Wake Me When Your “Third Awakening” Is Over

Who needs gray when you’ve got black and white?

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."

…"A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. "There was a stark change between the culture of the '50s and the '60s -- boom -- and I think there's change happening here," he added. "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."

The First Great Awakening refers to a wave of Christian fervor in the American colonies from about 1730 to 1760, while the Second Great Awakening is generally believed to have occurred from 1800 to 1830.

The whole Good v. Evil thing is just all kinds of fucked up, especially coming from someone who has waged an illegal war that has spawned a whole new generation of terrorists and still firmly believes he’s the Good Guy. It’s a little more nuanced than that. But aside from the lack of necessary perspective from a technical standpoint, it’s bloody dangerous to identify terrorism as evil, which an irrational concept, when it is, irrespective of our president’s opinion, a rational act with identifiable motivations. There are causes of terrorism which can be addressed, and just because terrorists are despicable people who use horrendous tactics is not a justification for ignoring what induces them. In reality, dismissing terrorists as blindly evil is to suggest that there’s no solution to the problem except total annihilation, which is simply not even possible. Once again, Bush illustrates that he is patently incapable of engaging this complex problem with the rigorous intricacy it requires.

And once again, he gives us a peek into America’s future, were he left to his own devices to shape it:

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history.

…In his comments yesterday, aides said Bush was not casting the war as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war.

"He's drawing a parallel in terms of a resurgence, in dangerous times, of people going back to their religion," said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was not open to other journalists. "This is not 'God is on our side' or anything like that."

The White House did not release a transcript of Bush's remarks, but National Review posted highlights on its Web site.

The Crusader-in-Chief’s simplistic and ugly agenda, framed by the black-and-white of his religion, is to be covertly disseminated in conservative media, while the White House pretends he’s still a reasonable man. Scary stuff. We’re being led by a religious fanatic who the mainstream media dutifully portrays as a “man of letters,” so those of us who pay attention can be marginalized as anti-religious nutcases when we dare to question whether it’s wise to have charged a religious zealot with leading a secular nation.