Running on empty

The only way to explain some of the arguments coming from the left is to conclude that they have no valid arguments. Thus is must be with this post at Alternet by 'comic' (they must mean that in the loosest sense of the term) Will Durst. Bush has syphilis?

President Bush is a stone-crazed loon suffering from a deterioration of his brain due to a tertiary case of syphilis and liable to become incapacitated at any time and accidentally start WW IIII, according to a noted Baltimore-based psychotherapist. Or he could die. Or both.  ~Alternet

This is usually the best the left can come up with. 'Doctors' who diagnose the President with this or that without ever seeing him or examining him, which is, one would think, a violation of their own professional code of ethics.

Dr. Musckovitz and his team of physicians, who have not seen or treated Mr. Bush, have identified telling characteristics of the dreaded sexually transmitted disease in the President by closely studying tapes of his mannerisms, speech patterns and eating habits. Candidly, the doctor cautioned "he's really starting to creep me out."

I recall another 'Doctor' actually wrote a book publically proclaiming that Bush was mentally ill. It's enlightening as well as heartening that the left has to resort to this kind of attack in order to somehow feel they are not running on empty in the political argument business.

For the last three years, I have observed with increasing alarm the inconsistencies and denials of such an individual. But he is not one of my patients. He is our President. He wants to remain our President for four more years, and he intends to do so on his own terms. On August 27, the eve of the Republican Convention, Bush said to New York Times reporters Sanger and Bumiller that “he would resist going ‘on the couch’ to rethink decisions.”

... If one of my patients frequently said one thing and did another, I would want to know why. If I found that he often used words that hid their true meaning, and affected a persona that obscured the nature of his actions, I would grow more concerned. If he presented an inflexible worldview characterized by an oversimplified distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, allies and enemies, I would question his ability to grasp reality. And if his actions revealed an unacknowledged – even sadistic – indifference to human suffering, wrapped in pious claims of compassion, I would worry about the safety of the people whose lives he touched. ~HNN

And this from a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical School. It makes one question the very 'science' of psychiatry itself. Especially when you see studies funded by the federal government that have groups of Psychologists diagnosing conservatism itself as a mental disease.

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned inequality". 

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.  ~guardian.co.uk

Perhaps L. Ron Hubbard had it right when he declared psychiatry the work of the devil.

But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted, tartly: "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses."  ~guardian.co.uk

[H]egemonic Word count: 708

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