[Texgreen] RE: Bush Drunk on Power/ Really a deep Deviance of Mental Illness

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:09:30 -0600

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Back in November 2005 I presented for Veterans for Peace (VFP) a speech for the First Friday gathering at the Maryknoll House in Houston, at the request&nbsp;of a local peace group. As a mental health professional of almost 40 years, I was clear about Bush's deep-seated problems. 
&nbsp;&nbsp; As I spoke about the VFP mission and our views of the Iraq Invasion/Military incursions, I identified Bush as having behavior that fit the standard Psychiatric Diagnostic&nbsp;Manual (DSM-IV)&nbsp;description of Sociopathic Personality Disorder.&nbsp; Psychopathic was formerly used in a&nbsp;broader way to describe behavior of criminal acts, and would cover people who are con men, scam artists, etc.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Geo. W. Bush's early childhood&nbsp;history,&nbsp; [read "Bush on the Couch", written by Justin&nbsp; Frank, M.D.] provides&nbsp;the basis for concluding that he did not develop a normal conscience,&nbsp; one which would include empathy, the basis for compassion and for adherence to internalized principles of right or wrong, and this is connected&nbsp;to lack of a&nbsp;secure attachment to a&nbsp;mother who provides a consistent stress reduction.&nbsp;Barbara Bush, his mother is&nbsp;well known for&nbsp;cruelty and explosive rage attacks on others. THis is the kind of character that thwarts proper child development, and leads to children having little or no inner conscience. THey instead manipulate, pretend to deceive, and avoid candor or openness as that is likely to incur the wrath of the harsh mother.&nbsp;
&nbsp; Bush's behavior seems to fit the pattern of one who has a sadistic streak, and a desire for power with no accountability. This is&nbsp; a very familiar pattern to one who has worked with adolescents who are termed juvenile delinquents, who may steal, harm, set fires, attack and become violent, join gangs, kill.&nbsp; Those who know through work with treating patients with such a mental work with Bipolar disordered people. She apparently related to her son with a mothering style I'd term&nbsp;'inconsistent/chaotic'. This is a cauldron in which a child becomes adept at avoiding openness, becomes sneaky, lies, pretends, and has difficulty establishing respectful collaborative relationships based on trust, and honesty in expressing needs and desires. About individuals often lack social sensibilities, pay little attention to others needs, and are often dominating/controlling. They 
may also have patterns of feeling justified in attacking others, with little concern tfro the manner of the attack, or its harm ot others. They fail to consider&nbsp; that others are equals, rather loook upon them as inferior to them, asa they have a veneer of narcissiistic grandiosity, being above the usuforsocial rules and norms. They think these are for others and they can avoid at will, having the right to do whatever they want, unbridled by the needs or rights of others.
&nbsp; Such children can be caught doing something, and they will argue so convincingly they did not do anything, that the one having seen them act start to doubt their perceptions.
&nbsp; Such persons often develop a flair for being 'charming' and they can be very superficially affective at using humor, jokes, and act mockingly to deflate the seriousness of their behavior.
&nbsp;&nbsp; Such is the case with George W. Bush, who was famous in his fraternity for doing the branding with red hot wire in hazing of new fraternity pledges. He did so with aplomb, dismissing the pain he caused by saying, things like 'It's nothing, no more than a cigarette burn.'&nbsp;&nbsp; Have you ever had such a burn? It is darned painful and nothing you can brush off. He did these brandings on pledges buttocks. He can laugh and toss out a glib comment as he smirks with a sense of sadistic pleasure at getting away with something. He actually seems to be bragging about it, like he is showing his pleasure at doing such things. 
&nbsp; THis detachment from others painful experiences, his inability to feel connected and concerned with those in trouble,&nbsp; shows upon in situations like&nbsp;with the Katrina women, children, and disabled, as seen on media films/television broadcasts.&nbsp; There his main concern was with his public persona, how he is being shown on TV. He finds a scapegoat and attacks them, bl;ames them, dismisses them, destroy their reputation, in order to maintain his grandiosity &amp; privileges as&nbsp;of a totalitarian king.
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Bush is capable of great inner turmoil and can be extremeoly dangerous. He however has appatern of getting others to be responsible, and he has surrounded himself with those wh like him are willing to do whater they can, regardl;less of the rules, the laws, the morality, the constitution, the Geneva conventions,the human shame of torture, the evil of a person for whom no human is fully deserving of dedicated and stable long-term loving treatment. He may not be able to have any such affection, rather others are just objects, to be used for personal aggrandizement.
&nbsp;&nbsp; May the structure of this facade of a leader be dissolved in rains of the storm of humanity's showering him with their rejections and all the disgust he has evoked and has earned. 
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Dr. Joseph Kaye, Dr.P.H., LCSW
Fellow,American Institute of Psychotherapy &amp; Psychonalysis
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From: Roger Baker &lt;rcbaker@eden.infohwy.com&gt; To: TXGP Listserve &lt;texgreen@gp-us.org&gt; Subject: [Texgreen] Wash Post: Bush is a psychopath, drunk on power Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2007 10:02:47 -0600 [Makes sense to me.-- Roger] &lt;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/ AR2007011201952.html&gt; JURISPRUDENCE The Imperial Presidency By Dahlia Lithwick Sunday, January 14, 2007; Page B02 Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day? Why is Washington still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have 
been held out to be? And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch has the power to open mail when it sees fit? I once believed that the common thread here is presidential blindness -- an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the chief executive to believe that these futile measures are integral to combating terrorism; a self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is a chump and Guantanamo Bay is just a holding pen for a jumble of innocent or half-guilty wretches. But it has finally become clear that the goal of these efforts isn't to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo Bay or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terrorism. The object is a larger one: expanding 
executive power, for its own sake. Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio interviewed Mark Corallo, who was spokesman for then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the Padilla case -- a case that has lolled through the federal courts for years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla's case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration's sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. "Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose," she reports, which is why Padilla was dragged back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that "key players in the 
Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved." Deborah Sontag's story on Padilla in the Jan. 4 New York Times makes the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court only as "a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court." This is why the White House moved Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla's dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their claims about executive power. When confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they pulled him back to the criminal courts so as not to lose powers they'd already won. This 
need to preserve new legal ground also explains the continued operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the camp that -- as then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in 2002 -- houses only "the worst of the worst." Now that more than half of them have been released (the best of the worst?) and even though only about 80 will ever see trials, the camp remains open. Why? Civil rights groups worldwide and even close U.S. allies such as Denmark, England and Germany clamor for its closure. But Guantanamo Bay stays open for the same reason that Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration cannot retreat from that position without ceding ground. The president is as much a prisoner of Guantanamo Bay as the detainees are. Having 
gone nose to nose with Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts, guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot call off the trials. The endgame in the war against terrorism isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to limitless presidential authority. Enter these signing statements. The most recent of the all-but- meaningless postscripts Bush tacks onto legislation gives him the power to "authorize a search of mail in an emergency" to "protect human life and safety" and for "foreign intelligence collection." There is some debate about whether the president has that power already, but it misses the point. The purpose of these signing statements is to plant a flag on the moon -- one more way for the chief executive to stake out the furthest corners in the field of his desired powers. Last spring, the New 
Yorker's Jane Mayer profiled David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff and legal adviser. Addington's worldview in brief: a single-minded devotion to something called the New Paradigm, a constitutional theory of virtually limitless executive power, wherein "the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries, if national security demands it," Mayer describes. Bush administration insiders told Mayer that Addington and Cheney had been "laying the groundwork" for a vast expansion of presidential power long before 9/11. And in 2002, the vice president told ABC News that the presidency was "weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years." Rebuilding that presidency has been their goal for decades. The image of Addington scrutinizing "every bill 
before President Bush signs it, searching for any language that might impinge on Presidential power," as Mayer puts it, can be amusing, sort of like the mother of the bride obsessing over a tricky seating chart. But this zeal to restore an all-powerful presidency traps the Bush administration in its own worst legal sinkholes. This newfound authority -- to maintain a disastrous Guantanamo Bay, to stage rights- free tribunals and to hold detainees forever -- is the kind of power that Richard M. Nixon could have only dreamed about, and cannot be let go. In a heartbreaking letter from Guantanamo Bay last week, published in the Los Angeles Times, inmate Jumah al-Dossari writes: "The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed." I fear he is wrong. The destruction of Dossari, Padilla, Zacarias Moussaoui, Yasser Esam Hamdi and some of our most basic civil 
liberties was never a purpose or a goal -- it was a byproduct. The true purpose is more abstract and more tragic: to establish a clunky post-Watergate dream of an imperial presidency, whatever the human cost may be. dahlia.lithwick@hotmail.com Dahlia Lithwick covers legal affairs for Slate, the online magazine at www.slate.com. _______________________________________________ texgreen mailing list texgreen@lists.gp-us.org http://lists.gp-us.org/mailman/listinfo/texgreen </BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></DIV></div> <hr> <a href="http://g.msn.com/8HMBENUS/2731??PS=47575" target="_top">Fixing up the home? Live Search can help</a> </html>