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Why Bush Loves Violence
By January 20, George W. Bush will have inflicted enough damage worldwide so he can retire to a quiet life of watching others scramble to clean up his mess. The missions he accomplished as president all bear the personal brand of his destructive streak: astronomic debt to China, horribly wounded veterans, a crippled health care system, and America’s damaged international reputation. And they will continue to be felt for years to come. What once started as cruelty to animals, siblings, and fraternity brothers has blossomed exponentially.
Bush’s life-long violent tendencies have been expressed both actively and passively. As a youth he enjoyed inflicting pain directly; as a first-term president he let surrogates do his bidding; and in his second term he passively turned his back in malign indifference to the suffering of others. His pathological sadism has never waned, though his efforts to hide it (from himself and others) have occasionally succeeded. He distracted us from his destructiveness by inviting us to express our own natural destructive impulses in the name of the good, specifically justifiable revenge against Osama bin Laden. And he really snookered his Christian supporters, inciting people who are fundamentally about love and forgiveness to openly practice hate towards their fellow (gay, pro-choice, non-Christian) man.
After 9/11, Bush discovered that Americans had handed over to him much of their sense of personal responsibility for thought and action. We were seduced into developing a thirst for revenge, in a war on terror that he originally called a crusade (until his aides told him to change terminology). Bush’s conscious fantasy about that crusade remains unwavering; what is unconscious is the fantasy that allows him to be willfully cruel, to dehumanize foreigners and the poor, whether they be soldiers or women and children. And he got us to go along with him.
Preemptive war preempted thought, giving us all permission vicariously to gratify our own sadistic impulses. Bush made it easy for all of us by removing the need to struggle with right and wrong. He just told us we were right to support him, and that we were doing what was best for ourselves, for our nation, and for God. But all the while he knows, at least unconsciously, how sadistic and destructive he is; otherwise he wouldn’t need a heavy regimen of daily prayer, or an allegedly dangerous foreign power to demonize. Love and compassion are actually dangerous to Bush because they would push him to re-assess his experience of being surrounded by hostile forces, which might interfere with the dehumanization necessary for him simply to enjoy his sadism. He has denied his own sadism to himself by expressing it in the guise of the good.
On January 20th, Bush will smirk once more, this time in relief that he made it through without having been stopped or caught. As he prepares to leave office, and surveys the wreckage of the peace and prosperity he began destroying eight years ago, Bush consciously sees only what he defensively regards as the collateral damage of his crusades to save the nation and the world. But if we could listen to his unconscious, between satisfied chortles over forcing the Obama family to make its own hotel arrangements and the last-minute arrival of cake plates worthy of Marie Antoinette, we’d hear him say to himself what his father was regrettably—and for the rest of the world, tragically—never around or willing to say: “Heck of a job, Bushie.”
Read More Farewell Chronicles:
Part I: 20 Forgotten Bush Scandals
Part II: Son of Nixon
Part III: I Survived the Bush Presidency
Justin A. Frank is a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.







jaclynde
The best point in this article is when it mentions how he knows he'll never be really punished for what he's done...even though he's done many things that could be considered war-crimes.
I think that the movie Frost Nixon is really relevant this year because someone should seriously make Bush sit through a 20 hour interview. We need (needed) to be tougher on him, because he is not untouchable.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
jaguarxjs
Let us not forget that he is also a Christian Fundamentalist that believes he is living during the 'end times' . For him and his deluded ilk war in the Middle East, economic collapse and natural disasters are all merely portents of the coming of their mythical savior, so why should they care or try and make things better?
If we lowly humans can fix our own problems then Dubyah and his fundies would be irrelevant, best not to fix it and just say 'God works in mysterious ways'.
estcruzer
It seems to me that if we knew this about Bush prior to the 2000 election we might have avoided much of the pain and suffering of the last 8 years. Maybe all politicians should have a certified psychoanalysis publicly viewable prior to any election voting. Certainly before we give a gun to someone we need to have some idea what direction they are going to shoot.
wiseguy77
Much of this was apparant to anyone with an eye for behaviour. His mockery as he sent a woman to her death while governor, his Blutto strut, and his disregard for the meaning of words - words were whatever he wanted them to be. This excellent analysis explains a great deal about Bush, but what does it say about those Americans who voted twice for this towel snapping, incorrigable bully? He water-boarded a country - and that was some accomplishment.
Samalabear
Click on the book link and it will take you to Amazon. I read the first review by A Customer, written in 2004, a 56-year-old lifelong Republican, as she describes herself, and she talks about this book and why she did not vote for Bush. It's a shame more people did not see the interviews she apparently saw before Bush was elected the first time. Chilling, positively chilling. She talks about her account of seeing Moore's Farenheit 9/11 and that, too, is fascinating.
My own reason for not voting for Bush was something gut instinct. I didn't know anything about him, but there was something about him and it was very unlikeable and, yes, scary.
estcruzer
Would it be possible to do a public psychoanalysis of Jeb Bush, prior to his bid for the presidency?
pumpkinshirt
from a previous post:
"Let us not forget that he is also a Christian Fundamentalist that believes he is living during the 'end times' . For him and his deluded ilk war in the Middle East, economic collapse and natural disasters are all merely portents of the coming of their mythical savior, so why should they care or try and make things better?"
The merits of the article aside, this little chestnut has become the liberal equivalent of the old conservative insistence that every environmental program is really just a Trojan horse for socialistic big government....that is, it's an easy, simplistic, (and in the case of the majority of those who style themselves as conservative Christians) factually incorrect little thought-package that lets someone act superior and knowing and dismiss anything the other side has to say.
Even if there are people who believe this (and, of course, there are, I'm not denying that), Bush probably isn't one of them. The idea that he's a Fundamentalist shows either a confusion between political pandering and belief or an ill-informed worldview in which all conservatives who are also Christian must be "fundamentalists."
Cognomen
Whenever I got skeptical and thought the author was going a bit far with his speculation I remembered the fact of Bush, as he left the G8 summit in Japan, punching the air, smiling and declaring "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
baptox
Dr. Frank's psychoanalytic speculation about Bush's childhood behavior and experiences and how they correlate to his adult character are so weak and ridiculous that they are laughable.
His explanation on how the public was "seduced" into supporting Bush and his policies is outright hogwash. Frank conveniently ignores the fact that a lot of us were not only not seduced, but repelled by this moron and worked hard to keep him and his like from getting elected.
Bush was, is and always will be a jerk. Yet he's a jerk who, along with his Rovian Republican machine, knew how to inspire a lot of Americans to vote for him by appealing to the basest human emotion, namely fear. Those Americans who voted for him and his cadre of know-nothing Republican automatons, are responsible for the mess in which this country finds it's self.
Anyone who couldn't see this selfish, petty, intellectually stunted, bully-boy/alcoholic snothead for what he was needs their own psychoanalysis. It is we the people who are ultimately responsible.
cajola
Bush is in a state of denial, he just does not see that he has done anything wrong....and he has inflicted his messed up logic on us all for the past 8 years.
Thank God we only have a few more days to endure his presence and what a legacy he is taking with him...not one to proud of that's for sure!
penscott
What arrant quackery! Does Justin Frank not understand that it is unethical to publish a psychological evaluation of someone he has never had the opportunity to meet and spend extensive time with?
Darsan54
Man, Mr. Frank doesn't pull any punches and his comments make a lot of sense. I have always thought there was something
disturbingly off about George. And yet, the American people were convinced after the first term to give him another shot. That says something about our lack of emotional health.
lenhart
Bush is just batshit crazy. The world would have benefited if Bush had been less rich. The rich can get away with being batshit crazy. Everyone else MUST face the consequences of idiocy, psychopathic behavior or even overt criminality. Bush is all three ---an idiot, a psychopath, a war criminal. The GOP is largely to blame. This is party that has put forward and adored Reagan, Bush Sr (another psychopath) and Bush Jr since 1980. The cold, hard stats from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Dept of Commerce-BEA all paint a picture of UTTER ECONOMIC FAILURE because of the policies of these three psychopathic personalities.
Visualmyth
Having just watched the last press conference of a president I didn't vote for, I was unsurprised by his verbal dodges and inability to see beyond himself in all of his comments. What bothers me in a more fundamental way is the sign behind him. It reads, " The White House - Washington" . This was changed by the Bush Administration from the original and acurate location," Washington DC" . A seemingly small point, but in light of Dr. Frank's observations, perhaps the American people should be suspicious of an administration whose grasp on reality does not even allow them to properly locate themselves on the planet. My question is how does the good doctor evaluate our next president, based on the same criteria, youthful experiences, emotional maturity, an intellectual grasp on reality devoid of self references. I hope that President Obama changes that sign, perhaps then Columbia, female and poetic, will represent a true demarcation point from a period of delusion, self and shared by the nation as a whole. A pity that none of the complacent reporters asked him about his signing statements, where he ran amouk and caused the most damage.
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