NY MAG >> The Loneliest President - What’s going on in George Bush’s mind? >>>

Stephanie

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Tue Jan-30-07 12:50 AM
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NY MAG >> The Loneliest President - What’s going on in George Bush’s mind? >>>

Edited on Tue Jan-30-07 01:00 AM by Stephanie

Many interesting diagnoses as to the state of Poor George's psyche. Some excerpts >

http://nymag.com/news/politics/Bush/26993/index.html

The Man With No Shadow
By Robert Stone, author of Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

I think Bush has come to believe he’s on a lonely, noble mission—doing the right thing in spite of the ravings and denunciation by pygmies—and that to some degree he thinks people outside the Oval Office have to be lied to. But he is very mysterious—he doesn’t reveal much in the way of personal qualities. There’s an actor quality to what he does; he’s not very good at it. It’s as though somebody gave him a “nice young man” lesson.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/Bush/26993/index1.html

Dad, the Bottle, Vietnam
By Jonathan Alter, Newsweek columnist

I see Bush’s behavior as the result of three major forces: the dad, the bottle, and the Vietnam War. For most of his life, Bush tried and failed to follow in his absent father’s footsteps. His father was a war hero; Bush a no-show Guardsman dodging Vietnam. His father did well in the oil business; Bush struck dry holes. His father got elected to Congress; Bush was defeated in 1978. A collection of Bush Sr.’s letters contains far more to Jeb than George W. Finally, in 1994, Bush was elected governor of Texas, but George and Bar were so upset that their anointed son, Jeb, lost the election that night for the governorship of Florida that they barely seemed to notice. You don’t have to be Freud to see that Bush has snubbed his father’s closest advisers (who turned out to be right) and hired men who held his father in contempt, like Don Rumsfeld (who turned out to be wrong). It was no big surprise that he rejected the Baker-Hamilton report. As with many former substance abusers, he became fanatically disciplined—maybe the most disciplined man to hold the office. But with discipline came rigidity. Former drunks sometimes fear that if they change their lives too abruptly after straightening out, they’ll pull a thread on their recovery and sink back into chaos. They never admit their helplessness, so when they succeed in staying sober anyway, it helps their confidence. It’s a reflection of their will to stay the course. This is too simple an explanation for Bush’s failures as president, but it helps illuminate his mind-set. Finally, Bush is a baby-boomer, but with a twist. He was rebelling against the reigning liberal orthodoxy of the sixties. He and other Vietnam War hawks believe that we lost simply because we quit. To give in to the Establishment view of his father and the Democrats now would be to repudiate his whole political sense of self. One thing has changed: Now he meets the families of the dead. It has wiped the smirk off his face—but it’s actually reinforced his determination that they must not die in vain.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/Bush/26993/index10.html

His Smile
By Deepak Chopra, president, Alliance for a New Humanity

One of the most unnerving things about George Bush is his smile. As the situation in Iraq has grown more calamitous, the smile hasn’t disappeared. It’s become markedly patronizing, saying, “I’m right on this. The rest of you just don’t understand.” A pitying smile. On the night of the State of the Union, the president kept his smirking to a minimum—a surprise. It’s been pointed out that until he became president, Bush didn’t smirk. It’s grown into a disturbing tic, expressing a mixture of contradictory traits: smugness, disdain, self-consciousness, doubt. It’s not the easiest smirk to read. People who read contempt in it are rightfully offended. They think of Bush’s most unpleasant attribute: his sense of entitlement. Having accomplished little in his life, he nevertheless expected the highest rewards. He wanted victory to come easily, as his birthright. When it did come in 2000—to the astonishment even of his family—the smirk said, “I told you so.” His smile turns into a go-to-hell smirk whenever Bush hears a hostile question. He’s shielding himself from impudence while reining in his own simmering anger. He’s smirking to put you on warning. In a moment he might blow his top. Bush’s smile also tells us, almost guilelessly, that he isn’t suffering inside. This fact maddens his critics the most. Lincoln suffered terribly during the Civil War, as Churchill did in World War II. Bush has to remind himself to put on a sad face when he talks about his war. The black dog, as Churchill called his depression, doesn’t nip at this president’s heels. Have we seen a more inappropriate smile from any politician since Nixon? I doubt it.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/Bush/26993/index12.html
The Vessel
By Gary Hart, Wirth Chair Professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and former U.S. senator

I think Bush didn’t have a view of America’s role in the world until after 9/11, and then it was provided to him by those around him in power. They had two big ideas: One was to depose Saddam and use Iraq as a base to pacify, in an imperial way, the Middle East, and to control its oil. The second big idea, carried over by the vice-president and the secretary of Defense, was that of the unitary presidency. It also fits in with a kind of messianic belief on the part of the president that he did have a great purpose in life even though he had up until that time not discovered that, and his great purpose was to destroy international terrorism and overthrow dictators and spread democracy.

http://nymag.com/news/politics/Bush/26993/index14.html

A Decadent Aristocrat
By Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Bush, like his mother, has an almost inhuman ability to identify his own advantage without the slightest regard to its cost to others. One reads in Lincoln’s diaries of how his heart bled for every soldier who died in the war he felt obliged to wage; one reads in Bush’s face and in his speeches an inability to conceive of other people as fully human, including the soldiers who die at his behest, a quality that renders him less than fully human himself. This heartlessness, unlike his achievement of the presidency, is the very hallmark of decadent aristocracy. It is worth noting, however, that most aristocracy is not so far decayed; the queen of England, despite her less cuddly manner, is clearly more compassionate than W. But in the great popularity contest of electoral politics, he has been a winner, and in his mind he is one still. With a few nods to the disagreeable fact of the Democratic Congress, he continued, in the State of the Union, to declare the truth rather than to reflect it, narcissistically unable to grasp that he is not the world.

More >

http://nymag.com/news/politics/Bush/26993/index14.html