On the thread
Is George Bush a psychopath?, Big Time Patriot posted a
link to an article titled
Is Your Boss a Psychopath? and then drew a parallel between certain characteristuics that have been evinced by George Bush and research that has been done about psychopathic or sociopathic personalities and the ability of people who show these tendencies to assume power in various social systems.
Although this is certainly a valid observation, I do not believe that it is a particularly good weapon to use in the fight against Bush or BushCo in general.
Read on for more:
Careful
Careful of putting people in little boxes.
This is what the medical and psychiatric professions do.
So-and-so is such-and-such.
So-and-so has such-and-such.
In medicine, this results in blinders being put on both the diagnostic process and on the attempt at a cure or treatment.
In psychiatry, the same thing holds true.
We can live with those problems, I suppose...or die with them...but on the whole, we survive.
However, in THIS case...in the case of trying to limit the damage that is done by people in positions of power who are clearly mentally and emotionally ill (And thus probably physically ill as well. They're ALL connected, you know...) if we are not successful in driving these people out of power, ALL of us are quite likely to die.
Literally.
In a nuclear war or from the environmental effects of a nuclear war tipping the already challenged ecology of the earth over onto the dark side.
And simply saying "Well isn't it OBVIOUS? He's as crazy as a bedbug!!!" just won't do it. Butch...or more accurately his equally crazy (and MUCH smarter) bosses, people like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rove...would marshal an INFINITY of trained shrink monkeys to appear on on every news channel in the world if it got to a point where that argument had to be refuted.
If we REALLY want to prove Butch's unfitness for the office of President, all we have to do is to access his medical records. I will almost guarantee that he is taking a bouquet of pills...psychoactive pills, more than likely (as if ALL allopathic medicines are not "psychoactive" to one degree or another) that would choke a horse. I see it in his movements; I see it in the sudden shifts of emotional balance that appear in certain public appearances...his first debate with Kerry being a PRIME example, and in many press conferences as well...and I see it every time he makes a speech. That fleeting, sneering smile in the wrong place, the shifting eyes, the awkward pauses in mid-sentence. Others have attributed these characteristics of his public appearances to the guiding voice of a producer or director giving him directions in an earpiece, which might also be part of the problem...after all, he IS just a talking head in this show and that IS how they work...but like ALL talking heads, he's got emotional and mental problems or he wouldn't let himself be used as a talking head in the FIRST place. My mother, an apolitical soul on the far side of 80 who spent 40 years teaching emotionally disturbed 1st and 2nd grade children took ONE look at him in that first Kerry debate and said "Why...he's acting JUST LIKE THE KIDS WHO HAVE BEEN DOPED UP IN MY CLASSES!!!" A.D.D.to the max (Whatever THAT silly term really means...), plus as always here in PharmAmerica, the (in)approiate set of pharmacological responses.
Allopathic overkill. ("WE'LL get them bacteria!!! Why...we'lll kill every goddamned gook bacteria in your body!!!" "WE'LL get them mosquitoes!!! Why...we'lll kill every goddamned gook insect on the planet!!!""WE'LL get them bad thoughts and feelings!!! Why...we'lll kill every goddamned mental and emotional process in your being!!!" "WE'LL get them dirty insurgents!!! Why...we'lll kill every goddamned gook insurgent in the Middle East!!!" And so it goes...)
However...since the medical records of powerful people are top secret/hottest thing ever/for your eyes only/burn when finished material (Again, for good reason. They ARE all crazy, these people.) we are not going to SEE those records unless some Deep Doctor magically appears as part of an internal plot to unseat the current regime...YOU know, like Watergate...and starts informing on Bush in the CIA paper of choice this time. Probably still the WAPO.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...we've got to do something.
So instead of throwing relatively meaningless terms around...I mean, the word "psychopath" has been applied at one time or another to everybody from Adolf Hitler to your local walk-the-streets-muttering-about-voices fool (Or is he just on a wireless phone...???), let us continue to pound away at the PROVABLE things.
There's no shortage of them, after all.
The Downing Street minutes, the incredibly badly planned and executed Blood For Oil War that resulted from the scam the evidence of which is contained in those minutes, the kleptocracy that is in power now...Bechtel, Halliburton, the Enron-ization of corporate America in general...the almost total collapse of the media as a bearer of ANY real news, the ongoing collapse of our economic system, our increasingly isolated position in the international arena, the mounting environmental disaster that is coming at us like a runaway freight train filled with toxic waste, the BURNING hatred felt for us by almost the entire population of the Third World, more of whom are every day getting closer and closer to possessing the weaponry needed to extract some measure of vengeance from us right on our nice little suburban streets and newly gentrfied inner cities..."gentrified" with profits made from the burning corpses and shattered lives of the poor all over the world, INCLUDING right here at home.
"Psychopatic"?
Sure.
So WHAT???
So's yer old man.
So's yer BOSS.
But INCOMPETENT?
A THIEF?
And worse yet, here in Kletopcracy Central...an incompetent THIEF?
"VOTE THE BASTIDS OUT!!!"
BET on it.
"Just the facts, ma'am. Nothing but the facts." (Joe Friday, Dragnet)
"We don' NEED no steenking shrinks!!!"
We HAVE the facts.
POUND 'em!!!
Later...
AG