Is it manic depression? Blackmail? Is it perhaps a hoax, or an extended piece of performance art? Something doesn’t add up here.

Card is one of my favorite authors. I first picked up his book Speaker for the Dead in an airport and liked it well enough to read Ender’s Game, which preceded it and which I liked even better. I went on to read many short stories and books by Card, including his Alvin Maker series, The Abyss, and a nonfiction series on writing fiction. In his nonfiction, which sometimes included forewords or afterwords to his fiction, he could be a little didactic, but I felt he always had a good point.

But in his political writing he seems increasingly like a different person, mentally and philosophically hijacked somehow, and I can’t figure it out. A good fiction writer, capable of believable characterizations, is of necessity a decent student of psychology and human nature. Which makes his fervent, even worshipful, support of the Bush administration that much harder to understand.

A few weeks after September 11, 2001, Card began a blog called “War Watch”, and you can read it from the beginning if you like at its archive page. It started out sanely enough. Card talked about the fact that we were embroiled in a war of cultures, and, at the end of that particular column, worried that America might misunderstand what it meant to have unity, that flag-waving was not enough. Right on.

But something weird has happened to his writing in this blog over time. “War Watch” has always been more strident than his fiction, partly because he understands (correctly, I believe) that the United States at least and perhaps Western civilization is at a tipping point, that it risks a defeat at the hands of Islamofascism that could be crippling and even mortal, and he is deeply fearful that Americans do not get that. But he appears to believe that only by accepting George W. Bush into our hearts as our Dear Leader can we avert this disaster.

Look at his latest column, here. In it he claims that George W. Bush is the only person for whom he has voted in his political life without being nauseous. What’s hardest to digest about this statement is the reasons he gives for his disaffection with the other candidates. He believes that McCain will be a grudge-holding, hating liar whose paranoia makes you long for Nixon. He likes Obama except that he fears that in foreign policy he will “go off in search of a nice, permanent, devastating defeat.” Looking back, he points out correctly that Reagan’s presidency, for which so many Republicans are nostalgic, was marred by scandals and ineffective dealings with the Mideast.

Yeah, those people aren’t perfect. But George W. Bush and his administration have exhibited the sum of all those faults, and more, topped with hubris, cronyism, foolhardy brinkmanship, and clan warfare. Nowhere in McCain’s political life can you find grudge-holding to match Cheney’s, and it’s hard to imagine an Obama-authored disaster that’s more expensive in terms of lives, money, and influence than what Bush has wrought in Iraq over the last five years.

So what is going on here with Card? Why the wet-eyed devotion to Bush? Card is not actually one of the neocon dittoheads, at least not historically; he considers himself a “Moynihan Democrat”. It makes me wonder if Card is acting out scenes from his books. Is he setting up a strawman point of view to rouse public debate, like Valentine and Peter Wiggin do in Ender’s Game? Has he fallen under a magical glamour cast by Bush, one that evokes supernatural loyalty, like Napoleon casts in Alvin Journeyman?

Or does Card simply believe that it’s imperative that all Americans support the office of President, whoever it is? I’ll be interested to check in with Card after this November’s election to see whether his tone changes. But frankly I’m worried that I might find his blog replaced with a garish MySpace-style cyber-altar to George W. Bush, complete with an animated waving flag and tinny MP3 anthems.