Forget Stephen King, Ron Suskind is the scariest author I know...

So there I am, sitting in my usual Sunday morning attire (briefs, not boxers) catching up on my online news reading when I manage to scare the hell out of myself. How did I do this fully 7 days before Hallowe'en? I started by reading this fun little article by Ron Suskind (co-author of former Bush administration Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's tell-all "The Price of Loyalty"). It's a rather chilling portrait of how Bush's reliance on his version of faith in Christianity is used by the administration to shield its decisions from both internal and external scrutiny. It's light reading. (On the spooky-meter we're at Scream.)

During the course of making my way through the article, Suskind mentions David Rubenstein of the Carlyle group asking Bush to leave one of it's boards of directors because "I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company." (Spooky-meter jumps to most of Signs.) But this isn't the heavy military industrial complex stuff we're used to hearing about Carlyle being involved in. We're talking about a job he was given on the board of what used to be the catering division of Marriott. (The Shining) Bush was given the job because he was down on his luck, so he pays them back by spending three years sitting through meetings and telling dirty jokes (Blair Witch Project)... This was after Billy Graham saved him. (Blues Brothers 2000... Look, if you're a fan of the original, this was a horrifying film!)

OK, I'm sleeping with the nightlight on, but I'm OK so far. I keep reading and get to a reference to an earlier article Suskind did for Esquire magazine:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush.

I decide to see if I can find that Esquire article by running a Google search using most of the above sentence as the search pharse (Don't worry, you can make up an email address to get access to it.) That's when the really disturbing part hits me. Most of the results I got back from Google were from bloggers talking about how creepy the article I was reading is. What's more they were choosing the following two paragraphs to illustrate the scariest part beginning with the sentence I had just searched! It was like realizing the killer was still inside the house with me! Observe:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

(Spooky level: The Ring) Oh {#@&! Now I'm spending the night with the lights on, every TV and radio in the house going while curled up inside my protective security blanket! This is a member of the executive branch saying that, in effect, the people running America are running an empire and aren't answerable to the constituents they serve who are merely engaged in the " judicious study of discernible reality". Well hell, when you put it that way... it scares the living $#*! out of me!

I'm sorry, but how are we supposed to proceed into this century when our leadership doesn't want to be bothered with abstract notions like reason and fact? What are we going to do? Pray our way out of uniting the Middle East against us? It's not like this is a novel idea. The "One Nation Under God" movement has only to look to European Christendom to see that not only did it not make European life more christ-like, but that it couldn't last forever. We're not "One Nation Under God" because not only do we not all believe in God, but those of us who do can't agree on who He is and what He wants. The problem with saying that you're on a mission from God, is that God never independantly verifies it to the rest of us. As for doing God's will in Iraq by deposing Sadam Hussein... Let's just say that starting pre-emptive wars against dangerous powers to liberate important regions has plenty of disasterous precedent.

Well, there you have it. Forget Kuntz, Barker, and King. If you want to send a real chill down your spine grab anything by the new master of modern horror, author Ron Suskind!