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Originally posted by grover
A while back there was a thread on the subject of bush minor's linguistic problems, and I said it then and I will say it now... something neurological has happened to the man.
Originally posted by apc
But it doesn't mean he's "ignorant" or has neurological problems. He's from Texas people! We're lucky we can understand a word he says!
In all reality he most likely has taken speech classes to help break through his native country drawl, but it still shows every now and then. Big deal.
Originally posted by carewemust
Who are people going to pick on after December 2008? ...
Originally posted by carewemust
Who are people going to pick on after December 2008? There will be a
lot of folks in this country going through "Anti-Bush Withrdrawal" syndrome
I bet! Regardless of his human faults (we all have faults BTW..duh), Prez
Bush has accomplished more and loftier personal goals than most of us
ever will. Whenever I read forums or articles where members attack
Bush, Gates, or anyone else who has achieved much in life, I just rack
it up as jealousy and a way for them to soothe their own egos. So sad...
Originally posted by FredT
An interesting discussion, however, could it possibly be that he simply is NOT a good speaker?
As the alcoholic George Bush approached his 40th birthday in 1986, he had achieved nothing he could call his own. He was all too aware that none of his educational and professional accomplishments would have occurred without his father. He felt so low that he did not care if he lived or died. Taking a friend out for a flight in a Cessna aeroplane, it only became apparent he had not flown one before when they nearly crashed on take-off. Narrowly avoiding stalling a few times, they crash-landed and the friend breathed a sigh of relief - only for Bush to rev up the engine and take off again.
Bush's irrational consideration of a "surge" in the wake of the ISG report--which apparently defies all credible counsel--has begun to generate speculation regarding his sanity. References to Bush's "delusions" have appeared in the MSM (notable on "Scarborough Country") and throughout the blogosphere. As a psychiatrist, I understandably get concerned when I see clinical terminology bandied about in political discourse, and thought it might be of interest to share my own perspective on this question.
First of all, let me state up front that I probably hate Bush as much (or nearly so) as anybody here. I think he has done more damage to our country (Etc..Etc put here for honesty Elf-Contd) I think the guy is both stupid and evil, and I have no intention of cutting him any slack here. But in the political/clinical tradition of Dr. Bill Frist's school of diagnostics, I have a distinct clinical impression that I think explains most of his visible pathology.
First and foremost, George W. Bush has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder. What this means, mostly, is that he has rather desperate insecurities about himself, and compensates by constructing a grandiose self-image. Most of his relationships are either mirroring relationships--people who flatter him and reinforce his grandiosity -or idealized self-objects--people that he himself thinks a lot of, and hence feels flattered by his association. Some likely perform both functions. Hence his weakness for sycophants like Harriet Miers, and powerful personalities like Dick Cheney.
Below is a brief psychiatric analysis of the President as provided by Dr. Justin A. Frank, Professor of Psychiatry at George Washington University in Washington, D.C . The interview was conducted by Geoffrey Steinberg of Executive Intelligence Review and published on April 7, 2006.
A psychiatric analysis of President Bush is not pleasant, amusing, or entertaining to read. Instead, it is a portrait of a very limited man who is beset by anxiety, and is unable to take in any part of reality which is anxiety provoking or unpleasant. He is a man with learning disabilities making it difficult for him to read and who is further intellectually hamstrung by the black and white thinking typical of a dry drunk. According to Dr. Frank, Bush is a compulsive liar who absolutely believes in the truth of his lies.
Contemporaries at Yale say he was like the John Belushi character in the film Animal House, a drink-fuelled funseeker.
His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong when writing to repeat words already used. Having employed "tears" once in the essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given him and wrote "the lacerates ran down my cheeks". The essay received a fail grade, accompanied by derogatory comments such as "disgraceful".
Perhaps the oddest revelation is an episode from 1992, when his father was president. The younger Mr. Bush found the White House a "creepy place," Mr. Draper writes.
After exercising in a White House gym one evening, he told a friend he froze in his steps while approaching the Lincoln Bedroom. Mr. Bush insists
"he saw ghosts - coming out of the wall," according to the friend.
Once his mind is made up, there is no room for manoeuvre. And once Bush has made his big decisions, he shows a peculiar lack of interest in following them through. That's the small stuff that can be left to officials. The Draper anecdote that has caused most astonishment among the political commentariat was Bush's reply when asked how he reacted when he learned that the first post-invasion presidential envoy in Iraq, Paul Bremer, had unilaterally reversed policy and dissolved the Iraqi army - with disastrous consequences. "Yeah, I can't remember," was Bush's reply. After that Draper stopped asking him about specific events or meetings: "I learned early on there that was little point; he has a very poor memory."
Early in his book Dead Certain, he tells the story of Bush's failed bid for Congress in 1978. Against all the best advice, Bush decided to run against a conservative West Texas Democrat, Kent Hance. He lost badly, but not embarrassingly. Explaining his decision to Draper, he said, "You can't learn lessons by reading. Or at least I couldn't. I learned by doing. I knew it was an uphill struggle. But see, I've never had a fear of losing. I didn't like to lose. But having parents who give you unconditional love, I think it means I had the peace of mind to know that even with failure, there was love."
Let 1,000 PhDs bloom. Here is a president who boasts of reading around 100 books a year, promotes reading standards and No Child Left Behind, graduated from Yale and Harvard, and is married to a librarian. Yet he thinks he can't learn lessons by reading. You can almost hear the critics scoff. Given his current situation, if the president had spent more time studying Iraq and less time doing Iraq, he might have emerged with a different conclusion about military action.
Sociopathy is chiefly characterized by something wrong with the person's conscience. They either don't have one, it's full of holes like Swiss cheese, or they are somehow able to completely neutralize or negate any sense of conscience or future time perspective. Sociopaths only care about fulfilling their own needs and desires - selfishness and egocentricity to the extreme. Everything and everybody else is mentally twisted around in their minds as objects to be used in fulfilling their own needs and desires. They often believe they are doing something good for society, or at least nothing that bad. The term "sociopath" is frequently used by psychologists and sociologists alike in referring to persons whose unsocialized character is due primarily to parental failures (usually fatherlessness) rather than an inherent feature of temperament. Lykken (1995), for example, clearly distinguishes between the sociopath (who is socialized into becoming a psychopath) and a "true" psychopath (who is born that way). However, this may only describe the "common sociopath", as there are at least four (4) different subtypes -- common, alienated, aggressive, and dyssocial. Commons are characterized mostly by their lack of conscience; the alienated by their inability to love or be loved; aggressives by a consistent sadistic streak; and dyssocials by an ability to abide by gang rules, as long as those rules are the wrong rules. As Stout (2005) indicates, it only takes three of the List of Common Sociopath Traits to be defined as a sociopath.