...preposterous. And most likely tongue-in-cheek, so I'll try not to get too ruffled by Mr. Greenberg's gauche application of the "60 minute Hegel" to a sound byte version of current events. Is it surprising that, George Bush, a devout Christian, has a teleological view of history? Not at all. Is it surprising that, as an American neoconservative, he believes in the spread of American-style liberal democracy? Of course not. Do these beliefs thereby make him a Hegelian? Only by a quantum imaginative leap. Trying to find remote intellectual precedents for the Bush Presidency (remember when he was a Straussian--but was too stupid to realize it?) is a fruitless and self-indulgent exercise.

I think you hit it the first time when you bring up his devout Christianity. There is nothing new to the claim that the President believes that there is an Architect behind History who does not take sides [we're conveniently on the side he's chosen]--as you point out this does not make him a Hegelian, but it does suggest that the most powerful single office in the land is inhabited by someone who believes, more or less devoutly, in an eschatological form of Christianity--giving him strength to continue to wage war for Halliburton even when things go to shit.

I don't think anybody ever called him a Struassian though; Wolfie, et al, yes, but not Bush.

In reality though, I daresay he is a Cyrennian.

A Cyrennian, eh? I always thought the Canadians were a larger part of the Coalition of the Willing than they had let on.

Public profession of Christianity doesn't necessarily tell us a thing about Bush. Is he more of a Christian or less of a Christian than Jimmy Carter? Does it even mattter?

Someone once said of Bismarck that "he believed in a God who always agreed with Bismarck." God took orders from him, and not the other way around.