Pot. Kettle. Saletan to Increase Self-Medication

AT SLATE TODAY, THE FAT LADY SANG WHEN William Saletan revealed his detailed personal history with psychotherapy in: Magical History Tour - Bush can't learn from the past if he can't see it. We'll pass over the obvious displacement mechanism in Saletan's "analysis" and go straight to his opening statement after he'd lay down on the couch.

"In press conferences, TV ads, and interviews this year, President Bush has manifested a series of psychopathologies: an abstract notion of reality, confidence unhinged from facts and circumstances, and a conception of credibility that requires no correspondence to the external world. Tonight, as he vowed to stay the course in Iraq, Bush demonstrated another mental defect: incomprehension of his role in history as a fallible human agent. Absent such comprehension, Bush can't fix his mistakes in Iraq because he can't see how -- or even that --he screwed up.

One of the most glaring elements of Saletan's confession is the obvious belief on the part of Mr. Saletan that geopolitical situations can be traced to the inner psyche of one man; that the war is the doing of one man; that nobody else has a hand in it; that it will leave when one man leaves.

Mr. Saletan clings to the obsession that, well, President Bush by himself all alone is creating the conditions for a terror war on the planet Earth, and that we are all at the mercy of this mania. There are a number of professional terms for this kind of obsessive-compulsive syndrome, but we'll fall back on the tried and true term: "Crazy."

Given the decades old terrorist body count that well predates President Bush's administration, given the 3,000 American bodies buried after 9/11, given the mass graves that continued to be uncovered, given the public beheading of Nicholas Berg, Mr. Salaten's views can only be seen, by any qualified psychotherapist, as "highly delusional" -- e.g. "crazy."

Indeed, if anything can be gleaned of use from Mr. Saletan's unhinged attempt to portray himself as a licensed therapist ( instead of the "political correspondent' that Slate states he is), it is that Mr. Saletan is suffering from a deep and recurring bout of intense and unremitting "Liberalosis." As such he is clearly a danger to himself and his country. His his friends and family should consider either an intervention or an institutionalization until his mania passes. We'd include his co-workers at Slate, but they are obviously too infected with the same disease to be of any help at all.

What is, you ask, "Liberalosis?"

It is a deadly disease that leads quickly to intellectual insanity and threatens millions of our fellow countrymen on a daily basis. Highly contagious, "liberalosis" can be contained and cured, but only through daily doses of reality. In the wake of the War in Iraq, daily doses of reality have been kept far away from the class most likely to contract, sustain and pass on Liberalosis. Hence, the disease, thought to be in remission after 9/11, is again on the verge of a major debilitating outbreak in the United States.

Items like Mr. Saletan's only remind us how intellectually insane the mere existence of President Bush can make the Typhoid Marys of this affliction.

For more detail on this disease, see the entry below (Republished from last December), and ask yourself what you can do, today, to put liberalosis into the same deep-freeze as Polio and Smallpox.

Posted by Vanderleun at May 25, 2004 12:40 PM