GetReligion has an interesting post on the State of the Union speech last night and President Bush's use of religion.
Liberals have long argued that President Bush uses "code language" that supposedly his evangelical base knows and understands to send them messages. I guess the idea is that he is saying one thing but meaning something entirely different, but only "his people" know the real meaning. Such paranoid delusions give me a headache because life isn't usually as complicated as a Tom Clancy novel. For good measure, I give liberals the same benefit of the doubt when someone on the right jumps to the "code language" argument.
What's interesting about Daniel Pulliam's post is the way he points out how little attention in the U.S. the President's religious language got. In one section of the speech, President Bush talks about radical Shia and Sunni Muslims as essentially being different sides of the same coin. That is, they misuse Islam to support their anti-American goals.
Pulliam points out that only the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler discussed this section of the speech in his article.
In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush presented an arguably misleading and often flawed description of "the enemy" that the United States faces overseas, lumping together disparate groups with opposing ideologies to suggest that they have a single-minded focus in attacking the United States.
According to Pulliam, this angle of the SOTU speech has created enormous distress overseas, but has barely been mentioned in the American press. It seems to me that lumping all radical muslims under one tent is a common tactic but one that will only lead to greater trouble in the Middle East. After all, there are some who say that much of our problem with the Middle East stems directly from our lack of understanding of their history, culture, and religion. Imagery such as President Bush used is only likely to strain those relations more.
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