Bush and his religion: This passage from Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" has been bothering me for a couple of weeks. It's about Bush's first meeting with Vladimir Putin:

In an interview, he [Bush] described his first meeting with Putin on June 16, 2001, in Ljubljana, Slovenia: [Bush talking:] "And in comes Putin, and he sits down, ... And he wants to get started. And I said, 'Let me say something about what caught my attention, Mr. President, was that your mother gave you a cross which you had blessed in Israel, the Holy Land.' And he said, 'It's true.' I said that amazed me, that here you were a Communist, a KGB operative, and yet you were willing to wear a cross. 'That speaks volumes to me, Mr. President.' "...And he [Putin] said, 'The rest of the story is, is that I was wearing my cross. I hung it on a dacha. The dacha burned down, and the only thing I wanted recovered was the cross.' And he said, 'I remember the workman's hand openning, and there was the cross that my mother had given me, as if it was meant to be.' And I think I told him then, I said, 'Well, that's the story of the cross as far as I'm concerned. Things are meant to be.' [Still Bush talking:] "He then went immediately to Soviet debt, how unfair it was that Russia is saddled with Soviet Union debt, and can we help. I was more interested in, who is this person I'm dealing with. I wanted to make sure that the story of the cross was a true story." ...Putin showed the cross to Bush a month later at a meeting in Genoa, Italy.

So here, in his very first meeting with the Russian President, George Bush insists on setting aside pressing matters of international diplomacy in order to have church chat. He's more interested in Putin's religious superstitions than in governmental affairs. I have nothing against the President having his own religious convictions, but am I alone in thinking that his decisions as a political leader should be made a little closer to the Earth? What frightens me about George Bush is that he believes he is guided by God. This is a recipe for disastrous overconfidence. To Bush, his "victory" in the 2000 election is not an accident of the electoral system, it is a gift from God. One would think that a President who lost the popular vote might act with a dose of humility. But Bush's mandate does not come from the American people. It comes from God. How can he truly make a mistake when the hand of God is guiding him? Enter the New American Century, brought to us by our Pope, Prophet and President, George W. Bush.