Now this is noteworthy. The man who said the following is no flaming liberal. To the contrary, he is a former Reagan aide and a writer for National Review Online, one Bruce Bartlett:

Just in the past few months, I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. But you can’t run the world on faith.

So bush is just like an Al Qaeda terrorist, wild-eyed and ready to kill. He is on a mission from God, and there’s no stopping him. He’s kickin’ butt and takin’ names cuz, you know, freedom’s on the march. We know that — but hearing it from someone on the other side is interesting. It’s one of many interesting revelations from an absolutely astounding article by Ron Suskind, which is going to be the talk of the town over the next few days.

What you’ll come away with after reading this massive piece is just how seriously shrub’s followers are when they equate him with Jesus Christ — and how he actively encourages such adulation.

George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles — character, certainty, fortitude and godliness — rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.

The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed ”Ask President Bush” events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. ”I’ve voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,” said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. ”And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.” Bush simply said ”thank you” as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, ”I trust God speaks through me.” In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that ”his faith helps him in his service to people.”

God speaks to him. So how can he ever do something wrong or make a mistake?

I’ve read a lot of stuff on our president, but this takes its place at the top of the Scariest Articles list. I have a deep aversion to cults of any kind, and I honestly never thought I’d see the day America would be in the throes of a cult leader. You can get away with anything once you’ve established a personality cult, as Mao and Stalin and others learned. No, he’s not Mao or Stalin (yet), but that sense of infallibility, that providence has brought him to this place of leadership so he can carry out the will of a higher being — that’s well documented.

The artilce is loaded with mind-blowing soundbites, things that would have seemed flat-out bizarre in other times, but in bushworld it’s simply the way followers talk.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Us against them. Like the Bolsheviks against the Kulaks, like Mao against the Rightists. I really don’t like it, and I hope this creepy and important article serves as a wake-up call, a splash of ice water in the face of the moderate Republicans who want to believe that, just as the moderates did in 1933, that the crazy little man on a mission will just be a passing fad, soon to be replaced by more moderate and sane politicians. Only by the time they realize just how serious the crazed little man really is, it may well be too late.

Via Mark Kleiman.

Angry Chinese Blogger has a fine post on this depressing topic. It’s not looked upon in China as it is here. Just as with AIDS patients, attempted suicides are stigmatized and forced into greater desperation. (That’s changing, of course, in the case of AIDS, slowly but steadily.) Reading it brought back to me a lot of memories of the sharp differrences between Asian and Western perspectives. Very poignant.

I had no idea when I posted about an article by my good friend Joseph Bosco that the post would become a magnet for all sorts of people who were intimately involved in the case back in the mid-90s. Recently, this post has generated some of the most extraordinary comments in the history of this blog. I mean, I am blown away at some of the passion and anguish I’m seeing here. As always, Joseph is doing an amazing job keeping the peace and calming some of the passion. It’s just an incredible example of what can happen when a blog post takes on a life of its own and extends to places you’d never have imagined.

I always suspected the writer of the World O’Crap blog is a genius. Now I know it. Her parody of Bill O’Reilly talking about his sexpolits in a childrens book is utterly priceless. I swear, I could see and hear O’Reilly saying these things as I read them — she has captured his every intonation. Incredible.

A tiny sample, because you have to read the entire thing.

A while later — it was August 2nd I think — we had a great show on the Factor. I interviewed Condi Rice, President Bush’s National Security Adviser, and we talked about the new information concerning threats against New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. You think Condi talks about stuff like this with those hacks on CNN? And I did a great job. That’s why Condi keeps asking me to interview her. Plus, she wants me.

Later, I spoke to Sunrise Adams and Savanna Samson of Vivid Entertainment about their new book, “How to Have A XXX Sex Life.” They are porn stars, kids, so I hope you don’t know anything about them. But the cuter one, Sunrise, kept flirting with me. I guess she doesn’t meet many men as powerful and manly as me in her business. Plus, from reading Those Who Trespass, she knows that I know how to pleasure a woman. It’s all about reading her signals (when she strips down to her panties, it’s usually a sign that she’s in the mood), and about rapid tongue movements.

However, despite her evident longing for me, I had to say no to Sunrise’s implicit offer. (Boys, just because a porn star wants to have sex with you, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it, to prove that you’re a stud or something. Remember that.) Besides, she was being taped in L.A., so it would have been difficult to get together. Sunrise does have nice boobs, though, I gotta admit. Much better than the bimbo’s.

And then it gets really funny. Man, this lady can write. She’s an anonyblogger, but I suspect she’s a professional, probably writing comedy screenplays.

That headline writer must have been very proud of himself. The story is about China’s efforts to upgrade its public toilets in time for the 2008 Olympics.

Beijing will next month showcase its highly publicized upgrading of public toilets when it hosts the fourth annual World Toilet Summit, the conference’s organizers said Thursday.

The Singapore-based World Toilet Organization, which promotes itself as a global body for co-ordinating and promoting sanitation issues, said the Chinese capital had been chosen to highlight its efforts in transforming its toilets.

“We want to showcase how a city that used to have not so good toilets can suddenly become so good, that it’s a do-able project,” World Toilet Organization founder Jack Sim told AFP.

I’ll believe it when I see it. They’ve got an awful lot of transforming to do.

I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.

A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a “suicide mission” to deliver fuel, the troops’ relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq — north of Baghdad — because their vehicles were considered “deadlined” or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.

Sgt. McCook, a deputy at the Hinds County Detention Center, and the 16 other members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company from Rock Hill, S.C., were read their rights and moved from the military barracks into tents, Patricia McCook said her husband told her during a panicked phone call about 5 a.m. Thursday.

The platoon could be charged with the willful disobeying of orders, punishable by dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay and up to five years confinement, said military law expert Mark Stevens, an associate professor of justice studies at Wesleyan College in Rocky Mount, N.C.

I dunno, if our soldiers are this frightened that they’d disobey orders and face prison rather than follow orders, doesn’t it say something about what’s going on in Iraq? (Don’t answer; we all know already.)

God, this is a difficult article to read. It may require registration — register, it’s worth it.

It tells the story of an innocuous building in Guangzhou used as a gulag for torturing Falun Gong and “re-educating” them. At the heart of it is an interview with a young lady, one Tang Yiwen.

“It is a brainwashing centre – one of many in China, almost one in every district,” says Tang Yiwen, a slight and soft-spoken 37-year-old interpreter who was grabbed off the street by police in February and taken to the Guangzhou institution. “It is said to be one of the most brutal.”

She said the inmates are mostly Falun Gong followers who, like her, have refused to renounce their beliefs even after serving three to four years in brutal labour camps like the one across the river.

She said the school put inmates through an intensive program of mental and physical torture that included beatings, prolonged interrogations, sleep deprivation and continuous exposure to video and audio propaganda.

The “brainwashing”, she said, was a more intensive form of “re-education” applied to Falun Gong followers in between stints at places like Chatou and Shanshui, the labour camp in Guangdong province where Tang spent three years until August last year. She said her visit to the Guangzhou City Law School has left her partially crippled in one leg.

The methods she and others describe sound eerily like the “struggle” sessions applied by Mao Zedong’s Red Guards to extract confessions of “rightist deviation” during the decade-long Cultural Revolution Mao set off in 1966.

“I used to hear from my father and old people how people, one a famous writer, had committed suicide in the camps,” Tang said, referring to that era. “I couldn’t understand. Why couldn’t they just hold out? After brainwashing in labour camp I understood why – it was really too brutal for human beings to stand. It was just like hell.”

On the face of it, the struggle between state and Falun Gong is a hopelessly uneven one, like the breaking of a butterfly on a wheel.

Like breaking a butterfly on a wheel — we seem to see that a lot in China, and in other societies where the government feels it must crush any hint of free thinking if it’s perceived to weaken its iron-fisted grip on power.

The article goes on to discuss the extremes to which the CCP goes to persecute the Falun Gong, and how miserable they’ve made Yiwen’s life.

There is also the full weight of the state propaganda department, which directs a hostile media campaign against Falun Gong, claiming the movement encourages suicide and neglect in adherents and takes their savings.

There is no legal redress for abuses: after the official ban in July 1999, the Chinese Supreme Court passed down a directive forbidding lower courts or lawyers to accept cases brought by followers.

On the Falun Gong side are people like Tang. She is crippled, unable to get a job in the teaching profession she loves and at risk of being jailed and tortured at any time. She said her husband was forced to divorce her, and she cannot get a passport to leave China.

Since receiving a pro-forma letter early in August from the office of the Australian Prime Minister acknowledging a smuggled-out account of her ordeals and her request for asylum in Australia, Tang has been constantly on the move, staying in a succession of temporary accommodations around China, fearing re-arrest by embarrassed and angry police.

Yet the butterfly is not broken.

There’s lots more.

I have my own issues with the Falun Gong. I find them kind of creepy, and I don’t like the way their representatives abroad try to manipulate public opinion. But as far as I know, they haven’t hurt anyone, and whatever their horrific crime is, it hardly merits torture and devastating persecution.

It’s just another one of those uncomfortable topics we’d all like to sweep under the rug. It doesn’t mesh with the view of China we want to have and with which we’re comfortable.

This is absolutely devastating. O’Neill was lying about what happened in Vietnam, and he knew it. It was all on Nightline last night, and there’s no longer any doubt: These self-described do-gooders who are magnanimously going out of their way to enlighten us about the evil nature of John Kerry — they’re simply full of shit. Period, full stop, end of story.

Not that I didn’t always know this, but it’s nice to see it proven through good old-fashioned investigative journalism. Long, long overdue. Read the entire post and then enjoy the comments — some are quite wicked.

Yesterday drudge ran with a wicked story that claimed:

The Kerry/Edwards campaign and the Democratic National Committee are advising election operatives to declare voter intimidation — even if none exists, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

Of course, this was pure BS, as Jesse points out — the memo drudge was citing said nothing even close to that — but that didn’t stop the wingnuts from runing with it as if it were gospel.

I’m going to venture a guess that this is a pre-emptive dirty trick. The Republicans have embarked on a formalized and well-organized campaign to rob millions of US citizens of the right to vote and a huge protest is inevitable — it’s already started (on to that in a moment). So what does Rove do? Create a powerful meme designed to neutralize all those moonbat complaints of being kicked off the voter rolls: “The Democrats are planning to claim voter fraud even though it doesn’t exist!”

And that’s the message Drudge started and that’s seeped into a large portion of the national psyche. I always said they were better at communications than we are.

Nevertheless, I wonder if anything can neutralize a crime of this magnitude — voter fraud on a level so vast it simply boggles the mind. It is as though we aren’t in America anymore — in order to ensure victory, the bad guys are simply trying to take away people’s right to vote. Especially the poor and the disenfranchised — and of course, the blacks. Florida revisited, but many times worse.

Paul Krugman today manages to summarize the breathtaking scope of this GOP-sanctioned criminality. It’s a great column and absolutely rquired reading.

Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.

The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.

Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong – and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven’t been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.

Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party’s phone banks.

But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio’s secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.

That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 – a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.

And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular.

It’s a coordinated nationwide effort, there’s no way around it.

The important point to realize is that these abuses aren’t aberrations. They’re the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It’s a culture that will persist until voters – whose will still does count, if expressed strongly enough – hold that party accountable.

I don’t know; is it just me? Can we simply accept that it’s acceptable for government officials to intentionally and blatantly work to prevent their citizens, American taxpayers, from voting? Shouldn’t there be a tidal wave of outrage — or has bush simply desensitized us to outrage after committing so many?

If our government is using our tax dollars to throw citizens off the voting rolls in what amounts to a power grab, I really have to question whether I want to live in America.

Update: Josh Marshall has some wonderful posts about this national cancer (and lots of other hot topics — he is on a roll this week).

Just watch it.