Day: December 1, 2006

Research: Bush Worship Is an Indicator of Psychosis

Jon Ponder

A researcher in Connecticut has produced evidence that there is a link between strong support for Pres. Bush and psychosis. The study is not a joke, and the researcher, Christopher Lohse, describes himself as a “Reagan revolution fanatic.”

The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.

The study was produced as part of Lohse’s master’s degree research at Southern Connecticut State University:

The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study … found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush…

“Our study shows that psychotic patients prefer an authoritative leader,” Lohse says. “If your world is very mixed up, there’s something very comforting about someone telling you, ‘This is how it’s going to be.’”

And:

“Bush supporters had significantly less knowledge about current issues, government and politics than those who supported Kerry,” the study says.

Lohse says the trend isn’t unique to Bush: A 1977 study by Frumkin & Ibrahim found psychiatric patients preferred Nixon over McGovern in the 1972 election.

My personal experience listening to callers to C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” every morning on the “support Bush” line strongly confirms these findings.

Time for Bush to Stop Holding Our Breath and Turning Us Blue

Trish

So far, the Bush administration policy of freezing out governments who disagree with it and “enemy-izing” them is — who would have thought — not working. With North Korea and Iran, it’s taken us closer to nuclear annihilation. It’s made formerly friendly Central and South America defy us. European allies who thought that maybe the U.N. inspectors could be right about Saddam not having weapons of mass destruction have been turned into alienated exes.

The Baker/Hamilton Iraq Study Group is expected to suggest we commit to pulling troops out of Iraq. It will also say we need to stop acting like four-year-olds using the silent treatment on playmates who didn’t share their ice cream cones.

James P. Pinkerton in the Dallas Morning News says the Baker Commission will be right.

Back in the good ol’ days before that spoiled child who is our president took over, talking to people used to work.

[Baker] started the controversy in October: “I believe in talking to your enemies. I don’t think you restrict your conversations to your friends.” Then, anticipating his critics, he added: “In my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”

…Baker was doing his best to clear a path toward negotiating with players in the Middle East – most notably Syria and Iran – without those negotiations being tagged with the scarlet letter “A,” for appeasement.

It didn’t work. On Monday, the hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial page sounded the alarm [and] worried that Baker and the “foreign policy establishment” might pressure Bush to “appease” Syria.

But there’s no good alternative to diplomacy, Pinkerton says. […]

On This Date – December 1

Jon Ponder
  • 2005 – Poll ranks Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif) as the fifth most unpopular governor. [Pensito Review]
  • 1986 – Lt. Colonel Oliver North pleads the 5th Amendment before a Senate panel investigating the Iran-Contra arms sale. [Xoom.it]
  • 1976 – In Florida, Willard Allen was released from a mental hospital 26 years after he was ordered by a judge to be held there for having sex with another man. His doctors had been recommending his release for almost 20 years. [365Gay]
  • 1899 – Birth of Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society [Xoom.it]
  • 1824 – The election to succeed Pres. James Monroe was thrown to the House of Representatives on December 1, 1824. Per instruction in the 12th Amendment, when none of the four leading candidates received over 50 percent of the vote the House took a vote. John Quincy Adams, whose father was president after Washington, eventually defeated Gen. Andrew Jackson, Sec. of War John C. Calhoun, and Sec. of the Treasury William H. Crawford. [History Channel]

Poll: Only 14% Agree with Bush That Iraq Conflict Is Not a Civil War

Jon Ponder

After months of polls that show around 30 percent of Americans — let’s call them “Dead-Enders” — approve of or agree with the president, there is a new poll out that indicates that no more than 14 percent of Americans believe that the crisis the president and his team have created in Iraq is not a civil war. And the poll is from no less a conservative bastion than the Wall Street Journal:

Sixty-eight percent of U.S. adults said they believe there is a civil war in Iraq, the online poll from Nov. 13 to Nov. 20 found, compared with 14 percent who disagree and 18 percent who aren’t sure…

About half of those polled would like the government to set a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq, while 18% favor withdrawing all U.S. troops now and 19% favor sending more troops to stabilize the situation.

The 18 percent who aren’t sure whether it’s a civil war are a bit scary but maybe they’ll see reality soon too.

Now Even Mona Charon Hates America

Jon Ponder
“I think [Pres. Bush] is failing. I think he is confusing stubbornness for strength.”
— Mona Charon

On Tuesday, we reported that one of the rightwing’s most reliable idealogues, Rich Lowry, had written a column in which he criticized Pres. Bush.

This was notable because just a few months ago conservatives like Lowry were telling us that criticizing the president equalled hating America.

This morning on C-SPAN, Mona Charon — the brunette Ann Coulter and the author of “Useful Idiots,” which is apparently a screed about liberals — joined the hate-America-first crowd.

About Pres. Bush she said, “I think he is failing. I think he is confusing stubbornness for strength.”

Of course, Charon spent the rest of her half hour interview trotting out the rightwing’s list of excuses for the failure of the war in Iraq — that it was the media’s fault, the Democrats’ fault, the CIA’s fault, etc.

But it is interesting that Pres. Bush has lost the support of cheerleaders in the rightwing chattering class like Charon and Lowry. If they go, so will a good chunk of what’s left of the 33 percent of Americans who still think he’s doing a heckuva job.

Froomkin: Mainstream Media Is Verging on Irrelevance

Jon Ponder
The Washington press corps have become the highest paid and most elaborately be-wigged courtiers since the reign of Louis XIV.

Flock of hair-dos: Dan Froomkin writes the often-controversial “White House Briefing” column in the online edition of the Washington Post. He has an article up today at Watchdog Blog in which he proposes that the Old Media journalists may be close to losing their relevance, primarily because they steadfastly refuse to call bullshit when they hear it:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.

What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.

Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

What strikes me is that these same expensively coiffed Kool Kids in the Capitol were all too eager to call bushwa on Pres. Clinton but have treated George W. Bush with kids gloves from the getgo — even prior to the 9/11 attacks.

Why the change in dynamics? My theory about this is that the journalists in D.C. looked down on Bill Clinton because a) he was a hick from Arkansas (Rhodes Scholar, pish-pish!) and b) they made four times as much money as he did even on his salary as president. Conversely, this same group sees the Bushes, whose family fortune is in the millions, as aristocrats — literally as their “betters” — and so treat them with deference.

This makes the Washington press corps the highest paid and most elaborately be-wigged courtiers since the reign of Louis XIV.

But Froomkin’s central point is key: Until the midterm elections last month, these journalists stood as the last bastion for democracy against a six year onslaught by Republicans to convert America from a republic to a corporatist oligarchy. Generally, they have been derelict in their duty. The Democrats won back the Congress despite the so-called liberal media. It is telling that within days after the voting the cable newsers were ignoring the infighting and disarray among Republicans and focusing instead on Speaker-to-Be Nancy Pelosi’s clothes and botox treatments.

If the United States survives the Bush era, it won’t be because the media stopped the GOP from systematically shredding the Constitution but because the Republicans’ incompetence at (or lack of interest in) governing caused them to fail.