- President Bush told Texas evangelist James Robinson that
"I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it,
but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen
. . . I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do
it."
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- With 49.3% of New York City residents in a recent Zogby
poll believing that some people in our government knew of the 911 attack
in advance and allowed it to happen, the President as right-wing evangelical
prophet is under siege in his Madison Square Garden bunker. Convention
watchers should take careful note of the theocratic nationalist rhetoric
at the Republican convention this week.
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- When was the last time a Western nation had a leader
so obsessed with God and claiming God was on our side?
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- If you answered Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany, you're
correct. Nothing can be more misleading than to categorize Hitler as a
barbaric pagan or Godless totalitarian, like Stalin.
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- Both Bush and Hitler believe that they were chosen by
God to lead their nations. With Hitler boldly proclaiming, before launching
his doctrine of preventive war against all of Europe, that "I would
like to thank Providence and the Almighty for choosing me of all people
to be allowed to wage this battle for Germany."
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- "I follow the path assigned to me by Providence
with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker," Hitler said.
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- Hitler stated in February 1940, "But there is something
else I believe, and that is that there is a God. . . . And this God again
has blessed our efforts during the past 13 years." After the Iraqi
invasion, Bush announced, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I
struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did
. . . ." Neither the similarity between Hitler and Bush's religious
rhetoric nor the fact that the current President's grandfather was called
"Hitler's Angel" by the New York Tribune for his financing of
the Fuher's rise to power is lost on Europeans.
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- Pat Robertson called Bush "a prophet" and Ralph
Reed claimed, after the 9/11 attack, God picked the President because "he
knew George Bush had the ability to lead in this compelling way."
Hitler told the German people in March 1936, "Providence withdrew
its protection and our people fell, fell as scarcely any other people heretofore.
In this deep misery we again learn to pray. . . . The mercy of the Lord
slowly returns to us again. And in this hour we sink to our knees and beseech
our almighty God that he may bless us, that He may give us the strength
to carry on the struggle for the freedom, the future, the honor, and the
peace of our people. So help us God."
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- At the beginning of Hitler's crusade on April 12, 1922,
he spelled out his version of the warmongering Jesus: "My feeling
as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter." Randall
Balmer in The Nation, noted that "Bush's God is the eye-for-an-eye
God of the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, the God of vengeance
and retribution."
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- As Bush has invoked the cross of Jesus to simultaneously
attack the Islamic and Arab world, Hitler also saw the value of exalting
the cross while waging endless war: "To be sure, our Christian Cross
should be the most exalted symbol of the struggle against the Jewish-Marxist-Bolshevik
spirit."
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- Like Bush-ites, Hitler was fond of invoking the Ten Commandments
as the foundation of Nazi Germany: "The Ten Commandments are a code
of living to which there's no refutation. These precepts correspond to
irrefragable needs of the human soul."
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- But if you ever wondered where Bush got his idea for
so-called "faith-based initiatives" you need only consult Hitler's
January 30, 1939 speech to the Reichstag. The Fuhrer begins, "Amongst
the accusations which are directed against Germany in the so-called democracy
is the charge that the National Socialist State is hostile to religion."
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- Hitler goes on to document how much "public monies
derived from taxation through the organs of the State have been placed
at the disposal of both churches [Protestant and Catholic]." Hitler
gave nearly 1.8 billion Reichsmarks between 1933-1938 directly to the Christian
churches. In 1938 alone, he bragged that the Nazis gave half a billion
Reichsmarks from the national government and an additional 92 million Reichsmarks
from the Nazi-controlled German states and parish associations.
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- Hitler made the intent of his faith-based initiative
clear when he noted, "With a tenth of our budget for religion, we
would thus have a Church devoted to the State and of unshakable loyalty.
. . . the little sects, which receive only a few hundred thousand marks,
are devoted to us body and soul."
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- Bush's assertion that "I trust God speaks through
me. Without that, I couldn't do my job" brings to mind God as a dull-witted,
cognitively-impaired nationalist unable to utter a simple declarative sentence
who spends his time preaching "blessed are the warmongers and profit-makers."
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- Bob Fitrakis is the Editor of the Free Press (freepress.org),
a political science professor, attorney and co-author with Harvey Wasserman
of George W. Bush vs. the Superpower of Peace.
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- http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/942
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