# 173: Bush's Deception

For the last year and a half, this blog ha been candidly telling how George W. Bush and cohorts are counterfeit Christians, and how it’s all about prestige and promoting Bush’s legacy as president.

In the October 16, 2006 issue of TIME Magazine is an article that every American should hear about: “Why a Christian in the White House Felt Betrayed.” This article was adopted from the book “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction” by David Kuo, published by Free Press.

“A new memoir by David Kuo, former second-in-command of President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, has the White House on the defensive with its account of an Administration that mocked Evangelicals in private while using them at election time to bolster its support. In this exclusive adaptation from the book, Kuo writes about how his White House experience left him disillusioned about the role religion can play in politics.”

I now write only excerpts from this article. “. . . the President’s campaign promise of $8 billion a year in new funds for both religious and secular charities that help the poor. That money never materialized . . . the White House was so bad at helping them do good.” “He [Bush] interrupted, ‘Forget about all that. Money. They want money. How much money have we given them?’”

“When members of his senior staff mocked the plan as the ‘F---ing faith-based initiative' . . . When I heard White House staff privately deriding Evangelical Christians because they were so easily seduced by White House power, I raised an eyebrow but not a ruckus. We were the nice guys.”

“Today, however, I decided to choose honesty over niceness.”

“The President’s staff didn’t just bad-mouth the faith-based office behind closed doors. Their political indifference also kept us from getting the funding we need so badly.” “. . . after two years in office, we had actually spent less than 1% of what Bush had promised.” “It was one of those wonderful Washington assertions that is simultaneously accurate and deceptive and just confusing enough to defy opposition.”

“Christian conservatives trusted President Bush. After two years in the White House, I came to realize that regardless of where the president’s heart lay on the matter, the back-office Republican political machine was able to take Evangelicals for granted–indeed often viewing them with undisguised contempt–and still getting their votes. G.O.P. operatives trusted that the Christian conservatives would see the President more as their Pastor in Chief than anything else. Bush had long used the podium as a pulpit, telling voters that above all he was an evangelical Christian who had been saved from his drinking by Jesus and rebuilt his life around his faith. That inspiring story was carried throughout the country by a network of prominent evangelical pastors who had been quietly working since 1988 to recruit thousands of other pastors to join the Bush team. After the election, however, those same pastors became accomplices in their own deception by not demanding that the President’s actions in office match their electoral fervor.”

“This White House is certainly not the first Administration to milk religious groups for votes and then boot them back out to pasture. In his days as a notorious ‘hatchet man’ for President Richard M. Nixon, before he had allowed Jesus to transform his life, Chuck Colson used to oversee outreach to the religious community. ‘I arranged special briefings in the Roosevelt Room for religious leaders, ushered wide-eyed denominational leaders into the Oval Office for private sessions with the president,’ Colson later wrote. ‘Of all the groups I dealt with, I found religious leaders the most naive about politics. . . . Or, most worrisome of all, they may simply like to be around power.’”

“Now I am finding courage to speak out about God and politics and their dangerous dance. . . . But President George W. Bush is a politician and is ultimately no different from any other politician, content to use religion for electoral gain more than for good works.”

“. . . better if they [Evangelicals] looked at him [Bush] through the same coldly political lens with which he views them.”