George W. Bush's tenuous relationship with hard facts and difficult realities is by no means an anomaly among today's political right.  To the contrary, the "I Want to Believe" UFO poster that Agent Fox Mulder of the old X-Files TV series displayed in his office seems in many ways to have become a core tenet of contemporary Republicanism.

To begin with, who are the religious fundamentalists who form the social backbone of today’s GOP, other than people who want to believe?  We see them flocking to televangelists who, with depressing frequency, are later charged with criminal fraud, preposterous sexual peccadilloes, and the like.  What is indicated about the people who follow such leaders, if not the strength of their desire to believe?

How about their attitude toward objectively based scientific knowledge?  As any teacher of high school science can tell you, the kinds of people who are the most ardent contemporary Republican field troops are eager to shut down reason and give scientific evidence the heave ho, when these conflict with what they want to believe about themselves and their origins, based on an extremely literalistic reading of the Book of Genesis.

Other manifestations of the political right’s “I Want to Believe” mentality include:

*  Wanting to believe in a thatched-cottage world-that-never-was,as depicted by the painter Thomas Kincade.

*  Wanting to believe that we can have a tax cut at the same time as a major war, and that this will be good for the economy.

*  Wanting to believe that driving an enormous SUV isn’t contributing to pollution and global warming.

*  Wanting to believe that a celluloid action figure can take care of the problems in California’s state government, if we just believe enough in him to elect him governor.