Fascinatingly Frightening...

...or frighteningly fascinating. I'm not sure which.

An article from John P Briggs, M.D. and JP Briggs II, Ph.D., father and son psychotherapists, on the mental state of President Bush on Truthout.org frankly scared the hell out of me. It's entitled "What Is He Capable Of? The Presidential Psychology at the End of Days" and it explains a lot. It puts the behavior we've all been watching since the beginning of his first term (hell, since the first election) into medical and psychological terms. It doesn't change anything but at least it helps us to understand what's going on in his head (hold the jokes) and the country's response to it. It also gives some interesting insight into the behavior of the Democratic controlled Congress when dealing (or not dealing) with Bush. In a way it's rather like reading the engineering analysis of the damage inflicted by the iceberg as you stand on the deck of the Titanic waiting for your feet to get wet.

I found the following passage interesting in relation to a blog entry I wrote a while back called "The Rise of The Three Brained Man":

"Polarizing tactics work because they provoke and rely on fear in those at the receiving end - fear of being wrong, fear of what the other guy will do, fear of uncertainty, fear of mistakes. Fear these things less and the tactics will work less. Such fears make us feel like children again. But we're adults. Binary, absolutist categories are always an inadequate description of the real world, which is, as Lincoln said, an "inseparable compound" of various polarities. As adults, we can think and speak about subtleties and complexities. If we do, fear will go down, not up. Most adults implicitly understand that the real world is, more often than not, nuanced, and an appeal to the truth of shades has its own strong power."

Fear and the response to it lies in the reptile brain. The ability to "think and speak about subtleties and complexities" sits squarely in the reasoning brain. Oh the things we are capable of when we use all the tools we were given.

I doubt the sanity of anyone that would actually WANT to be president, however, I think I'd like to see a psychological profile of each of the candidates from this point forward. Might be nice to know who has mommy & daddy issues BEFORE they take the oath.