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Civil War in the Republican Party if Bush Wins

Discussion in 'Free-For-All Archives' started by JGrubbs, Oct 19, 2004.

  1. JGrubbs

    JGrubbs New Member

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    Ron Suskind, co-author of Paul O'Neill's book "The Price of Loyalty", writes in NY Times, that Bruce Bartlett, former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told him recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.''

    NY Times-October 17, 2004
    By RON SUSKIND

    Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

    ''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''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.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''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,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''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.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

    Source: NY Times
     
  2. tragic_pizza

    tragic_pizza New Member

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    Nor can you depend wholly on something someone says that someone said.
     
  3. tragic_pizza

    tragic_pizza New Member

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    By the way, this is a highly suspect article. First, it isn't accessible without a subscription, second, when I do a search on Yahoo there is nothing written by Bartlett that echoes this quote. Third, the Times is a vehemently Democratic newspaper.
     
  4. The Galatian

    The Galatian New Member

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    The Civil War is already underway here...

    The neocons and the paleocons are very much at odds.

    They come from two different places, after all.
     
  5. Pennsylvania Jim

    Pennsylvania Jim New Member

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    Ineresting thing is that the article seems to have Bush on the faith side. I guess the author assumes that anyone who believes in truly godly cgovernment has already left the party. He might be close to right on that.
     
  6. rsr

    rsr <b> 7,000 posts club</b>
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    I see nothing "suspect" about the article. It's an opinion piece. And requiring a "subscription" is a standard practice at many newspaper sites; I have subscribed to several because it's unreasonable to expect newspaper to give away their product without something in return.

    Bartlett is a published columnist; I'm sure if he were misquoted he would respond. I don't think he was.

    Whether he's correct is an entirely different question.
     
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