Bad news for the Bush-Cheney campaign came this week in the form of, surprisingly enough, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson. In an interview with CNN’s Paula Zahn, Robertson said of a meeting with Mr. Bush, “I met with him down in Nashville before the Gulf War started. And he was the most self-assured man I ever met in my life. You remember, Mark Twain said, he looks like a contended Christian with four aces. He was just sitting there, like, I’m on top of the world, and I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, Mr. President, you better prepare the American people for casualties. Oh, no, we’re not going to have any casualties. Well, I said, it’s the way it’s going to be. And so, it was messy. The lord told me it was going to be, A, a disaster and, B, messy. And before that, I had deep, in my spirit, I had deep misgivings about going into Iraq.” As if on instinct, the White House immediately went into attack mode. Senior campaign bitch advisor Karen Hughes was the first to respond to Robertson’s comments on CNN’s Inside Politics. “Judy, I cannot imagine that that conversation would ever take place,” Hughes said. “I’ve never heard the president say anything of the sort. Of course he knows that wars result, unfortunately, in the loss of lives. That’s one of the reasons it makes it such a difficult and agonizing decision for a president to decide to commit troops. And of course, at the time that conversation took place, we had already lost casualties in Afghanistan, in the war against terror. So I just can’t imagine what — whether he misunderstood, or what happened. But I’m certain that the president did not say that remark.” White House fall man press secretary Scott McClellan later added to that by saying, “Of course, the president never made such a comment.” Nobody in the Bush campaign came out and called Robertson a liar. But they came startlingly close. The implication here is clear. Either Robertson is lying, or he just has no idea what he’s talking about.

After a four year love affair with the Christian right, it is surprising that the Bush administration should now be in the position of accusing one of Christian conservatives’ gods of not telling the truth. Even moreso considering that Robertson is still fully supporting Bush. In the same interview he said, “I just said, I think God’s blessing him, and I think it’s one of those things that, even if he stumbles and messes up — and he’s had his share of goofs and gaffes — I just think God’s blessing is on him. And you remember, I think the Chinese used to say, you know, it’s the blessing of heaven on the emperor. And I think the blessing of heaven is on Bush. It’s just the way it is.” Regardless of the wisdom of comparing the guy you’re rooting for to a Chinese emperor, that’s still a pretty positive opinion. Yet the Bush campaign seems so comfortable with negativity that they simply cannot help attacking people, even when it’s one of their own.

One has to wonder if somebody on Bush’s staff had the brains to pull him aside and tell him it might be a bad idea to start fighting with the Christian Coalition less than two weeks before the election. Especially when, of the two major candidates in the race, it’s the Republican who doesn’t attend church. Yes, this is the same man who when asked by Bob Woodward if he asked his father for advice on Iraq replied, “There’s a higher Father that I appeal to.” The same president who began his term amidst controversy about his faith-based initiative which would “allow religious groups to compete for federal grants to provide social services.”

This is not to say that one must attend church regularly to be a good Christian. But after Republicans have made so much out of the importance of being part of a religious community, one must wonder if they would still be supporting Bush if they knew that he is not a part of one. And in fact, there are other stronger grounds on which one can question Bush’s faith. The United States has a long history of Christian presidents. Chief among these is former President Jimmy Carter. Carter is possibly the most faithful president in recent history. Since leaving office he has spent much of his time working on human rights and charity projects. And in his entire career he has never talked about God with the frequency and the aggressiveness with which Bush does. One almost has to wonder who Bush is trying to convince.

At the age of 40, Bush was what psychologist Oliver James calls an “alcoholic.” Certainly his abuse of alcohol has been well documented. Bush was even convicted of drunk driving in Kennebunkport, Maine in 1976. But that all changed in 1986. According to the Washington Post, “That July day, Bush officially swore off alcohol. But his decision was about more than getting sober. Stirred in part by what he describes as an intense, reawakening Christian faith, Bush sought to seize control of his life. By doing so he would finally begin to close the gap between what was expected of him and what he had achieved.” This was a year after his life-changing meeting with Billy Graham in Kennebunkport, the place of his DUI 9 years earlier. The Washington Post article continues, “In the end, Bush said, the key to giving up alcohol was the new spirituality he had begun to embrace the year before. Bush is not a particularly introspective man, but whatever soul-searching there was to do, he had started doing in the summer of 1985, after a conversation at the family summer retreat in Kennebunkport with the Rev. Billy Graham, a longtime family friend and spiritual adviser.

“Graham, he said, ‘planted a seed in my heart and I began to change.’”

We can think of Bush then as a so-call “born-again Christian,” with his faith being the key to his controlling his alcohol abuse. Typically, the complaint about born-again Christians is that they talk about their faith too much. This is likely because born-agains are not brought up with this devotion to God. Rather, they “find Jesus” later on in their lives. Without being brought up with their faith, born-agains need to continuously talk about it as a means of convincing themselves that they really do believe.

With Bush the need to believe is doubly important because his faith is so crucial to controlling his alcohol abuse. It provides his life with structure and discipline. His talk of God appears to have more to do with shielding himself from his own alcohol abuse than any real devotion to religion. So ironically, the president who talks the most about religion may have the most hollow faith of any president in recent memory.