Thursday, July 01, 2004
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?
...In his personal delusion Bush is so convinced of his own words that he comes off as very convincing to others. He is very seductive to most Americans' concept of themselves as a nation. To them he looks like the first president in a long time to assert what is "right about America," and especially so following a president who was deemed "slick" and kept a woman under his desk (Which strikes some of us coarser types as pretty damned slick if you can get away with it.) Bush has charisma to those who believe the world is a mean place and that subtler considerations only get in the way. Especially fearful conservatives, always operating from the politics of scarcity, fearful of losing what they have gained materially, those being the core operating values of standard conservatism. Neo-conservatives, of course, are willing to kill you to get it in the first place.
If Bush has given conservatives cause for joy, he has given fundamentalist Christians an absolute hard-on. With tears of joy and praise, they have embraced him as their long-awaited national savior, and if the concept of malign narcissism is right, about the only thing a narcissist finds more appealing than being president is being the Messiah. So, hand-in-hand Bush and these Christian soldiers, clothed in the infallible rightness of their agenda---an ultra-fundamentalist Christian America with dominion over a world hammered (bombed if need be) into a likeness of itself, they stomp forward in close hoplite ranks. Bush poses against backdrops that make halos of the presidential seal appearing as Christ-like as possible. The adoring throng does not fail to be properly inspired, despite his congenital close-eyed squint. Even without psychological theories of narcissism, the whole idea of ecstatic Christian masses spotting a halo around Bush's head in Newsweek seems a little nuts at face value, though it must make Karl Rove pee his pants with glee in that campaign headquarters known as the White House....
The Damaged Mind of George W. Bush
The Madness in His Method
...Missing in all these studies is the answer to that question-why. Why was Bush obsessed with Iraq? My theory is this: We must seek the answer in an ambivalent father-son relationship coupled with the son's almost ferocious drive to prove himself to his father and to outdo him at the same time. Take into account recent scientific evidence of possible long-term brain damage associated with years of heavy drinking and cocaine use.
Elsewhere, Alan Bisbort and I, in articles on Bush as a dry drunk, have documented this phenomenon. Grandiosity, rigidity, and intolerance of ambiguity are the leading characteristics of what AA folks call the dry drunk syndrome. The dry drunk quits drinking, but the thinking is not really sober....
