Sure, we make fun of his boorish manners, his malapropisms, and his lack of intellectual horsepower. But that's chump change. I just saw a picture on the front page of Raw Story of George Bush apparently
slapping a Black Congressman in the face at the NAACP convention. And so I have to ask: has Dubya finally and completely lost it?
The caption reads: "Bush 'playfully' slaps Rep. Al Green at NAACP convention."
I can't find the picture anywhere else. But if this shot is what Raw says it is, then stupidity is no longer Boy Blunder's biggest problem.
Think about the last week's events: talking to Tony Blair as if the Prime Minister was a lowly underling. Manhandling Andrea Merkel. And now slapping a black Congressman, who looks every bit as happy to be touched as Merkel was. It seems the pathology that has been covered with duct tape and baling wire for the last six years is all finally bursting out into the open, all at once. The dismal polls, the cognitive dissonance between Bush's bravado and the constellation of disasters that make up his unsalvageable legacy, the loss of power are all finally shattering the false front that has protected our dry-drunk-in-chief from himself.
Long ago, I saw what may well have been a psychotic break in progress. At first it seemed funny. Then the realization that a human being was actually falling apart before my eyes triggered a mix of fear and horror and (only later, I must admit) sympathy. The guy I saw go off the rails was just a student I didn't know in a class I barely remember. I don't know what happened to him -- I don't think I ever saw him again. At worst, he might have been a danger to himself, or to a handful of people around him.
But if the guy manifesting "a collapse of the "ego integrity", a state of mind where the person is unsure of who they are, where they are, what they are doing and how they should be behaving" is the President of the United States -- and not just any president, but a president who has cultivated a support system that encourages blind faith in his infallibility -- there is nothing remotely funny about it. It is an incipient nightmare of unimaginable magnitude.
Please help hunt this story down and do with it what we did with the Merkel grope. The world needs to confront this danger now.