Cool where did you get this info from? Each website types celebrities or political leaders differently.Originally Posted by gilligan87
Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
ILE
SEI
ESE
LII
EIE
LSI
SLE
IEI
SEE
ILI
LIE
ESI
LSE
EII
IEE
SLI
Cool where did you get this info from? Each website types celebrities or political leaders differently.
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Randy Pausch
Ne-IEE
6w7 sp/sx
6w7-9w1-4w5
I've seen Kerry types as ENFp in more than one place, and it makes sense to me. Al Gore seems really ENTj to me: the face shape, the posture...the dress sense...
But, for a certainty, back then,
We loved so many, yet hated so much,
We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...
Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
Whilst our laughter echoed,
Under cerulean skies...
Bush=
Really, the thought of him being an ESTp makes me *cringe*.
Hmmm...George W. reminds me of my dad a little....ESTp
=/
Exactly, stereotypical
Well, the thing is you can't really see theGuys, ESTps DON'T force their views on others like Bush is doing. He's doing this whole "no abortion, no stem-cell research, abstinence only, be a christian" thing. Do you guys have any idea how UNCHARACTERISTIC this is of an ESTp? Seriously.
Anyways, where the hell are you guys seeing thein Bush?
You have to realize that all of his actions are mainly for the conservative power and the people controlling him, I highly doubt that he gets a lot of free will as president.
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Randy Pausch
Ne-IEE
6w7 sp/sx
6w7-9w1-4w5
I'm submitting to the agenda of Delta movement and rest my caseI'm reasonably happy with ESTx "diagnosis" anyways. For me he is more likely p but his public "image" has many j characteristics I admit. Maybe he will write his memoirs after his presidency and tell us what he REALLY thinks and who he REALLY is.
I have to add that while I'm not exactly pro-Bush I'm definately not anti-Bush
and I'm not leftist but more centre / moderate right politically. Ugh.
Whatever type you just described, it was not ESTp. ESTps are always running around doing something. Beta isn't as "fun" as it might look on the surface - there is always something to be done and we do it (the "never-ending to-do list" infamous amongst our friends and family). If we go out to have fun first, the thought of things left undone nags... and nags... and nags...The guy is from elitist family, belongs to an elitist secret society and is nowadays a religious fundamentalist (self-proclaimed). On top of this he is the "most powerful man" in the world. If he doesn't seem like the John Doe ESTp you see on the street every day is not really that surprising. I still can't see the case for ISFj or ESTj based on how he was younger. He was always the "black sheep" of the family (self-proclaimed) and was more concerned about having fun than meeting responsibilities (for example meeting his national guard duties).From where I'm standing, there are more likely types than ESTp. The moral pre-occupation strikes me as ESTj (note how there is an expectation of the world to "play fair" but that doesn't mean the US needs to) or something with.
Before September 11th he was spending his presidency mostly by playing golf. He had no agenda and he was just "letting things roll on their own weight". After September 11th he has been on a manhunt giving ultimatums and fighting never ending wars. I would think an angered ESTp would do like this. ESTj and ISFj are very consistent performers and always have well defined goals and plans. Only goal Bush has is to "end tyranny in the world". I would think ESTj and ISFj characters would take a more humble approach and define realistic goals for which a step-by-step plan can be formulated. He was also known as "the executioner of Texas" or something like that because he always signed the death penalties without giving much thought. That is very ESTp to me. He doesn't want to interfere and take responsibility for things he doesn't feel concern him.
I'm still open to other options but I just can't see a case to back them upHe is NOT N. He seems very T and he is hardly an empath. He was popular and outgoing when younger so probably E. He has never had any real plans he is just reacting to situations which makes him very p. So he is ESTp
From ESTp description:
"Solid ESTps have free and flexible movements. When standing in one place they tend to wriggle rhythmically as if they have a slight electric current running through them."
Just look at him when he gives a speech...the guy just can't keep still.
But throw in more evidence and I might reconsider
(Ok, I don't know any ENFjs so if this doesn't apply to you guys pleaase correct me)
Plus, him being a black sheep would have more to do with how he differs from the rest of his family rather than what type he actually is.
Also, angered ESTps don't go on manhunts. It strikes me as very un-ESTp, actually.
I agree that ESTps are very good at lying. They say everything with such certainty even if they're lying or they just don't have a clue what they're talking about. You seriously wouldn't have any idea unless you actually knew the real truth.
As to what Herzy said, ESTps generally seem to not give a damn what other people do, unless it actually affects said ESTp.
That's not really true.
Bush is a -figure-. He is not independent of the times; he IS the times. The great spell of uncertainty emerged the night he was elected. He has always used uncertainty to his advantage. He rarely announces his intentions in advance, and when he does, he goes through with him "at the time of his choosing." Compare this to Clinton, or even to his father.
The powers of the presidency weigh heavily on the national superego. In effect, he -is- the superego because he is the law enforcement. This control trickles down subconsciously into the entire nation and all parts of it. Even your own life.
Bush is not the idiot people think he is. What we see is simply the effect of a conservative individual using feeling and intution in the service of extroverted sensing. Herzblut is a liberal; of course she would be embarressed to see her type being shamed by a conservative like Bush.
Darn Rocky! I never knew you had it in you!You hit the nail on the head right here. :wink:
Bush =Bush is not the idiot people think he is. What we see is simply the effect of a conservative individual using feeling and intution in the service of extroverted sensing. Herzblut is a liberal; of course she would be embarressed to see her type being shamed by a conservative like Bush.
Why don't you people see this? (Except for Rocky + INFps)
Excuse me?
Types that no one thinks Bush is:
INFp, INTp, ISTp, ISTj, INTj, INFj, ESFp, ENTp, ENFp
For reference or whatever. Maybe it would be more productive to discuss Bush's type in terms of what types he isn't. It's interesting that all of the extraverted rationals have (somewhere) been mentioned as plausible types.
Lyricist
"Supposing the entity of the poet to be represented by the number 10, it is certain that a chemist, on analyzing it, would find it to be composed of one part interest and nine parts vanity." (Victor Hugo)
I was saying, "Darn Rocky, I never realized an ISTp could be so reckless!"
Seriously, I don't think W. is the same type as Harry Truman.
Nope, but he'll never let you know it! Hell, he'll never let you know... well, I don't think he likes einsteins that much....
For all you people arguing he is ESTp.... you aren't describing ESTps! One person I noticed went through it letter by letter (I hope they realise that the J/P is not a dichotomy).
You might not be describing ESTjs either, but you haven't made any convincing argument either way.
I for one still believes he has an ISTj preference.
As tcaudilllg pointed out, GWB's personality is so well balanced and developed that all functions are easily accessible. As a TiSe he could thus easily pass for a SeTi or even as having an F in there.
However, nobody seems to considers GWB an intuitive. That may be a clue the N is the least developed function.
All in all I would vote for ISTj
Greetings, ragnar
Interesting, this statement sparks to mind that members of the government and the hidden society have well balanced and developed functions due to their extensive knowledge and training. This is very secret and well hidden, of course this is just imaginary knowledge of mine.
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Randy Pausch
Ne-IEE
6w7 sp/sx
6w7-9w1-4w5
Interesting, this statement sparks to mind that members of the government and the hidden society have well balanced and developed functions. This is mainly due to their extensive knowledge and training given to special members of society. This is very secret and well hidden, of course this is just imaginary knowledge of mine.
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” Randy Pausch
Ne-IEE
6w7 sp/sx
6w7-9w1-4w5
Bush is ESTp. Here's the proof:
http://www.informationclearinghouse....hTenYrs4MB.mov
Herzy, hate to burst your bubble, but you can't idealize your type. You can't just say "ESTps don't force their views on others!" Why? Because some of them do. Not everyone can be open minded, and as many ESTps cross the line as ENTps or INTjs.
But, for a certainty, back then,
We loved so many, yet hated so much,
We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...
Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
Whilst our laughter echoed,
Under cerulean skies...
That's not really proof.
"To become is just like falling asleep. You never know exactly when it happens, the transition, the magic, and you think, if you could only recall that exact moment of crossing the line then you would understand everything; you would see it all"
"Angels dancing on the head of a pin dissolve into nothingness at the bedside of a dying child."
You're idealizing your type by claiming that ESTps as a WHOLE don't force their views on others.
One of my friends here at school lives with an ESTp who is CONSTANTLY trying to convince me that Russian communism "is the way." Any time he sees me, he can't help but bring up Lenin this and Marx that, blah blah blah. When I tell him my views, he just says I'm ignorant. And yes, I'm quite confident he's ESTp: I've observed his behavior, and I've watched him take the test, and seen the results. ESTp, logical subtype.
My point was that any type can be closed minded, even those who we normally perceive, as a whole, to be otherwise.
It shows that Bush was once just as quick witted and well-spoken as any ESTp; he wasn't always the blathering idiot that is currently in office.
But, for a certainty, back then,
We loved so many, yet hated so much,
We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...
Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
Whilst our laughter echoed,
Under cerulean skies...
A) I'm not idealizing anything.
B) Give me an example of one that does. No Bush.
C) Elaborate on your last statement?
D) Your video doesn't prove anything.
Listen to Rocky. Bush =
my dad used to always try to force his ideas on me until i went through about 3 years of rebellion and now he doesn't because i won.
<3 dad
His dad had that problem, too. It's probably the pressure of the presidency--and his partisanship--that causes him to slur in public. Another thing, he rarely says "uh."
If you look back at Clinton's dialogues, you'll find that everything he said that wasn't written out for him before hand (media questions, for example) was started with either a momentary pause, or "uh". Bush just says things off the top of his head.
Not exactly solid proof but a good piece of data. I still think Bush is most probably ESTp based on what I have read about his younger years and these kinds of videos help me reinforce that opinion. People here have made me have doubts though. I almost bought the ESTj or ESTx "diagnosis". Anyways I'm glad there are people here who still defend the ESTp view
George W. Bush
“What about George W. Bush? What was his childhood like (because of course he
started these two terrifically destructive and ugly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan)?" -- Molyneux
“I remember when he was first elected—no, it was when he was re-elected? I’m not
sure which one. I went downtown and there were a million of us on the street in New York City,
complaining that George Bush was going (to try) to be President. And I came home and I watched CNN,
and here was George Bush talking to the guy, and they asked him, ‘What makes you such a tough guy,
so militarily strong?’ and so on . . . He turned around and he pointed to the audience and he said, ‘See
that white-haired lady over there? She used to beat me up all the time. She was the Decider. Now I’m
the Decider . . .’” -- deMause
“So brutal ambition is driven by the early humiliation and dominance from the
Mom.” -- Molyneux
“Right, right. And when he went to war in Iraq, what are the exact words he said—for
the reason he did it? ‘God told me to do it.’ Well, we know, God wears a dress, doesn’t he?” -- deMause
- from Bush On The Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Justin A. Frank, M.D.; pp. 2-17: The story
of George W. Bush’s early years, up through his first vivid memories, contain the roots of several
fundamental elements of what we have come to know as his character. As we’ll see, while the family’s
response to his young sister Robin’s illness and death certainly revealed underlying tensions and made
some matters worse, Bush’s family history—emotional even more than factual—was deeply seated in
his heart and mind, even before his little sister was born.
By now, the basic outline of George W.’s early years is familiar to us from several published
biographies. The first child of a well-connected war hero and his young social-register bride, George W.
was born in July 1946 while his father was still at Yale, where his demanding social, athletic, and
academic schedules must have left little time for assisting his wife in the parenting duties. The day after
he graduated in 1948, the elder Bush set out to pursue his fortunes in the West Texas oil boom, landing
in Odessa, the working-class sister town to Midland. The family’s two-room apartment was a long way
from Barbara’s privileged suburban New York upbringing—“as different from Rye, New York as any place
imaginable,” according to her memoir, in which she describes a family of prostitutes with whom their
apartment shared a bathroom. Isolated from her family, Mrs. Bush was again left to fend for herself
during the seven-day work weeks and frequent travels her husband’s new business venture required.
Within a year, they moved to the first of a series of four California residences where they lived during
Mrs. Bush’s pregnancy with their daughter, Robin, who was born in December 1949. The child was
named after Mrs. Bush’s mother, Pauline Robinson Pierce, who had been killed in an automobile
accident that fall; though she had traveled east for a family wedding just a few weeks earlier, Mrs. Bush
did not attend her mother’s funeral.
The next year, the young family returned to Texas, this time to Midland, where they were living
when their second son, Jeb, was born in early 1953. Mrs. Bush handled much of the parenting on her
own as her husband traveled. “I had moments where I was jealous of attractive young women out in a
man’s world,” she explained in Pamela Kilian’s biography, Matriarch of a Dynasty. “I would think, well,
George is off on a trip doing all these exciting things and I’m sitting home with these absolutely brilliant
children who say one thing a week of interest.”
George W. was six years old at the beginning of the tragic episode that he has said yielded his
first vivid childhood memories—the illness and death of his sister. In the spring of 1953, young Robin
was diagnosed with leukemia, which set into motion a series of extended East Coast trips by parents and
child in the ultimately fruitless pursuit of treatment. Critically, however, young George W. was never
informed of the reason for the sudden absences; unaware that his sister was ill, he was simply told not
to play with the girl, to whom he had grown quite close, on her occasional visits home. Robin died in
New York in October 1953; her parents spent the next day golfing in Rye, attending a small memorial
service the following day before flying back to Texas. George learned of his sister’s illness only after her
death, when his parents returned to Texas, where the family remained while the child’s body was buried
in a Connecticut family plot. There was no funeral.
No parent is ever prepared for the devastation of losing a child, and Mrs. Bush would later
express doubts over how she handled the matter with her son, who was certainly old enough to be
affected by the loss of the sister. When families have come to me seeking therapy in the wake of such
an overwhelming event, I listen to both parents and children for insight into the family’s response to the
loss. I also look for any evidence of preexisting developmental trends that had already begun to take
shape in the child’s infancy. The surviving child’s psychological development is well underway before
tragedy strikes, and the trauma often only compounds whatever problems were already there.
As a therapist working in the tradition of Melanie Klein, who traced the formation of personality
from birth, I am particularly interested in the relationship between mother and infant, which has an
enormous and lasting influence on how the child grows up to see the world. Given a mother’s selective
memory and a child’s cognitive limitations, we can never know exactly what transpired between a
mother and her baby. Nevertheless, we can explore the mother’s history and behavior for clues to the
exact nature of the initial mother/child dynamic to deduce the formative impact it had on the child’s
development. In the case of Barbara Bush, who has written revealingly about her experiences as both a
mother and a child, one needn’t look far.
Referred to by her children as “The Enforcer,” Barbara Bush has by her own admission always
been the family disciplinarian. She was, from most accounts, a cold taskmaster, and she spanked the
children readily. Called “the one who instills fear” by a close family friend, she would boldly break up
fights between her sons, “bust them up and slap them around,” according to a brother-in-law. Decades
later, she still embraces her role as an arbiter of punishment, as when she describes her son’s famous
near-fatal pretzel-choking incident as a “heaven-sent message that he should stop knocking his mother’s
cooking.” Like her own mother, Mrs. Bush did not leave much of a cooking legacy for her children to
knock. “My mother never cooked,” Ron Suskind reports President Bush telling Nancy O’Neill in The Price
of Loyalty, “The woman had frostbite on her fingers. Everything right out of the freezer.” And she
remains quite vocally willing to step into certain frays, telling Larry King’s viewers that “you can criticize
me, but don’t criticize my children and don’t criticize my daughters-in-law and don’t criticize my
husband, or you’re dead.”
Beyond her reputation for strength, if not hostility, Mrs. Bush has shed little direct light on her
approach to mothering her first baby. Her memoir is noticeably silent on the topic, focusing instead on
the many times she had to move during W.’s early years, and the frequency of his father’s absences. Her
most candid discussions of motherhood involve her own mother, in which she provides telling glimpses
of her relationship with the woman from whom she was most likely to learn about being a mother.
What she reveals are two deep strains running through her mother’s family into her own: a continuous
undervaluing of the self and a need for detached discipline. And throughout, she is the mother who
leaves feelings behind, whose attitude ends discussion or curtails emotional engagement. On the
morning after her husband lost his reelection effort to Bill Clinton, according to her son George’s
memoir, Barbara Bush uttered a single telling statement: “Well, now, that’s behind us. It’s time to move
on.” Here is a woman bent on protecting herself and her family from feelings of pain or anger.
Barbara became a stern enforcer naturally. As a child, she “would determine who [among her
circle of friends] was speaking to whom when we got on the bus together,” explained June Beidler, a
member of the young Barbara’s circle, to Bush biographer Pamela Kilian. “She was sort of the leader
bully. We were all pretty afraid of her because she could be sarcastic and mean. She was clever, never at
a loss for what to say—or what not to say.” At home, Barbara’s mother, Pauline Robinson Pierce, “did
most of the scolding” and frequently spanked Barbara and her siblings with a hairbrush or wooden
clothes hanger. Her mother’s authoritarian ways evidently made a lasting impression on young Barbara:
The first two memories Bush shares of her mother in her memoir involve a “humiliating incident” in
which the mother confronted a ten-year-old Barbara for overeating in public, and an “outrageous”
request, made when the Bushes visited a decade later, that Barbara’s new husband not use the toilet at
night (which Mrs. Pierce claimed disturbed her sleep). She clearly remembers that her mother’s
spankings were harder than the ones she administered to her own children, but struggles to justify her
behavior nonetheless, claiming with certainty that she was naughtier than her own children, and that
her spankings were deserved—while acknowledging that she can’t remember anything she did to
deserve them . . . .
Equally vivid in Mrs. Bush’s memoir is the impression that her “striking beauty” of a mother paid
little attention to aspects of maternal life associated with traditional nurturing. Mrs. Bush may recall
Mrs. Pierce publicly chastising her at the table for overeating, but she doesn’t “remember that mother
cooked.” Mrs. Bush’s regret that her mother never taught her “things like how to cook, clean and wash
clothes” is evident, as is the sense of remorse that her mother assumed her daughter “should be able to
pick [them] up reading.” Pauline Pierce’s inability to provide maternal nurturing led young Barbara to
gravitate to a neighborhood family, a common childhood attraction Freud described as the “family
romance.” Freud observed that some unhappy children imagine they belong to a different family; for
Barbara it was the Southern, openly warm and affectionate Schoolfield family, whose matriarch was
“like a second mother” to Barbara.
What is noticeable in the jibes about overeating, and the assumed reason for punishment, is
that Barbara Bush quite clearly learned from her mother how to put herself down. Self-esteem problems
were rampant for the little girl, who describes herself as “the biggest pain in the world.” . . . .
. . . . young Barbara was left to make excuses for a mother who was chronically depressed, too
preoccupied by her own pain to engage her daughter with maternal nurturing or teach the child its basic
elements.
When a young girl is not adequately nurtured physically or emotionally by her mother, she often grows
up to pass this deficiency on to her children. The impact this deficiency would have on a child has been
illuminated by the work of Melanie Klein. According to Klein’s theories, our psychological life begins at
birth, characterized by a primitive ability to differentiate between the nurturing environment of the
womb and the chaotic, terrifying terrain into which we are born. Our internal world is shaped by our
struggle to manage the overwhelming anxieties of infancy; these anxieties, along with our initial coping
strategies, can be reactivated throughout adulthood, thus influencing our emotional health and
development for the rest of our lives.
Klein traces these anxieties to our attempts to understand the sudden wreckage of our idyllic
prenatal world. With no one to blame but ourselves, we conclude that we must possess the powers to
wreak such devastation; our sense of loss is tainted by responsibility and guilt, our anxieties fueled by
the rudimentary awareness of the destructive powers we assume are our own. The awareness of our
destructive capacities likewise remains in play over the course of our emotional development, as we
attempt to manage anxiety that arises from our knowing we possess the power to destroy again.
As we progress through infancy, a myriad of challenging experiences—hunger, colic,
discomfort—fuels our fear of destruction. This is complicated by a natural desire to return to the
plentiful, mindless paradise we experienced in the womb—Freud’s so-called “death instinct,” which
counters our equally natural instinct to survive. The first method to cope with the death instinct is to
protect the self by converting that instinct into aggression. By this point, however, we are also enjoying
positive experiences that we must distinguish from the negative. From this need we develop the first
mental attitude for dealing with the fear of destruction: We split our world into the good and the bad,
separating experiences into the safe and the dangerous. Further, to defend ourselves against fear and
insulate ourselves from the destructive forces within, we split our sense of self along the same lines;
projecting the negative outward onto the environment, we ally ourselves with the good self while we try
to deny and get rid of the aspects of the self we experience as threatening and undesirable. This
unconscious mental process, called “projection,” leaves us without any feelings of actually being
destructive.
This is where the mother/child dynamic begins to make itself felt—and where the kind of
maternal reserve shown by a Barbara Bush can have a devastating impact. The first focus of the infant’s
consciousness is his mother, whom he experiences as a loving extension of himself when he is
contentedly being fed by her. The baby’s positive experiences at the breast of an attentive, nourishing
mother—for whom we use the breast as a metaphor, whether the baby is actually fed by breast or
bottle—forms the core of self-esteem, of identification with a beneficial source of nourishment and
love.
If the baby is deprived or uncomfortable, he might spit up or act frustrated during the feeding,
subjectively visualizing the breast as the source of its discomfort. The infant, however, is not yet mature
enough to perceive its frustration and satisfaction as coming from the same breast. Thus, there are two
early relationships the baby has—one with the good breast/good mother, the other with the bad
breast/bad mother. The mother’s state of mind during nursing—whether she is paying attention to the
baby or letting her mind wander elsewhere—can cause dramatic differences in the baby’s experience, as
every mother can attest. Mothers know that their babies can tell when they are and are not emotionally
in touch with their baby. When the mother is preoccupied with something else, the baby has difficulty
taking in nourishment and experiencing the positive relationship that can help him manage his
frustrations. The baby experiences his mother at these moments as a source of anxiety: She becomes
the mother of frustration. This is of vital importance, because the mother/baby relationship eventually
becomes the inner model of the world that affects all of the child’s future relationships.
At this stage of development, the baby needs to identify with the ideal mother, to see himself as
sharing her essential goodness, as he projects onto the bad mother the negative attributes that his split
ego is still too fragile to internalize. But as he grows and develops new capacities, he must move beyond
this oversimplified way of ordering the universe—of splitting and projecting—or else run the risk of
distorting his perceptions of it. This next stage of development depends on the relationship with the
mother, who helps the baby transform his despair and anxiety into something more manageable.
Through an ineffable process of unconscious interaction with her baby, the mother senses what the
baby is experiencing and reacts accordingly—using facial and verbal responses as well as active care
giving. If the baby cries, for example, the mother takes in and processes the baby’s experience and then
makes enough sense of it to take appropriate action, such as feeding, changing, or soothing. Sensing the
truth of the baby’s feelings of discomfort, the mother returns them to the child in a tolerable form. This
helps the baby develop his own sense of his emotions to feel connected to (and contained by) his
mother; over time, he internalizes the maternal function and can transform the bad feelings
independently.
At some point, the infant recognizes that his good and bad mothers are one person, able both to
comfort and protect him and to anger and disappoint him. The baby comes to understand that he can
love and hate the same person; it is from this coexistence of love and hate that the vital notion of
ambivalence is introduced. He is also able to internalize the destructiveness he had previously projected,
resulting in despair over the knowledge that his rage could hurt the very person he loves.
Because the mother has helped the baby develop the ability to regulate his emotions, his
feelings are rendered less threatening. The baby is able to cope with his contradictory feelings . . . He
creates an internal mental representation of himself and others that helps him understand and respond
to the mental states of the people in his life. The better nurtured a child is, the more closely his
perceptions will reflect material reality. His overall psychic reality strengthened, he is able to avoid being
overwhelmed by anxiety when something goes wrong and to feel challenging emotions such as guilt and
concern when appropriate.
When the mother is unable to feel her child’s discomfort or recognize his needs—due to her
own depression, distraction, or emotional distance, or simply because the baby himself is too fussy or
hyperactive for the mother to make sense of his needs—this vital exchange between mother and infant
does not take place. The effect on the child’s psychological development is profound. His fear persists,
and the split between good and bad remains unhealed. Dependent on his original crude tools to manage
his anxiety, the emotionally uncontained baby continues to project his negative feelings on his
surroundings, desperate to rid himself of his bad feelings without learning to manage them as his own.
Relying on such unevolved mechanisms to protect his idealized image of himself and his inner world, he
is unable to integrate his conflicting emotions. His world remains simplified, peopled with unreal figures,
uncomplicated by ambiguity.
The cries unheard by an ineffective mother can reverberate through the lifetime of the child. As
Melanie Klein has said, throughout life we return to varying degrees to variations upon our infantile
mental positions, traces of which remain in all of our interactions. The child who fails to progress
significantly beyond his split world view into the process of integration will, in adulthood, fall back on
primitive mental mechanisms, with devastating results. The infant’s unintegrated split between good
and bad will reappear in similarly divided adult perspectives, such as a reliance on black-and-white
thinking, a tendency to view other people as either allies or enemies, or the cultivation of a fantasy
world dominated by the struggle between good and evil. All children go through this process; for George
W. it was probably expressed in games of cowboys and Indians.
The oversimplified fantasy world of such an individual can be filled only with equally
oversimplified and fragmented figures that mirror his own state of mind. The people he seeks to attack
and destroy are experienced as evil and one-dimensional, rather than integrated in his mind as whole
people. Because he experiences them this way, he feels free to harm them without pity or loss. He may
not even recognize his role in the attack; rather, he feels constantly under attack himself, a feeling that
further helps him evade responsibility. And with nothing to threaten his idealized self-image, he has no
cause to feel vulnerable or to acknowledge the possibility that he can be wrong. These are clues to
arrested psychological development that I look for in patients I treat both as children and adults. I see
them all too clearly in the actions and attitudes of George W. Bush.
It’s not hard to see how Mrs. Bush, through no fault of her own, would be unprepared as an
undernurtured young mother to provide vital early nurturing to her own newborn child. Her memoir
offers a subtle but unmistakable portrait of a self-blaming daughter who consistently doubted herself
and her lovability, and who evolved into a stern and distant mother. She split her worldview into good
and bad—all the good lived outside of her, while the bad remained locked within. As a memoirist, Mrs.
Bush makes light of her reliance on the word “wonderful” to describe the people she met in adulthood,
but the joke points out her reflexive need to see every person she writes about as uniquely positive. At
first glance, it may seem that she is just putting on a public face for her readership, yet this habit
suggests not just false humility but genuine insecurity and recrimination. The more she lionizes others,
the worse she feels about herself.
Being turned so profoundly inward herself, Mrs. Bush would have had trouble soothing her
infant son; in turn that would have hampered her son’s ability to heal his original psychic split and
manage his anxieties. These anxieties would be magnified rather than modified, forcing him to resort to
his own means to modify them. An anxious baby has limited resources to dissipate his discomfort: He
can kick and scream—physical means to discharge anxiety or tension—but he may soon learn that such
behavior doesn’t always invite further nurturing. Fixed in the internal world of his infancy, he must
continue to project his unintegrated destructive impulses, resulting in the primitive worldview that
divides people and experiences into good and bad, ideal and persecutory.
George W. Bush’s public, adult behavior bears distinct hallmarks of this lack of integration,
coupled with an inability to perceive the complex nuances of reality. One result is the black-and-white
posturing that is so prevalent in his rhetoric—the worldview of a man who declares, “There are no
shades of gray in this fight for civilization. . . . Either you’re with the United States of America, or you’re
against the United States of America.” Bush’s decisions and actions are clearly informed by a need to
order his world into good and bad. He shows a rigid inability to consider the idea that anything in his
own behavior might qualify as destructive; instead he projects such impulses onto his many perceived
persecutors, to maintain his sense of self. He denies his fallibility, vulnerability, and responsibility
because on a fundamental unconscious level he feels he must do so to survive.
But this primitive mechanism, as in infancy, is doomed to fail. Ultimately, the only way for an
individual burdened by such a perspective to be safe—to protect against the delusion of external
persecution—is to annihilate the persecutors. But this process, set in motion to quash anxiety and guilt,
also compromises his perceptive abilities and nullifies his intellectual understanding of the problem at
hand.
There is every reason, then, to consider George W. Bush’s drive to rid the world of dangerous
people as not simply the policy judgment of a president—but as the drive of an undernurtured and
emotionally hobbled infant, terrified of confronting the dangers within his own psyche.
Throughout this book, I’ll discuss how this basic dynamic resonates through so many of the choices Bush
has made in adulthood and continues to make as president. While he was still a child, however, Bush
experienced a watershed event that further shaped his worldview. The death of a young sibling is
inevitably a defining moment in the life of a child. In the case of young George W., the tragic blow to the
family was perhaps matched in its impact on the boy’s development by the family’s response to it, which
was fuel to the psychological fire that raged unnoticed in the child’s underdeveloped psyche.
It has been said that the nursery rhyme “Humpty Dumpty” was written with the first-born child
in mind. It seems to capture perfectly the irrevocable trauma felt when the second child is born: Nothing
can put the first-born back together again. But first-born offspring find different ways to manage this
insult. Some can be overly nice to mask their fury; others can be suspicious of being taken advantage of;
still others are overcome with the fear of losing what they have. But if that next sibling dies, then an
entirely new and complex dynamic is set in motion. The first-born often has to disown his destructive
fantasies, splitting them off from his consciousness. He then projects them outward with even greater
vigor, exacerbating his simplified internal world.
A child who is already relying too heavily on a split worldview developed in infancy is thus
especially vulnerable to the lasting impact of a sibling’s death. As the Bushes’ first-born child, young
George would inevitably have harbored resentment toward Robin for taking his mother away from him;
when the child’s illness led to absences that took his mother further away, the resentment would have
grown stronger—and stronger still in the face of his mother’s grief after Robin’s death. If George’s
feelings were never addressed, his natural animosity toward his sister would have remained unresolved;
he would have been left with a host of forbidden feelings that were too threatening to acknowledge,
only furthering the process of splitting and projecting unwanted aspects of the self.
Such experiences, of course, can be an opportunity for healing; sorrow has been called the
vitamin for growth, and there is certainly ample reason to feel sorrow when a child suffers a terminal
illness. In Bush’s household, however, sorrow was evidently suppressed. The elder Bushes’ silence on
the topic around young George deprived him of the ability to prepare for the child’s death, to say
goodbye, to deal with the unavoidable sadness of such a loss. The sorrow that could have challenged
George’s split worldview, by forcing him to integrate the negative feelings and to view his world in less
simplistic terms, was denied.
And the historical record confirms that within the restrained environment of the Bush family
young George was wrestling with powerful and troubling feelings. Biographer Bill Minutaglio recounts
the story of George W.’s first sleepover after the family’s loss, “not long after Robin’s death,” when the
“usually insouciant” boy went to the home of a friend to spend the night. “Throughout the night,”
Minutaglio writes, George “was engulfed in constant nightmares,” until his mother arrived to comfort
him. George’s young host, Randall Roden, “was watching, unsure what was happening to his friend.
Finally, Barbara pulled him aside and quietly explained about Robin’s death. ‘It was a profound and
formative experience,’ Roden believes.”
Without an instructive example of how to experience grief, George W. was deprived of the
opportunity to learn to mourn, which a child typically learns by watching his parents go through the
process. An exercise in holding and integrating the contradictory emotions of love and sadness,
mourning is necessary for psychological growth. The capacity to feel sorrow is a prerequisite for the
ability to be compassionate, to feel concern for others; managing loss is essential to both personal
growth and the development of empathy for others. A child burdened with a primitive worldview, in
which others are easily dehumanized either as threats or intruders, or as idealized exemplars of perfect
goodness, could obviously benefit from such an opportunity; a child who is instead given the message
that one shouldn’t feel sorrow is instead implicitly encouraged to hold onto his way of seeing the world.
Compassion not only goes untaught, it is discredited, rendered irrelevant. When the population of his
world is further dehumanized in this way, the child has a difficult time humanizing others when he
reaches adulthood.
The best way to address such a loss is to talk, to interact, to see the parents mourn, to share the
loss, to help the child talk about his conflicting feelings—his anger as well as his relief. The apparent
silence on the topic within the Bush family half a century ago set a dangerous precedent for the
impressionable young George. Viewed through the dehumanizing perspective of childhood, the example
of his parents laid the foundation for the development of a powerful, lifelong coping mechanism,
grounded in a self-protective indifference to the pain of others.
How ironic, then, that this child should grow up to occupy the presidency at his nation’s greatest
moment of grief—the period of deep shock that followed September 11, 2001. In his post-9/11 edition
of The Bush Dyslexicon, Mark Crispin Miller writes perceptively of Bush’s “apparent incapacity for any
show of sorrow, at least in public. Without a script, he seemed unable to assimilate the tragic aspect of
the crisis, or even face it, but would just look right on past it to the happy, happy day of our eventual
revenge.” Even when Bush did pay lip service to America’s grief, it was almost always supplanted
immediately by expressions of anger. “If this were a psychobiography,” Miller writes, “we might look
deeply into Bush’s tendency to jump away from grief and straight to rage.”
And, as Miller points out, within months Bush was joking about the events of 9/11, and
declaring that “all in all, it’s been a fabulous year for Laura and me.” Whatever grief there may have
been appeared to have been washed from his system.
- from A TRAGIC LEGACY: HOW A GOOD VS. EVIL MENTALITY DESTROYED
THE BUSH PRESIDENCY by Glenn Greenwald; p. ix:
I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
--ABRAHAM LINCOLN
- pp. 39-51:
You know, you’ve heard me talk about this probably, but I really, truly view this as a conflict
between good and evil. And there really isn’t much middle ground—like none. The people we
fight are evil people. . . .
Either you’re with us or you’re against us. Either you’re on the side of freedom and
justice or you aren’t.
--GEORGE W. BUSH, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, January 30, 2002
One of the aspects of the Bush presidency that has often confounded supporters and opponents
alike is that George Bush’s political beliefs do not fit comfortably, or even at all, within any of
the familiar, commonly assigned ideological categories. Certainly Bush is typically referred to as
a conservative . . . the conservative political movement claimed him as its own and was largely
responsible for both his 2000 and 2004 election victories.
Political conservatism in the United States, however, has two meanings. In one sense, it
is an abstract theory of government that—in its pure, academic form—advocates various
political principles. In this academic formulation, conservatism is defined by a belief in (a)
restrained federal government power, (b) minimal federal taxes and responsible and limited
spending, (c) a generalized distrust of the federal government and its attempts to intervene into
the private lives of citizens, (d) reliance on the private sector rather than the federal government
to achieve “Good” ends, (e) a preference for state and local autonomy over federalized and
centralized control, (f) trusting in individuals rather than government officials to make decisions,
and (g) an overarching belief in the supremacy of the rule of law.
But the term conservatism also refers to a group of political figures and their supporters
who call themselves conservatives. In this version, conservatism is defined by the actions taken
and the policies implemented in reality by conservatives when they are in power rather than by
what think tanks and theorists set forth as conservative principles.
This dichotomy is not unique to conservatism. All political theories can be understood as
a set of principles, or, independently, as the collection of policies and methods of governance
that its adherents, in practice, undertake when in power. Communism, for instance, exists as a
sterile, academic theory in the works of Karl Marx and the speeches of Mao Tse-tung and Fidel
Castro. At that theoretical level, communism constitutes harmonious egalitarianism in which all
are liberated from capitalistic enslavement and material wants, and thus are freed to pursue more
elevated levels of creativity and personal fulfillment.
But when its adherents—“Communists”—have obtained power, they have not behaved in
conformity with these pretty utopian principles. They have almost uniformly imposed tyranny
and wrought profound misery. The term communism, then, is not understood exclusively—or
even primarily—by reference to the abstract principles defining it in books and in speeches.
Rather, it is best and most commonly understood to describe the actions of Communists when in
power.
Like communism, the theory of American political “conservatism” in the pure, abstract
Hayek-Goldwater sense has rarely, if ever, converged with the actions and policies of
self-described conservatives when in power. And, like communism, perhaps the very nature of
theoretical conservatism means that it never can.
Arguably, the imperatives of human nature and the instincts of government leaders—to
attempt to enhance rather than restrict their own power—constitute an insurmountable barrier to
the implementation of “pure” conservatism, an idealistic vision where elected government
officials proceed to limit or even dismantle the mechanisms of their own power. Additionally,
elected officials in the American political system must often support government programs
benefiting a political movement’s constituents as a condition of retaining their power, thereby
rendering the reduction, let alone the abolition, of excessive government spending virtually
impossible.
Whether political conservatism in the United States has ever really existed can be and
continues to be endlessly debated. The allegedly purest form of it, as embodied by Ronald
Reagan, oversaw an expansion of the power of the federal government in countless ways. That
expansion of power was accompanied by wild deficit spending. The Reagan administration
ushered in a significant increase in domestic discretionary spending (though far less than that
which has occurred under the Bush administration). And multiple Reagan officials were
indicted, and some convicted, as a result of a scandal that grew out of the administration’s
violations of legal prohibitions on providing aid to the Nicaraguan contras. To be sure, Reagan
paid rhetorical homage to conservative theories, but his actual governance deviated in multiple
ways from those principles.
Regardless of one’s views of that debate, it is beyond reasonable dispute that President
Bush’s actions and policies deviate fundamentally, and in almost every area, from the theoretical
precepts of political conservatism. Whatever one might call the set of guiding principles
animating President Bush, political conservatism—at least as it exists in its storied, theoretical
form—is not it.
Since President Bush was inaugurated, discretionary spending has skyrocketed, both in
absolute terms and when compared to the budget-balancing Clinton administration. In 2003, the
right-leaning Cato Institute published a detailed assessment of federal government spending over
the preceding thirty years—entitled “ ‘Conservative’ Bush Spends More Than ‘Liberal’
Presidents Clinton, Carter.” It concluded:
But the real truth is that national defense is far from being responsible for all of the spending
increases. According to the new numbers, defense spending will have risen by about 34 percent
since Bush came into office. But, at the same time, non-defense discretionary spending will have
sky-rocketed by almost 28 percent. Government agencies that Republicans were calling to be
abolished less than 10 years ago, such as education and labor, have enjoyed jaw-dropping
spending increases under Bush of 70 percent and 65 percent respectively. . . .
After all, in inflation-adjusted terms, Clinton had overseen a total spending increase of
only 3.5 percent at the same point in his administration. More importantly, after his first three
years in office, non-defense discretionary spending actually went down by 0.7 percent. This is
contrasted by Bush’s three-year total spending increase of 15.6 percent and a 20.8 percent
explosion in non-defense discretionary spending.
Those profligate spending patterns only worsened as the Bush presidency proceeded. In
2005, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published a study by its own Veronique
de Rugy and Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie. The report was entitled “Bush the Budget
Basher” and concluded: “After five years of Republican reign, it’s time for small-government
conservatives to acknowledge that the GOP has forfeited its credibility when it comes to
spending restraint.”
President Bush has not only violated every claimed tenet of conservatism when it comes to
restraints on federal spending, but he ranks among the most fiscally reckless presidents in
modern times—so insists the pro-Bush AEI:
“After 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared [the budget] down pretty good,” Rep.
Tom DeLay (R-Texas) crowed a few weeks back during ongoing budget deliberations. But
nothing could be farther from the truth, at least since the GOP gained the White House in
2001.
During his five years at the helm of the nation’s budget, the president has expanded a
wide array of “compassionate” welfare-state, defense, and nondefense programs. When it
comes to spending, Bush is no Reagan. Also, he is also no Clinton and not even Nixon. The
recent president he most resembles is in fact fellow Texan and legendary spendthrift Lyndon
Baines Johnson—except that Bush is in many ways even more profligate with the public till.
These massive spending increases are entirely independent of any 9/11-related or defense-based
expenditures: “When homeland security spending is separated out, the increase in discretionary
spending is still huge: 36 percent on Bush’s watch,” according to the AEI. During the Bush
presidency, total real discretionary outlays increased by 35.8 percent. By comparison, the same
figure increased by only 11.2 percent during the deficit-plagued Reagan administration, and
during the budget-balancing Clinton administration, it decreased by 8.2 percent. All of this led
the AEI report to conclude: “It seems incontestable that we should conclude that the country’s
purse is worse off when Republicans are in power.”
The Bush administration has also repeatedly asserted the prerogatives of federal power in
areas traditionally reserved to the states. It has, for instance, sought to eliminate the rights of the
states to enact laws governing marriage, assisted suicide . . . In each of those areas, various states
have enacted laws—in some instances by referenda—that President Bush disliked. As a result,
the Bush administration fought to override the judgment of the states by federalizing those issues
and imposing the policy preferences of the president as a uniform, compulsory standard, which
no state was to be free to reject. Hence: No gay marriage. No physician-assisted suicide . . .
The Bush administration’s disdain for the ostensibly conservative belief in limited federal
power and the sanctity of states’ rights became most apparent in the case of Terri Schiavo. A
lifelong Republican and Southern Baptist state court judge had been presiding over the Schiavo
matter for several years, faithfully applying clear Florida state law to resolve the battle between
Schiavo’s husband and her parents as to what end-of-life decisions would be made about
Schiavo. Florida appellate courts upheld virtually all of that judge’s substantive rulings.
But the outcome of those state judicial proceedings deviated from the president’s moral
preferences and those of his “conservative” Congressional allies. As a result, in an atmosphere of
intense drama, Congress enacted and the president signed “emergency” legislation vesting
authority in the federal courts to override the judgment of the Florida courts. Wielding the tools
of federal power, they sought to take it upon themselves to resolve the end-of-life issues faced by
Terri Schiavo’s family, issues that were controlled by clear Florida law.
The list of the Bush administration’s systematic deviations from fundamentally
“conservative principles” (as they exist in theory) is too lengthy to chronicle here. Suffice it to
say, while the Bush presidency is consistent with the actual decisions and policies of previous
“conservative” politicians, a belief in conservative theories of government is plainly not what has
guided the president or his administration.
MORALISM TRUMPS CONSERVATISM
That political conservatism (in its theoretical sense) has not been the North Star of the Bush
presidency defies reasonable dispute. That reality leads to the question, What does drive the
president? When aggregated, the Bush administration’s actions, policies, and political arguments
can appear jumbled and incoherent, bereft of a philosophical center. But the opposite is true. At
the heart of the Bush presidency exists a coherent worldview, one the president has applied with
exceptional consistency and unyielding conviction.
Many Bush critics, and even some of his supporters, have long depicted the president as a
weak and malleable individual—more of an aimless figurehead than a resolute leader—whose
actions are the by-product not of personal agency but manipulation and control by advisers
shrewder and more willful than he. But that portrayal is pure mythology, for which there is
virtually no support.
It is certainly true that throughout his presidency, Bush has relied heavily on advisers
who focus on details, has delegated even significant tasks to aides, and has trusted those around
him to inform him of critical matters and to educate him on issues about which he knew little. In
those regards, his reliance on his advisers and top aides is substantial. But when the president, in
a mid-2006 press conference, anointed himself as “the Decider,” it struck many as arrogant, but
few as inaccurate: George Bush’s strong personality traits and deeply held personal beliefs have,
more than anything else, defined and propelled the Bush presidency.
In his book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, Bush
speechwriter David Frum recounted several incidents early on in the Bush presidency, even prior
to the 9/11 attacks, in which an engaged, aggressive, and even sometimes shrewd George Bush
left no doubt that he was in charge, that he was the Decider well before he coined that term.
. . . each defining aspect of the administration—the policies it has undertaken, its
interaction with the outside world, and the manner in which decisions are made—has been
shaped and determined by the worldview and personal leadership attributes of the president
himself. As a result, all of the seemingly disparate component parts and disconnected events of
the Bush administration have a common origin.
They all are, to varying degrees, outgrowths of the president’s core view that the world
can be understood as an overarching conflict between the forces of Good and Evil, and that
America is “called upon” to defend the former from the latter. That view finds a corresponding
expression for the president on the personal level, where the moral and religious duty of the
individual is to divine God’s will (the Good) and to act in accordance with it.
By definition, this premise demands the identification of Evil, which is the enemy—an
enemy that is pure in its Evil and that, by its very nature, cannot be engaged, offered
compromises, negotiated with, understood, managed, contained, or ignored. It can only be
attacked, hated, and destroyed.
When expressed and implemented as a governing philosophy, this belief in the centrality
of Good vs. Evil results not in an effort to limit government power, but rather to expand it
drastically, both domestically and abroad, in order to accumulate power in service of the battle
against (perceived) Evil and to impose (perceptions of) Good. Such a philosophy is centrally
predicated on the certainty that government leaders can divine God’s will—not with regard to
specific issues and policies but in a generalized moral sense—and can therefore confidently
enlist and expand the awesome power of the American government in service to universal moral
dictates. As a political philosophy, it is therefore far from “conservative.” Rather, it is messianic,
evangelical, and Manichean.
The term Manichean refers in its most literal sense to a religion founded in the third
century by the Persian prophet Manes. The movement attracted large numbers of followers who
were drawn to its simplicity and moral clarity. The religious movement spread throughout large
parts of the Roman Empire and into China. Its central precept was that the entire world could be
cleanly divided into two opposing spheres—God and Satan in the world of the eternal, and a
corresponding dualistic battle of Good and Evil playing out on Earth. A stark dichotomy lies at
the heart of the worldview, with God as father of goodness, and the Prince of Darkness as the
ultimate author of all Evil.
World events were all driven by, were all the by-product of, an ongoing, endless conflict
between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. One’s overarching moral duty was to
maintain adherence to God’s will by siding with Good and battling against the forces of Evil.
One of Christianity’s most influential moral philosophers, St. Augustine, was a devotee
of Manicheanism in his youth. But ultimately, its doctrinal deviations from Christianity led to its
being condemned as heretical by various Christian emperors. Nonetheless, the similarities
between Manichean and Christian moralism are self-evident, and the influence of the former on
the latter is beyond doubt.
But the historical fate of the Manichees is of far less interest than is contemporary
reliance on their religion’s central moral tenets. In the overwhelming majority of President
Bush’s significant speeches and interviews throughout his political career—but particularly
since the 9/11 attacks—he evinces a dualistic worldview lodged at the core of his belief system.
Both the president’s deeds and, frequently, his own self-descriptions leave no doubt he
holds that world events are driven by the forces of Good vs. Evil. And it is equally clear that the
duty to side with Good and battle against Evil motivates the president—not merely in his private
life but also as a leader, as the American president. The tools for fulfilling that duty are the
powers and resources of the U.S. government.
Many people, probably most, believe in the existence of Good and Evil—that is to say,
they perceive certain isolated acts, perhaps even certain individuals, as composed not of a
mixture of good and evil, but rather as pure Good or pure Evil. Indeed, wide agreement exists
that certain actions can be understood only as pure Evil: Nazis devoting themselves to the
extermination of targeted groups; whites treating blacks as property to be bought and sold;
cold-blooded murders committed for no reason, or petty reasons, without mercy or remorse;
theocracies putting to death heathens, infidels, homosexuals, rape victims, and others who
deviate from mandated orthodoxies; and terrorists flying fuel-laden jets filled with innocent
people into office buildings also filled with innocent people in order to slaughter as many as
possible. One could compile a long list of acts that most would agree are Evil.
Conversely, there are acts that seem accurately characterized as pure Good: one who risks
his own life to save another or one who devotes his life to the well-being of those in need. It is
true that plausible arguments can be advanced that such behavior is driven by mixed motives—
the life-saver becomes a hero and receives adulation, Mother Teresa becomes famous and widely
admired for her aid to the sick and destitute, etc. But it is difficult to dispute that, on an intuitive
if not rational level, these acts seem to be propelled by a force for Good (whatever its origins),
just as murderous or genocidal acts (even when there is a perceived justification for them) seem
driven by Evil.
But deeds that are pure Good or pure Evil—and, even more so, individuals who are pure
Good or pure Evil—are rarities, the exception and not the norm. In truth, the vast, vast majority
of individuals are capable of both Good and Evil, and even those who may commit an Evil act
are capable of acts of great Good (and those who commit acts of Good are capable of Evil).
Human beings and their psyches are complex and shaped by numerous, often conflicting
influences.
Moreover, most behaviors are not susceptible to moral judgment at all. They are
morally neutral, purely pragmatic endeavors geared toward effecting a desired outcome rather
than in the service of moral dictates. When one applies for a job or carries out one’s job duties or
reads a book or eats a meal or chats with a friend or invents a new product or repairs a
malfunctioning machine, pragmatic rather than moral considerations predominate. Routine
decisions and actions such as these are not motivated by moral considerations, even if they have
a moral component to them.
But the Manichean mind-set does not admit to the merely isolated or occasional
appearance of Good and Evil. Rather, in this view, the battle between Good and Evil is the
ongoing dynamic at the epicenter of world events, and more so, acting in defense of the Good
constitutes the overarching duty. It is that mind-set that has driven President Bush and his
presidency. He lays the template of the glorious and all-consuming battle between Good and Evil
over all significant matters, personal and public/political.
Further, for the Manichean believer, the battle between Good and Evil is paramount. It
subordinates all other considerations and never gives way to any conflicting or inconsistent
goals. Measures intended to promote Good or undermine Evil are, by definition, necessary and
just. They cannot be abandoned for pragmatic or prudential reasons, or because of growing
opposition, or in response to evidence of failure. Insufficient progress when attacking Evil never
justifies re-examination of the wisdom of the action, but instead compels a redoubling of one’s
determination to succeed. In sum, complexities, pragmatic considerations, the restraints of
reality are trumped by the imperative of the moral crusade.
This Manichean paradigm unites and explains the president’s personal approach to all
matters—his foreign policy decisions; his relations with other countries; his domestic programs;
the terms he adopts when discussing, debating, and analyzing political matters; his attitude
toward domestic political opponents (including his own former officials and allies who have
become critical); and his treatment of the national media. For the president, there always exists a
clear and identifiable enemy who is to be defeated by any means, means justified not only by the
pureness of the enemy’s Evil but also by the core Goodness that he believes motivates him and
his movement.
Religious faith is but one path to a Manichean mind-set, but it is far from the only one.
Many people come to view the world as an all-consuming Manichean battle due to a variety of
factors having nothing to do with religion—including extreme nationalism (manifested as a
belief that one’s own country is intrinsically Good and anyone who opposes it is pure Evil);
ideological, racial, or ethnic supremacy; or even unrestrained fear (causing one to adopt a view
of themselves as a “Good” victim with the sole priority being “protection” from the threat posed
by forces of Evil). And while much of the support for President Bush’s Manichean crusades may
be explained by some combination of those factors, it is George Bush’s religious faith—as he
himself acknowledges—in which his personal Manichean worldview is rooted.
A critically important caveat is in order here. In the hands of political leaders, Manichean
moralism can operate on at least two different levels. For some, it serves as a sincerely held
belief system, genuinely animating their actions and decisions. Government leaders
automatically driven by Manicheanism believe that there is objective Evil in the world and
deploy state resources to attack and defeat it. Even the most tyrannical and extremist religious
leaders, for instance, or the most brutal tyrants presiding over empires, or the most repressive
Communist dictators (such as Mao Tse-tung or even Fidel Castro) often come to believe that
they are acting in pursuit of moral Good, and that their tyranny is justified—even compelled—by
the threat of Evil which surrounds them. Whether the forces they attack are in fact Evil and/or
whether they are acting in pursuit of the genuine Good is an independent question entirely. The
salient point is that Manichean leaders, by definition, believe that they are acting in pursuit or
defense of the Good and against Evil.
Independently, political leaders can cynically adopt the template and language of
Manichean moralism as a tool for persuading citizens of the necessity and justifiability of
certain actions. Controversial actions that, in fact, have little or nothing to do with a concern
for Good and Evil, and which political leaders know have little or nothing to do with either, can
nonetheless be rhetorically justified via a dualistic appeal—that the action in question is
necessary to fight for Good and defend against Evil. Thus, issues can be framed in Manichean
terms by insincere leaders to manipulate public opinion, to cast morally neutral or even immoral
policies as necessary for defense of the Good, and to thereby generate support for actions they
wish to undertake.
Bush supporter and Commentary magazine founder Irving Kristol—generally credited as
the “Father of Neoconservatism” and the father of Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard’s
influential prowar editor—has expressly argued that society works best when a vanguard of elite
leaders decide what is best and then disguise those conclusions in a Manichean package in order
to induce what neoconservatism essentially regards as the idiot masses to accept and ingest those
decisions. Kristol explained this approach in an interview, quoted by Reason magazine’s Brian
Doherty in July 1997:
There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate
for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated
adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should
be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.
Writing in Free Inquiry magazine, Shadia Drury, a professor of philosophy and political
science at the University of Regina (Saskatchewan, Canada), documented that Manicheanism as
a manipulative tool has deep roots in neoconservative theory:
There is a certain irony in the fact that the chief guru of the neoconservatives is a thinker who
regarded religion merely as a political tool intended for the masses but not for the superior few.
Leo Strauss, the German Jewish émigré who taught at the University of Chicago almost until his
death in 1973, did not dissent from Marx’s view that religion is the opium of the people; but he
believed that the people need their opium. He therefore taught that those in power must invent
noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit.
Drury notes that—beyond Irving Kristol—self-proclaimed followers of Strauss’s theory include
some of the most influential figures in the shaping and selling of Bush’s foreign policy, such as
Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, and various other Pentagon officials under former Secretary
Rumsfeld. In his autobiographical essay, Irving Kristol specifically lauded the Straussian belief
that the masses in a democracy need to be pacified with moral imperatives, and that “truth” was
only for the elite leadership:
What made [Strauss] so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in
the Enlightenment dogma that “the truth will make men free.” . . . Strauss was an intellectual
who thought that “the truth could make some minds free” [emphasis added], but he was
convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and
that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the
release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly
unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.
Thus, in the eyes of neoconservatives, concepts of Manichean morality are but tools
used to blind, rather than enlighten, the masses, to keep them loyally in line behind their leaders’
“superior” wisdom and insight. Leaders make decisions about complex matters and then package
those decisions in simplistic moralistic terms in order to manipulate public support. Such
packaging is how the neoconservatives’ long-standing, pre-9/11 desire to invade Iraq for all
sorts of geopolitical reasons was transformed into what Bush chief of staff Andy Card called a
“marketing product,” justifying that invasion based on the claims that 9/11 Changed Everything .
. .
- pp. 33-38 [Bush Agonistes (DESTROYING THE REPUBLICAN BRAND)]: Political
journalist Rod Dreher is as conservative as an individual can be—a longtime contributor to
National Review, a self-described “practicing Christian and political conservative,” and a
columnist for the Dallas Morning News. Yet his rejection of George Bush and Bush’s vision of
America is now complete, and the reasoning that led him to that point is shared by many other
Americans who previously supported the president.
In January 2007, Dreher recorded an extraordinary oral essay for National Public Radio
in which he recounts how the conduct of President Bush (for whom he voted twice) in the Iraq
War (which he supported) is causing him to question, really to abandon, the core political beliefs
he has held since childhood. Dreher, forty, explains that his “first real political memory” was the
1979 failed rescue effort of the U.S. hostages in Iran. He states that he “hated” Jimmy Carter for
“shaming America before our enemies with weakness and incompetence.” When Reagan was
elected, Dreher believed “America was saved.” Reagan was “strong and confident.” Democrats
were “weak and depressed.”
In particular, Dreher recounts how much, during the 1980s, he “disliked hippies—the
blame-America-first liberals who were so hung up on Vietnam, who surrendered to Communists
back then just like they want to do now.” In short, to Dreher, Republicans were “winners.”
Democrats were “defeatists.” On September 11, Dreher’s first thought was: “Thank God we have
a Republican in the White House.” The rest of his essay recounts his political transformation as a
result of the Bush presidency:
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right
warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic.
But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country
with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse
than anything Carter did.
The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq
War have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn forty next month—middle aged at last—a time of discovering limits, finitude. I
expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power
revealed so painfully.
I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed
over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative—that I have got to teach my kids that they
must never, ever take presidents and generals at their word—that their government will send
them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot—that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation
that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Will my children, too small now to understand Iraq, take me seriously when I tell them
one day what powerful men, whom their father once believed in, did to this country? Heavy
thoughts for someone who is still a conservative despite it all. It was a long drive home.
Dreher’s essay is extreme and intense but also increasingly commonplace and illustrative. The
unparalleled magnitude of the disaster that President Bush has wrought on this country will
carry a profound impact on American strength and credibility for a long, long time to come and
also on the views of Americans—including many conservatives—toward their political leaders
and, almost certainly, toward the Republican Party.
Yet another illustrative example is Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who was not only a
supporter of the war in Iraq but also one of two journalists invited to a secret meeting with senior
Bush Defense Department officials in November 2001 at which the participants strategized on
ways to persuade the president of the need to invade Iraq. But by 2006, Zakaria had turned
against the administration almost completely, and by the middle of the year was issuing
sweeping condemnations of both Bush and the legacy of his presidency:
Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—
troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling
Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington’s assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most
have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance
and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader
effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.
Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush’s legacy is now clear: the
creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I’m sure he takes full
responsibility.
The enormity of the damage Bush has done to America is reflected by the palpable
change in the content as well as the tone of our political dialogue. By the end of 2006, op-ed
themes such as historian Douglas Brinkley’s in the Washington Post became commonplace.
Brinkley is a highly regarded presidential historian, having written books about Franklin
Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, and John Kennedy.
In his first paragraph, Brinkley recounts a meeting he had with Reagan biographer Lou
Cannon: “Like many historians these days, we discussed whether George W. Bush is,
conceivably, the worst U.S. president ever.” While Cannon “bristled” at the idea, he did so,
according to Brinkley, not because anything in Bush’s presidency thus far precludes such an
assessment, but only because, with two years left, declaring Bush “the worst” was premature.
After all, unforeseen events could unfold in such a way as to improve Bush’s standing.
But Brinkley had no such qualms, barely qualifying his ready conclusion about Bush’s
place in history:
But we live in speedy times and, the truth is, after six years in power and barring a couple of
miracles, it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the
presidential ladder.
In February 2007, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, the newspaper with the
highest circulation in the country, announced that he had reconsidered his view of Bush’s
place in history. Headlined “Mea Culpa to Bush on Presidents Day,” Neuharth wrote:
Our great country has had 43 presidents. Many very good. A few pretty bad. On Presidents
Day next Monday, it’s appropriate to commemorate them all. . . .
A year ago I criticized Hillary Clinton for saying “this (Bush) administration will go down in
history as one of the worst.”
“She’s wrong,” I wrote. Then I rated these five presidents, in this order, as the worst: Andrew
Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon. “It’s very unlikely
Bush can crack that list,” I added.
I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly
at the top. . . .
Bush admitting his many mistakes on Iraq and ending that fiasco might make many of us
forgive, even though we can never forget the terrible toll on lives and dollars.
The collapse of the Bush presidency brings to mind the plight of the Greek tragic
figure Icarus, whose father built wings made of feathers and wax to enable them to escape from
their exile on Crete. Intoxicated by hubris and uncontrollable sensations of his own potency,
Icarus exceeded his limits and flew too close to the sun, which melted his wings and caused him
to plunge helplessly into the sea.
One can draw a straight line between the unprecedented heights reached by George Bush
in his post-9/11 glory days and the hubris- and arrogance-driven collapse—now sustained and
total—of his presidency.
By any measure, things have not gone well for the United States over the first six years of
the Bush presidency. Is there anyone who really claims otherwise? In any area, what metrics
could possibly be adopted, what achievements invoked, in order to argue that the interests and
welfare of America have been enhanced during this administration?
As Brinkley points out, while Bush and Lyndon Johnson both presided over a deeply
unpopular war, Johnson’s place in history is vastly improved by substantial “major domestic
accomplishments to boast about when leaving the White House, such as the Civil Rights Act and
Medicare/Medicaid.” By stark contrast, Brinkley pointed out, “Bush has virtually none.”
It appears highly likely, even inevitable, that until Bush leaves office on January 20,
2009, the United States is going to be saddled with a failed president, one who is lost, aimless,
weak, and isolated in the extreme. Yet he continues as inflexibly as ever to be driven by a
worldview that has come to be almost universally rejected as useless, even dangerous, for
dealing with the challenges facing the nation.
A failed, lame-duck president, with nothing to lose, can either accept his impotence and
passively muddle through the remainder of his term or do the opposite—move furiously forward
on an extremist course, free of the constraints of facing the electorate again and convinced that
he is on the side of Good and Right. Such a conviction can lead to the belief that his unpopularity
is not an impediment, but a challenge, even a calling, to demonstrate his resolve and
commitment by persisting even more tenaciously in the face of almost universal opposition.
The embrace of that latter course renders public opposition and all other forms of outside
pressure irrelevant, even counterproductive. It is human nature that when one is rejected and
condemned by contemporary opinion, a temptation arises to reject that contemporary opinion as
misguided and worthless. One instead seeks refuge in other less hostile metrics of success—
universal moral standards, or the judgment of a Supreme Being, or the future vindication of
history.
It has long been evident that the president’s worldview compels such refuge. Convinced
that his core beliefs are preordained as Right, he will reject any measurement that rejects his
beliefs and embrace any that affirms them. What matters to him now is not the judgment of
contemporary politicians, journalists, or even the majority of American voters. The rightness of
his actions are determined not by public opinion polls or editorials or even empirical evidence
but instead by adherence to what he perceives to be objectively moral notions of Right and
Wrong, Good and Evil. As the president himself has made expressly clear, his calling is to wage
war against Evil on behalf of Good—as he conceives of those concepts—and he will not be
deterred in that mission, not even slightly, by pragmatic impediments, whether they be political
pressures, resource constraints, ongoing failures, or the objections of American citizens.
“Dear Mr. President/Come take a walk with me/Let's pretend we're just two people and You're not better than me / I'd like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly . . . What do you feel when you look in the mirror? / Are you proud? / How do you sleep while the rest of us cry? / How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye? / How do you walk with your head held high? / Can you even look me in the eye / And tell me why? / Dear Mr. President / Were you a lonely boy? / Are you a lonely boy? . . . How can you say no child is left behind? / We're not dumb and we're not blind / They're all sitting in your cells / While you pave the road to hell . . . I can only imagine what the First Lady has to say/You've come a long way from whiskey [lord’s herbs (ganja)] and cocaine . . . Let me tell you 'bout hard work/Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away . . . I don't know nothing 'bout hard work . . .”
“ . . . I never was the fantasy of what you . . . wanted me to be / Don't judge me so harsh . . . I'll say it loud here by your grave / Those angels can't ever take my place . . . But when you tell ‘em my name / And you want to cross that bridge all on your own . . . You tell 'em my name / I got a few friends . . . Somewhere where the orchids grow / I can't find those church bells / That played when you died / Played Gloria / Talkin’ ‘bout Hosanna / Don't judge me so harsh . . .”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...y-1798601.html
‘The US today is . . . full of sodomy, he says. "Did you see [Colonel] Gaddafi [at the UN] complaining that American soldiers have been sodomising Arab boys? . . .”’
Last edited by HERO; 07-07-2013 at 03:44 AM.
SLE...does things by his books. right?
-
Dual type(as per tcaudilllg)
Enneagram 5 (wings either 4 or 6)?
I'm constantly looking to align the real with the ideal.I've been more oriented toward being overly idealistic by expecting the real to match the ideal. My thinking side is dominent. The result is that sometimes I can be overly impersonal or self-centered in my approach, not being understanding of others in the process and simply thinking "you should do this" or "everyone should follor this rule"..."regardless of how they feel or where they're coming from"which just isn't a good attitude to have. It is a way, though, to give oneself an artificial sense of self-justification. LSE
Best description of functions:
http://socionicsstudy.blogspot.com/2...functions.html
Squandered the liberal roots of the republican party by embracing ever more 'Christians' opening the door to an authoritarian socialist follow through.
Squandered the good financial management of the Clinton era.
Not in my quadra.
ENFJ
And now you may thank Obama (ENFP) and his British friends for destoying life in Libya, Syria, Egypt, lasting chaos in Iraq and Afganistan, neverending economy "crysis" in EU, many problems in ex-USSR and hell knows what will be next. We in Russia think, that next would be ex-USSR, Eastern Europe and China. All these mad Arabs after chaos, religious fanaticism and destroyed economy on their territory easily will take money for war against us, similarily as it was with Germany in 1930s-1940s.
But what makes for a "man of hate" like Obama? He hates private wealth, sustainable employment, the freedom to live without interference. He wants all things subordinated to his will.
Socionics -
the16types.info
All this is a lie. It is senseless academic nattering with no basis in the notion of rights, and wars are fought to secure our rights. Bush was foolish, but not psychologically driven to prove his masculinity to invading country.
Socionics -
the16types.info
Alternative hypothesis: there's some agent preying on weakness (Bush's mind, Obama's fear) to build a ring of instability or control between Russia and Africa. The PTBs want something there, as much as they want Russia to not have it. Oil transports?
He didn't squander anything - hundred years ago both parties underwent polarization, so people voting for Republican today actually vote for Democrats of old and vice versa. Democrats of old were the Christian party you talk about. Names changed.
"I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system." - George W. Bush
I'm sure it worked...
The OP was actually an interesting read. Well, I mean, what I read, which was like half of it. That post was long as shit!
Moonlight will fall
Winter will end
Harvest will come
Your heart will mend
The fatherland will save us all from the primordial mother. (Give that ho a slap across the cheeks)
PTB = powers that be. I had to look that up. :-)
Socionics -
the16types.info
The Ancient Romans, and I believe the Germans and Russians do actually use the term "Fatherland." The English and Americans say Motherland.
Socionics -
the16types.info
My job today is to expand everybody's vocabulary. Here is one, translate Pizdat from Russian to English!
Socionics -
the16types.info
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