Saddam "gun...more than a gun": "phallic equivalent of a scalp"

[DeepModem Mom]

New York Times:

WHITE HOUSE LETTER
The President and the Gun: To the Avenger Go the Spoils
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: June 21, 2004

...."It's now the property of the U.S. government," Mr. Bush said at a news conference this month in Savannah, Ga., when asked specifically about the pistol and whether he would return it to the people of Iraq. What the gun tells us about the president, the war and the relationship of the Bush family to Mr. Hussein is another story entirely. It is in many ways better, or at least more interesting, than the first.

The Iraqi dictator, after all, tried to assassinate Mr. Bush's father in 1993, when he was only a year out of the White House, as payback for the 1991 Persian Gulf war, which the first President Bush had waged on Mr. Hussein. In other words, the gun is more than a gun, at least according to the Freudians.

"It's the phallic equivalent of a scalp - I mean that quite seriously," said Stanley A. Renshon, a psychoanalyst and political scientist at the City University of New York who has just completed a book, to be published by Palgrave/Macmillan in September, called "In His Father's Shadow: The Transformations of George W. Bush."

In Mr. Renshon's view, Mr. Bush went to war for geo-strategic reasons, but there was a powerful personal element as well. In short, Mr. Hussein's gun is a trophy that symbolizes victories both military and psychic....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/21/politics/21letter.html

[leftchick]

1. just as I suspected...

the idiot in chief* is a sick fuck...

[susu369]

2. But Mrs. Saddam says Saddam not Saddam

see thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1823822

So the phony president may have a phony "phallic equivalent" - which I find hilarious!

GWB = The Potemkin Village Idiot

[sam sarrha]

3. they are going to let Saddam go and make him Dictator for life. to

spite us.. then they will chase us out, beheading and BBQ'ing and eating any stragglers.

[DeepModem Mom]

4. Also interesting about this Bumiller piece...

is that she includes this passage, and another: "'Whatever specific symbolism Bush may privately attach to this token, it does make it look to the external viewer that he sees this in very personal terms,' (Michael Sherry, a military historian at Northwestern) said. In the end, he said, 'I'm left feeling that it sounds kind of childish.'" Yet Bumiller manages to frame the issue in terms that cast Bush in a pretty favorable light:

"Mr. Bush keeps at least one other war-related token: the badge of George Howard, a Port Authority police officer who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001....In that context, Mr. Hussein's pistol is a bookend of sorts, the prize of a president who viewed the badge as reason for waging two wars. To the Delta Force that brought it back, the gun is a piece of history representing nothing less than mission complete."

[DeepModem Mom]

5. shameless kick, because I like Renshon's turn of phrase (n/t)