Bush Tells Group He Sees a "Third Awakening"

Can't wait to see what the Bush-haters and the Bush-is-a-decent-but-deeply-flawed-torturer-and-liar contingent do with this one:

President Bush said yesterday that he senses a "Third Awakening" of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation's struggle with international terrorists, a war that he depicted as "a confrontation between good and evil."

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history. Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

"A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me," Bush said during a 1 1/2 -hour Oval Office conversation on cultural changes and a battle with terrorists that he sees lasting decades. "There was a stark change between the culture of the '50s and the '60s -- boom -- and I think there's change happening here," he added. "It seems to me that there's a Third Awakening."

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Bush has been careful discussing the battle with terrorists in religious terms since he had to apologize for using the word "crusade" in 2001. He often stresses that the war is not against Islam but against those who corrupt it. In his comments yesterday, aides said Bush was not casting the war as a religious struggle but was describing American cultural changes in a time of war.

"He's drawing a parallel in terms of a resurgence, in dangerous times, of people going back to their religion," said one aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was not open to other journalists. "This is not 'God is on our side' or anything like that."

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UPDATE
Perhaps I should have been a little more clear about what I intended by my introduction to this post.

I had assumed that this story in the Post would serve as fodder for those who think (a) Bush delusionally believes himself to have been annointed to fight a "holy war" (a common view of the "Bush-haters") and/or (b) Bush has deluded himself into believing in his rightness in black-and-white/good-and-evil terms, which causes him to "lie" while actually believing what he is saying to be true (a common view of those in the decent-but-flawed contingency).