[Vision2020] Republican Kevin Phillips on Bush

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Kevin Phillips, the old Republican Strategist, the author of the just-published, THE AMERICAN THEOCRACY (2006), talking to Amy Goodman of <www.democracynow.org>, 3/20/06, about our current President George W. Bush................

KEVIN PHILLIPS: It’s really an appalling thing, because I -- in the course of the last couple of days, as my book tour started, I’ve talked with a number of conservatives, people running conservative publications, old aides from the Republican campaigns back in the 1960s and 1970s, and everybody agrees, and some are even starting to say it semi-publicly: this man is a national embarrassment.

AMY GOODMAN: On what grounds? 

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, some just because they know him and don't think anybody with his lack of qualifications should be president, others that think that the country has a black eye, others that think that conservatism is now being threatened as much as liberalism was in the late 1960s by the Johnson administration. This is just a convergence of the ineptitude of one man, of the complicity of a number of other senior people in the administration.............
<>...........And then we go -- more impressionist paintings on the wall here -- we go to reports from the Middle East. This came in several Israeli newspapers and others, that Bush at one point commented, although the White House denies it, that he said God told him to invade Afghanistan, God told him to invade Iraq. And then we get 2004, and when he was campaigning in several places, again he played the religious card.  
But this thread -- and I come back to my impressionism -- from a whole lot of people, many of them Republicans and people acquainted with the Republican Party -- this has been in there -- it's this sense that he is the prophet and he's telling us what God wants. And this, to me, is an enormously important backdrop to this mess in what is, after all, the Bible lands for Christians, the Middle East.