Crazy Is As Crazy Does

From News for Real

One Flew Over the .... White House?

The time has come to ask the question:

Can it be that our president is not just wrong, not just stubborn, not just acting on sinister but purposeful motives, but mad as a hatter – in the clinical sense? Is the President of the United States of America, mentally ill?

Ever since Bush's speech Wednesday night I've listened carefully as media analysts and members Congress try to make sense out of what Bush proposed. For Congress the effort comes about four years late. But rather than being relieved to hear them finally asking tough questions, I was left scratching my head. It occurred to me everyone was trying to make sense out something that was demonstrably “sense-less.” Not senseless in just the policy, strategic or moral sense, but senseless as in “insane.” (Hell, Bush not only was saying crazy things Wednesday night, but he even "looked" crazy.)

That thought left me wondering if maybe I was the one that was insane. I mean the implications of that, if true, were terrifying. After all, it's one thing to have guy in the Oval Office who's a crook -- we've been there, done that, and survived. But it's quite another matter to have a certifiable lunatic in that position at a time of war. (Just ask the Germans.)

To find out if there could possibly be a shred of proof for my suspicions I turned off the TV and went online and spent the day searching through the latest psychology papers and texts.

Terms like "crazy" and "insane" are not only loaded, but imprecise. The first thing I needed to do was to narrow it down to a particular, clinically defined, pathology. It turned out that was not an easy matter, because Bush seems to have claims on more than one piece of crazyland real estate. The best I could do was narrow it down to a few leading candidates.

Read the rest of it, including all the gnarly clinical symptoms, here.