I don't get why people have such a difficult time about this. I can understanding being cynical that Bush is a full blown zealot like Perkins, Dobson, or Kennedy, but does anyone really doubt that he's a Christian believer in the allmighty and what not?

He doesn't need to be a doctarian fundamentalist for his belief to be significant ... Altermeyer points out in his book that authoritarian religious believers often don't even know the content of the Bible. What's more important is their belief that the Bible contains the absolute TRUTH and that someone acting in the name of the Bible is absolutel justified.

This certainly fits as a description of Bush's mind-set. He strikes me as exactly that sort of "Christian" - one who uses his claim to be a Christian that his actions are somehow correct in and of themselves because he believes he's doing what his "gut" or the Lord are telling him is correct.

That saying actually does have a wise and patriotic version, but it's largely been lost to history.

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-countryright-or-wrong.html

The post is about the phrase "my country, right or wrong" and how it historically is actually an expression of patriotic dissent rather than blind nationalistic allegiance. Massimo explains (bold emphasis mine):

This phrase is often quoted in times of blind so-called patriotism and imperialistic nationalism. Yet, although the phrase itself is as old as it is stupid, few people who utter it seem to realize that its most famous incarnation is actually a rebuttal by Senator Carl Schurz back in 1872. The complete sentence is: “My country, right or wrong. In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” Schurz' biographer reports that the Senator's comment was greeted by a “deafening” applause, which clearly shows that members of that august body had more balls at the end of the 19th century than their counterparts at the beginning of the 21st.

Later on, on 17 October 1899, Schurz gave a speech at an event called the Anti-Imperialist Conference, in Chicago. Imagine anybody organizing such an event in today's America! Schurz elaborated on his original comment: “I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.’”