1 Boring Old Man

I’m a retired Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, and I sort of left that behind me as much as possible when I became a regular retiree. But occasionally, I have set-backs. 

This Justice Scandal is one of those times when I find myself thinking like a Psychiatrist. The Valerie Plame Affair was another. If Cheney were a sane person, he would’ve let Wilson’s Oped go. All he had to do was say, "I wasn’t aware of his report so I can’t really comment," and it might’ve just blown over. We didn’t know who Wilson was. But he didn’t do that. He and his fellows so over-reacted as to actually keep it on the front burner for years, and make it into a cause celebre` for their adverseries. That is the action of a sick man, a man who would be disgnosed as having a Narcissistic Personality Disorder with Paranoid Features in clinical practice.

Since the 1970’s and the work of Heinz Kohut and others, this group of conditions has been an increasingly recognized and understood set of Personality Disorders with definied diagnostic criteria. The patients are arrogant, insensitive to others, given to rage or temper attacks, and regress when criticized or slighted, becoming openly paranoid and vindictive. One of their characteristic ways of being is contemptuousness – that negative emotion in which the "other" is deemed to be without any value.

At least five of the "men at the top" show clear signs of this disorder – Bush, Cheney, Rove, Bolton, and Rumsfeld. They can’t be wrong. They can’t be criticized. When they are criticized, their response is to hold their critics in contempt, and retaliate – often vicously. They cannot take advice. To need advice is to be flawed, and that’s intolerable. Their response to criticism is to become irritated and insensed, as if the critic just doesn’t get it [because of their own intrinsic inferiority]. Compromise is a non-issue. A good example was Karl Rove’s speech to the New York Conservatives, in which his premise was that Liberals were to become extinct because of their wrong thinking. Conservatives and Liberals, Right and Left, have been the stuff of America since its inception. Back and forth, debate, compromise is how we do things. But with this Administration and it’s equally disturbed mouthpieces, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Coulter, Malkin, there’s a new music in the air – extinction. To be honest, it sounds like the "final solution" in Mein Kampf. They scoff at being called Nazis, but it’s a very apt moniker.

These are sick men. They are not to be dealt with, because frankly, they’re too sick to deal. How we long for a good old sane Conservative force in our political dialogue. What we have now is a group of Narcissistically disturbed, often Paranoid men who justify their underhanded and often illegal shady ways of doing things by their delusional belief that "Liberals" are subversives who want to destroy our way of life. In fact, it is increasingly true that the opposite is the case. My point is that there is no other recourse than to remove them from power. They are too rigidly entrenched in a pathological group to change, and they are becoming more and more dangerous as they are "cornered." 

Take no comfort in the fact that they’re on the run. Challenging such people just makes them sicker. We are so not out of the woods so long as they’re in Washington.