Bush on The Couch, Again

New York Magazine Puts Bush on the Couch
Posted by Jon Ponder Feb. 26, 2007, 7:14 am

Earlier this month, New York Magazine published a series of essays under the collective title, “Bush’s Mind: Analyzing the President.”

In 17 essays by experts in politcs and psychology, the magazine offers what it calls a “psychopolitical survey” of the inner George W. Bush.

Here are a few particularly insightful highlights:

A Decadent Aristocrat, by By Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression: Bush, like his mother, has an almost inhuman ability to identify his own advantage without the slightest regard to its cost to others.

Bush, like his mother, has an almost inhuman ability to identify his own advantage without the slightest regard to its cost to others. One reads in Lincoln’s diaries of how his heart bled for every soldier who died in the war he felt obliged to wage; one reads in Bush’s face and in his speeches an inability to conceive of other people as fully human, including the soldiers who die at his behest, a quality that renders him less than fully human himself. This heartlessness, unlike his achievement of the presidency, is the very hallmark of decadent aristocracy.

It is worth noting, however, that most aristocracy is not so far decayed; the queen of England, despite her less cuddly manner, is clearly more compassionate than W.

Bush’s upbringing in wealth and privilege is key to understanding him, and yet the public is blind to it. They take his mangled hookum and NASCAR Dad persona at face value. Conversely, Traditional Media types tend to bow and scrape in front of their betters, and I believe Bush’s high station in life is a factor in the nearly hands-off coverage he’s gotten in the Capitol.

First and foremostly, George W. Bush is the spoiled and pampered scion of one of an American dynasty that goes back to Pres. Pierce. His position in life, and his attitude about it, explains everything about the ease with which he has failed upward, all the way to the top.

Simplicity Himself, by By Franklin Foer, editor of The New Republic:

Bush mocks us before we can mock him. He mocks us with his palpable disdain for the news media, the Congress and, most of all, our votes in November 2006.

Where Nixon was a barrel of laughs, the Bush presidency simply isn’t very funny. There are no masterful Bush impersonators. Nixon’s comedic appeal resided in his dark interior life. When he spoke in public, you knew that you weren’t getting the full Nixon. Back in the private quarters of the White House, he was famously brooding over his enemies, sipping scotch, and talking to the portraits on the wall. The fact that the leader of the Free World was neurotic, paranoid, and palpably creepy made him a genuinely excellent premise for jokes.

Bush has none of these qualities. Even as his entire presidency has tanked, he shows no signs of acquiring psychological complexities. He remains the “simple,” “resolute” man that his hagiographers once venerated.

Mockery and satire are safety valves as old as society itself that enable the people to humanize their leaders. But Bush mocks us before we can mock him. He mocks us with his palpable disdain for the news media, the Congress and, most of all, our votes in November 2006. As any eight-year-old can tell you, mocking mockery is rarely effective.

Dad, the Bottle, Vietnam, by By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek columnist:

I see Bush’s behavior as the result of three major forces: the dad, the bottle, and the Vietnam War. For most of his life, Bush tried and failed to follow in his absent father’s footsteps. His father was a war hero; Bush a no-show Guardsman dodging Vietnam. His father did well in the oil business; Bush struck dry holes. His father got elected to Congress; Bush was defeated in 1978. A collection of Bush Sr.’s letters contains far more to Jeb than George W. Finally, in 1994, Bush was elected governor of Texas, but George and Bar were so upset that their anointed son, Jeb, lost the election that night for the governorship of Florida that they barely seemed to notice. You don’t have to be Freud to see that Bush has snubbed his father’s closest advisers (who turned out to be right) and hired men who held his father in contempt, like Don Rumsfeld (who turned out to be wrong).

If Bush were a Democrat, the Liberal Media would not rest until they knew whether or not the “former” alcoholic president was drinking again.

His Smile, by By Deepak Chopra, president, Alliance for a New Humanity:

One of the most unnerving things about George Bush is his smile. As the situation in Iraq has grown more calamitous, the smile hasn’t disappeared. It’s become markedly patronizing, saying, “I’m right on this. The rest of you just don’t understand.” A pitying smile. On the night of the State of the Union, the president kept his smirking to a minimum — a surprise.

It’s been pointed out that until he became president, Bush didn’t smirk. It’s grown into a disturbing tic, expressing a mixture of contradictory traits: smugness, disdain, self-consciousness, doubt.

It’s not the easiest smirk to read. People who read contempt in it are rightfully offended. They think of Bush’s most unpleasant attribute: his sense of entitlement. Having accomplished little in his life, he nevertheless expected the highest rewards. He wanted victory to come easily, as his birthright.

When it did come in 2000 — to the astonishment even of his family — the smirk said, “I told you so.”

His smile turns into a go-to-hell smirk whenever Bush hears a hostile question. He’s shielding himself from impudence while reining in his own simmering anger. He’s smirking to put you on warning. In a moment he might blow his top. Bush’s smile also tells us, almost guilelessly, that he isn’t suffering inside.

This fact maddens his critics the most. Lincoln suffered terribly during the Civil War, as Churchill did in World War II. Bush has to remind himself to put on a sad face when he talks about his war. The black dog, as Churchill called his depression, doesn’t nip at this president’s heels. Have we seen a more inappropriate smile from any politician since Nixon? I doubt it.
There is no temperament more ill-suited to leadership than the simpleton autocrat, and yet this is precisely the personality type the Republican Party has forced on the United States, and the world — twice.
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Nixon’s meglomania led him to blur the line of legality, for which he was forced to resign the preidency. For the good of the republic, and the assurance of a stable future for the democratic government Bush’s actions and policies have hobbled, he needs to be turned out and relegated to the sidelines from now on, as Nixon was.


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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.