We've heard recently from the nasty reactionaries who go to Columbia Law School, now let's hear from the more cosmopolitan students at that distinguished institution; this from Erik Encarnacion, a philosophy major from Princeton now studying at CLS; he writes:
I've been thinking more about this whole liberal hand-wringing about Bush.
On every substantive issue Bush has been a resounding failure. Polls indicate as much: people are dissatisfied with his performance on every level. Liberals (like me) thus conclude that it must be Bush's position on substantive cultural conservative issues, like gays, guns, and god. Surely this has some truth to it.
But I think to many fundamentalist Christians George W. Bush represents something deeper than these discrete issues: he is the first ostensibly fundamentalist Christian to be president, and to reject him would be to reject fundamentalist decision-making methodology: prayer is better than thought. The idea is that for any given problem, praying will provide superior answers to actual thought. This theme is well represented in Bush's decision to go to Iraq. I remember his talking about how he prayed really hard about the decision to invade. I also remembered not being comforted at all by this fact. But for fundamentalist, culturally conservative Christians, the fact that Bush prays before making a decision is sufficient to legitimize the outcome. To reject Bush's 1st term would entail acknowledging that prayer is not a good decision-making method, which, being brainwashed, they are not willing to acknowledge.[T]hank you for your inspirational blog: it is better than a cup of coffee in the morning before my "Corporations" class.
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