Monday, August 22, 2005

Is W channeling Nixon?

Although I don't hold the mental health community in particularly high regard, this strikes me as more or less credible. That said, I'm not nearly as worried about Bush's temper as I am about his fundamental priorities...

Is Bush Out of Control?
By DOUG THOMPSON
Aug 15, 2005, 05:46
The Rant - From Capitol Hill Blue

Buy beleaguered, overworked White House aides enough drinks and they tell a sordid tale of an administration under siege, beset by bitter staff infighting and led by a man whose mood swings suggest paranoia bordering on schizophrenia.

They describe a President whose public persona masks an angry, obscenity-spouting man who berates staff, unleashes tirades against those who disagree with him and ends meetings in the Oval Office with “get out of here!”

In fact, George W. Bush’s mood swings have become so drastic that White House emails often contain “weather reports” to warn of the President’s demeanor. “Calm seas” means Bush is calm while “tornado alert” is a warning that he is pissed at the world.

Decreasing job approval ratings and increased criticism within his own party drives the President’s paranoia even higher. Bush, in a meeting with senior advisors, called Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist a “god-damned traitor” for opposing him on stem-cell research.

“There’s real concern in the West Wing that the President is losing it,” a high-level aide told me recently.

A year ago, this web site discovered the White House physician prescribed anti-depressants for Bush. The news came after revelations that the President’s wide mood swings led some administration staffers to doubt his sanity.

Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.

“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”

Dr. Frank’s conclusions have been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.

As a recovering alcoholic (sober 11 years, two months, nine days), I know all too well the symptoms that Dr. Frank describes and, after watching Bush for the past several years, I have to, unfortunately, agree with him.

Conversations over the last few weeks with longtime friends who work in the Bush White House confirm even more what Dr. Frank says and others have suggested.

The President of the United States is out of control. How long can the ship of state continue to sail with a madman at the helm?

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

The BIG risk in Global Warming isn't what you think

It's not just a gradually rising ocean and changing temperature and precipitation patterns, it's a wholesale unhinging of the climate as we know it...

"During the last million years or so, glacial periods and interglacials have alternated as a result of variations in the Earth’s orbital parameters. Based on Antarctic ice cores, more detailed information is available now about the four full glacial cycles during the last 500,000 years. In recent years it was discovered that during the last glacial period large and very rapid temperature variations took place over large parts of the globe, in particular in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. These abrupt events saw temperature changes of many degrees within a human lifetime. In contrast, the last 10,000 years appear to have been relatively more stable... "

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/042.htm

The risk of reaching an heretofore unknown tipping point in the climate is quite real and very dangerous. You've been warned.