Originally Posted by raveneye

Thanks for the post, Elphaba. I notice that nobody yet has made any attempt to refute any of the statements of fact in Blumenthal's article



His description drives home the point that the Bush presidency has many points of similarity to a religious cult. We have:

--a central authority figure who requires total, unquestioning loyalty; those who publicly question that authority are outed or vilified (e.g. you're either with us or you're with the terrorists);

--a set of assertions/beliefs that in turn are presented as absolute truth and are not subject to any debate whatsoever, regardless of the evidence against them and regardless of the possibility that they are empty of meaning (e.g. "we'll stay in Iraq until we get the job done", the two alternative sets of intelligence information maintained by Cheney; the use of intelligence as propaganda in the Iraq war runup, esp. in regard to the Iraq/AQ "connection");

--an attitude of existing and operating above any accountability, the idea that "we have Right on our side" therefore we are to be implicitly trusted in everything we do, we have no need to explain ourselves except in the most general terms; decisions are made largely in secret without essential input (e.g. the Harriet Miers nomination, many other examples).