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Tales from the Bushiverse
... But Bush has long been guided by a combination of personal connections and emotional narratives, which have a way of making mere empirical data seem otiose. I suspect this hermetic seal against facts has deeper roots in the president's worldview.

Like a good Methodist (and most Protestants) Bush presumably accepts the doctrine of sola fide, which holds that, as the Methodist Discipline has it, "we are never accounted righteous before God through our works or merit, but...only by faith." (Actually, leaders in the Methodist church have been disputing the "good Methodist" characterization, a story that's been oddly ignored given the amount of ink spilled over Kerry's deviations from Catholic dogma and the centrality of faith to Bush's public image, but that's another story.) Good deeds are merely external signs of the faith that is, as Methodist founding father John Wesley put it, "productive of all good works, and all holiness."

The more one listens to Bush speak, to the primacy he places on character, values, intention, resolve, the more it seems clear that this doctrine plays a central role in shaping the president's perception. He lives in a world where a good will is of paramount importance, and providence can be trusted to ensure that pure motives never yield perverse consequences. One suspects Bush, often enough subject to being called "the idiot" himself, would have trouble appreciating the example of Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin, who though perfectly good-hearted, manages to produce only tragedy. He is, in short, in the grip of what Thomas Sowell, who attributed the syndrome primarily to technocratic liberals, termed the vision of the anointed.

This, rather than mere ignorance, may shed light on Bush's decision when asked his favorite figure in political philosophy—ordinarily thought to be concerned with changing the world—to name Jesus, "because he changed my heart." This, perhaps, is why when faced with questions of strategy or tactics in the War on Terror, Bush so often resorts to some variant on "terrorists are bad, mmkay?" It would explain his reliance on insight into the "souls" of foreign leaders in foreign policy, and perhaps most tellingly, his persistence in believing in the necessity of preemptive war on the grounds of intent to acquire weapons of mass destruction, even absent any sign that the intent was being realized.

This would also go a long way toward explaining Bush's visceral reaction to criticism. If one is in the habit of separating intent from outcome, not every mistake is shameful. Things can turn out badly even though one behaved as well as could be expected. When they're inextricably linked, however, every allegation of error rings like the accusatory cop-out of the failed revival healer: "It only works if your faith is strong." To accuse Bush of having made a bad decision is, if this is indeed his mind-set, in effect to call him a bad person, to question the quality of his heart no less than his judgment. Admitting error, acknowledging that things haven't panned out, becomes impossible. ...