All Hail King Bush!
Other people seem to be noticing the the Conservative agenda has indeed turned back the clock in many ways. The 21st Century is beginning to look an awful lot more like the unilateralist 18th than the multilateralist 20th. The US was born during the fading days of the ancien regime, when emerging democratic movements within the maturing Nation States sought to restrain the unbridled power and unchecked urges of their Leaders. To that end, the US federal system was constructed to constrain the war-making powers of the President… there was no way General Washington could easily transition from President Washington to King Washington. But what are we now witnessing?
The biggest scandal in constitutional law: the gradual disappearance of the congressional Declaration of War. Has there ever been a war more suited to a formal declaration�started more deliberately, more publicly, with less urgency and at more leisure�than the U.S. war on Iraq? … Bush is asserting the right of the United States to attack any country that may be a threat to it in five years. And the right of the United States to evaluate that risk and respond in its sole discretion. And the right of the president to make that decision on behalf of the United States in his sole discretion. In short, the president can start a war against anyone at any time, and no one has the right to stop him. And presumably other nations and future presidents have that same right. All formal constraints on war-making are officially defunct … In terms of the power he now claims, without significant challenge, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world. He claims to see the future as clearly as the past.
And speaking of Leaders, power, and urges…
President Bush announced the attack in a four-minute television speech to the nation. “On my order, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war,” he said. “These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.”
Minutes before the speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. “Feels good,” he said.
I’ve earlier noted how common adjusted sociopaths are in positions of authority? One staggeringly universal developmental pathology of sociopaths is that during childhood or adolescence (when they are not strong enough to torture other people), they apprentice with an unusual degree of animal torture. What was George Bush’s childhood like? How does he feel about killing?
As a kid [he] put firecrackers in frogs and threw them into the air to watch them explode. He cracked himself up in an interview with Talk magazine by mocking a woman on death row whose cries for mercy he scorned, screwing up his face and saying, “Please don’t kill me!” in an impersonation of the deceased.
He presided over more executions as governor of Texas than any governor since capital punishment was legalized. His own people said he never spent more than 15 minutes deliberating over whether to sign the order to kill. This included at least one case in which the public defender slept during the trial, and many other cases in which the court-appointed lawyers obviously just took the money and ran, leaving their clients to the mercy of a vicious and corrupt system.
This is a man who enjoys killing. He is totally in his element when it comes to killing. Everyone is different. This is the way he is.
Speaking of pathology of sociopaths…
Amnesty International: 1 in 4 Irish are Mentall Ill
“Although one in four Irish people are affected by mental ill health, and although Ireland has ratified a UN covenant recognising ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of… mental health,’ the state of mental health care in Ireland today is shameful,’ said Sean Love, Director of Amnesty International’s Irish Section.
Actually, I think the statistics generally accepted are that one in four people everywhere are considered to experience some form of mental illness during their lifetime, not just the Irish.
There was a comedian a few years back who even quoted this in her routine. “Think of your three best friends. If they’re ok, than it’s you.”
Good point! What percentage of mental illness does Rogewr consider normative within a societal group?
Perspectives on infant mental health from Israel: The case of changes in collective sleeping on the kibbutz
http://psy.hevra.haifa.ac.il/~childdev/perspectives_on_infant_mental_he.htm
Collective sleeping of infants and young children on the Israeli kibbutz, which involved separations between young children and their parents at bed time as well as unavailability of parents during the night, has been in practice for many decades until the recent past. Collective sleeping departed markedly from sleeping arrangements common in most cultures and violated well-accepted child rearing norms. This paper reviews research that points to collective sleeping of infants and young children as a risk factor in terms of the security of their attachments to their mothers and the intergenerational transmission of attachment. The broader infant mental health implications of the communal sleeping “story” are discussed, with a special emphasis on cultural “blind spots” regarding practices concerning infants, the central place of attachment-related protection and survival themes in the recent abandonment of collective sleeping, and implications for research.