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May 30, 2003

PSYCHOBABBLE ALERT: OUR FRIENDS THE EGYPTIANS

The diagnoses proliferate. The insights are startling. The indispensable MEMRI quotes Anis Mansour, a renowned columnist, and psychodiagnostician for the Egyptian state sponsored Al-Ahram:
"President Bush should get treated by American psychiatrists. Not because he is crazy... President Bush the son is much more attached to his mother than to his father. So, we are faced with a case of Oedipus, who loved his mother and murdered his father. Bush the son enrolled in the same schools that his father attended. He worked in the same occupation as his father: buying and selling oil. He got closer to his mother when his sister died of cancer. When he was six years old, his mother heard him say to his friends: I cannot leave my mother in these conditions."

"His father used Saddam and then fought against him, [defeated him, and] kicked him out of Kuwait. The American forces were about to enter Baghdad, but Bush the father turned them back seventy kilometers. The son followed the same route and triumphed. He eliminated Saddam Hussein. He will succeed where his father failed and will be elected for a second term."

"Historical psychologists say that Bush the son pleased his mother, but not his father, who warned him against the war and the battle against terrorism. He asked him to be content with this amount of success, but the son repeated what his mother said: 'NO.'......"

Posted at 07:42 PM by

Comments

This sort of thing is probably best interpreted as a sign of the weakness of the deliverer and the strength of the target.

When you have hard facts available with which to impugn your opponent's morals, intelligence, or good sense, you use them. When you can make reasonable inferences about such things from publicly available evidence, you do it. This analysis-at-a-distance bit is reminiscent of the old lawyer's axiom: "When the facts are against you, pound the law; when the law is against you, pound the facts; when both are against you, pound the table."

No question that it can be irritating, though.

Posted by: Francis W. Porretto on May 30, 2003 08:38 PM