George Bush’s Mental Illness
Sanity occurs when the mind is in touch with reality. Insanity is a state where the mind is out of touch with reality.
It is generally accepted that when a person sees things that aren’t there or talks to people who aren’t there that he/she is suffering from some form of mental illness that includes delusions and/or psychosis.
People make exceptions when it comes to religion, however.
In the world of religion, it is perfectly acceptable to hold beliefs that cannot be supported with evidence, to hear the voices of higher beings, and to talk to Gods that nobody can see or engage in conversations that nobody else can witness.
Tonight CBS’s 60 Minutes aired an interview with Bob Woodward, who has just published a book, Plan of Attack, which he describes as “the first detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how and why the president decided to wage war in Iraq.”
Woodward described Bush’s actions after he gave the order to go to war. Woodward also wondered whose advice Bush had sought making his decision.
Having given the order, the president walked alone around the circle behind the White House. Months later, he told Woodward: “As I walked around the circle, I prayed that our troops be safe, be protected by the almighty. Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I be as good a messenger of his will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for
forgiveness.”Did Mr. Bush ask his father for any advice? “I asked the president about this. And President Bush said, ‘Well no,’ and then he got defensive about it,?? says Woodward. “And then he said something that really struck me. He said of his father, ‘He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength.’ And then he said, ‘There’s a higher father that I appeal to.’”
Beyond not asking his father about going to war, Woodward was startled to learn that the president did not ask key cabinet members either.
If so many people on the face of this planet did not suffer from similar delusions, we could call his condition what it is: mental illness, delusion, psychosis.
Bush is delusional and irrational. His mental illness has already caused thousands of deaths. How many more will have to die?
Just because a delusions is shared by huge numbers of people does not mean that it is not a delusion. A delusion exists when beliefs cannot be reconciled with reality. Reality is the only measure of who is sane and who is insane. Sanity has nothing to do with the number of people who share a particular belief.
UPDATE 4/19/2004: This MSNBC/Newsweek article gives some more details about Bush’s thoughts about the war on Iraq. As quoted above, Bush said he did not want to “justify a war based upon God”, but he also wanted to ” be as good a messenger of his will as possible.” If you’re claiming to be as good a messenger of his will as possible, then you are claiming that you are doing God’s will. Bush wants to have it both ways.
In his interview with Woodward, conducted over two days in December of last year, Bush displayed no second thoughts about Iraq’s postwar miseries or the failure to turn up any WMD. “I haven’t suffered doubt,” he told Woodward. When the author—quoting Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove—suggested that “all history gets measured by outcomes,” Bush “smiled,” reports Woodward. ” ‘History,’ he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms out and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. ‘We won’t know. We’ll all be dead’.”
Most Christians believe that they will have to stand before God after they die and face the consequences of their actions. But here Bush indicates that the history of his actions will be unkown to him after death and therefore it’s not something he needs to worry about.
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May 5th, 2004 at 8:30 am
ah, but if he thinks that it will be unknown to him it can only be because he willingly avoided it; which would probably indicate he knew it would be negative; ergo there’s no reason to think he’s not still going to hell all the same.
August 14th, 2004 at 10:30 am
Remember the Maine! And the Other Ships Sunk To Start a War
by Bill Sardi
February 15, 1898: “Remember the Maine.” Mysterious explosion rocks the battleship MAINE in Havana Harbor, Cuba. 266 men were killed. Initally it was believed a torpedo or mine caused the explosion. On April 25, 1898 the US declared war on Spain. A 1976 investigation found that the Maine was sunk due to a self-inflicted blast, probably as a result of coal bunker fire on board.
May 7, 1915: The British steamship Lusitania was sunk by a German torpedo on the high seas of the Atlantic Ocean. 100 Americans lost their lives. The result was the the US was brought into WWI. It was not revealed at the time that the Lusitania, a passenger boat, was carrying arms.
December 7, 1941: How was President Roosevelt going to convince the American public to enter into war with the Japanese when they were wrapping up their war in Europe? Japanese bombers, launched from aircraft carriers, bombed Pearl Harbor and sunk the US Pacific Fleet. Over 2000 died. The US knew of the threat of war and had intercepted the “East-Wind Rain” secret code of the Japanese Pacific fleet. Japan had closed all its embassies in the Pacific rim the week prior to Pearl Harbor, which is an overt sign of war. The US aircraft carriers had been removed from Pearl Harbor days before the bombing.
Admiral Kimmell in Hawaii was intentionally kept in the dark that the Japanese fleet was nearby. President Roosevelt appeared before Congress, declared Pearl Harbor a “day in infamy,” and the rest is history.
August 5, 1964: President Johnson orders the US to take retaliatory action against Vietnam after “renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf on Tonkin” (Vietnam). There were no new attacks against American ships.
The news media reported a lie, leading over 50,000 Americans to their death and millions of casualties.
October 12, 2000: USS COLE, an American destroyer, docking in Yemen to re-fuel, was approached by a small docking vessel that carried a bomb. 18 sailors are believed dead and 35 others were wounded. The bombing occurs on the eve of the Presidential debates, and as rumors that Iraq is moving troops in the Middle East, as well as riots in Jerusalem. Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel, says during television interview that the same people who conducted terrorism in Jerusalem bombed the USS Cole.
Don’t be duped into going to war solely over reports of bombings of US Navy boats in far off lands where we the facts of the event are completely controlled by one source, the government. Remember the Maine!
October 16, 2000
Former German Defense Minister Confirms CIA Involvement in 9/11: Alex Jones Interviews Andreas Von Buelow
http://www.prisonplanet.com/021104vonbuelow.html
Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
By TERESA HAMPTON
Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
Jul 28, 2004, 08:09
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4921.shtml
HITLER- THE CREATION
http://www.whale.to/b/hitler.html
http://www.nazis.net/shadowoftheswastika2.htm
How The Bush Family Made Its
Fortune From The Nazis
The Dutch Connection
By Attorney John Loftus
©. 2000-2002 John Loftus 7-2-2
http://www.tetrahedron.org/articles/new_world_order/bush_nazis.html
THE RISE OF THE FOURTH REICH
Part I
THE BUSH FAMILY OLIGARCHY
Funding the Hitler Project
http://watch.pair.com/reich.html
Understanding 9/11:
Incompetence, Blowback, Perle Harbor or Reichstag Fire?
http://www.oilempire.us/understanding.html
ISRAEL’S SECRET WAR AGAINST AMERICA
http://www.liesexposed.net/nfp/issue0207/secwar.htm
FOR OIL AND EMPIRE: WAS 911 ALLOWED TO HAPPEN?
http://www.rense.com/general56/allowed.htm
RFID GETS SKIN DEEP ALTERNATIVE
http://www.rense.com/general56/skindeep.htm
ASPARTAME,ANTI-DEPRESSANTS AND BUSH
http://www.rense.com/general56/dewf.htm
US BIOLOGICAL ATTACKS ON US CITIZENS
http://www.rense.com/general56/biolog.htm
US MILITARY WANTED TO PROVOKE WAR WITH CUBA IN 1962
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html
THE LONE GUNMEN’S “PILOT” EPISODE
http://home.earthlink.net/~killtown/lonegunmen.html
WTC # 7 “PULLED” BY SILVERSTEIN, FDNY
http://rense.com/general47/pulled.htm
DANGEROUS RADIATION
http://www.rense.com/general56/rad.htm
ALL 911 AIRPORTS SERVICED BY SAME SECURITY COMPANY
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ICTS.html
Bin Laden’s Brother-in-law Had Close Ties to Bush
by Tom Flocco *
AmericanFreePress.net * And Scoop.co.nz
August 28, 2002
Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, an Osama bin Laden benefactor, has laundered money into tax-exempt U.S. entities for years as a foreign financier of terrorism. But a new 9/11 lawsuit is thrusting Mahfouz’s latent past business links to George W. Bush back into the spotlight and raising important questions about links between Saudi finance and terrorism in America.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0208/S00148.htm
http://www.infowars.com
http://www.prisonplanet.com
October 23rd, 2004 at 8:13 pm
IF THERE IS A GOD..HELPPPPPPPPPP
October 24th, 2004 at 9:06 pm
I am one of the millions that you attack by claiming that religion is synonymous with mental illness. I am not pro-Bush by any stretch of the imagination and I believe he is fairly insane, so please don’t lump me in with his international disaster. If you are going to try to read this- go grab a cappuccino or a soy latte or whatever…
Consider how easily the masses (ourselves included, mind you) are swayed by single anecdotes, let alone sketchy and downright erroneous information- we need only to look at the peak approval ratings that Bush received (albeit via Fox news) post-9/11 to see that. Every single person in this world relies on a certain amount of faith- it is a psychological fact that our brain keeps us sane by filling in the gaps/ignoring the details/changing the details to fit our schema. While we are blaming the leader of the free world for doing this on an all-too-regular basis, we all are doing the same exact thing every minute of our existence. Now, we all are scientists to some degree, and we rely on the facts that we DO have to piece together a coherent story, and Bush does seem to lack quite a bit of that, but to take that to the next level and claim that it is his faith which is either the cause or the means by which his reasoning is faulty is just wrong. In addition, to say that faith at all, which every one of us rely on to some extent, is an illness, would be to say that all of us are “ill”. Maybe the beastie boys would think that was cool, but I don’t.
The following is what I believe to be an insider’s view on why Bush does what he does and why it should be distinguished from the christian faith. If interested, read on, if not- go grab another latte.
I believe that Bush belongs to a certain brand of christianity, which, along with most of the other world religions, appeals to the individual’s sense of achievement (i.e. I can get myself to heaven if I just try hard enough, or alternatively, if I don’t get to heaven, it’s because I didn’t try hard enough). He believes that the world is going to be taken over by christianity and that he is one of God’s chosen messengers to the achieve this goal, granting him access to heaven. The problem (aside from the obvious one) is, he believes that the means of “taking over the world for christianity” is a crusade. Somebody recently labeled him a Calvinist (I think it was ron suskind in the new york times magazine) because of his self-dubbed infallibility, but this is exactly the opposite of the Calvinist stance. While all other forms of christianity and all other faiths appeal to the human condition, depending on the sheer will of self to attain and rise above, this crazy sect of Christianity believes that we are powerless to do anything that makes us more pleasing to God- that it is him who allows us to attain. Don’t blow up just yet.
In Bush’s christianity, he only gets calvinism half right- by a very erroneous interpretation of the bible, he believes that he was “chosen” by God to be put in a position of power, and that he is to lead a “new jihad” against all non-believers (which I will conveniently call “the axis of evil”)- to either somehow impregnate them with faith by force (which Calvinists believe is not possible), or to kill them. He (along with much of the American church) neglects the original puritano-calvinist doctrines of “the invisible church”. For thus of us who can’t remember back to high school American history, this doctrine is what caused the puritans to leave Europe in the first place. They were oppressed by a people who claimed that the “visible church” was the body of true believers, and only by adhering to strict doctrines defined by their interpretation of the bible would you be able to attain salvation. In other words, people who were observed to be following all these principles were the christians with whom God was pleased. The puritans rejected that idea, stating that an “invisible church”, achieving salvation only by a God-given faith and not by works “so that no man could boast of his achievements”, was the true church. Stay with me.
The problem with rejecting the second half of Calvinism is that you can have your cake and eat it, too. Bush believes that he can get to heaven by using his luckily God-given position- in which he can attain many earthly possessions and earn his place in heaven by carrying out God’s will, which he believes is to eradicate the earth of non-believers. Where did he come up with this idea? Again- erroneous interpretation of the bible. He believes that the second coming of the messiah, prophesied by Jesus, is one in which he will return to a perfected earth, aka heaven, on which he will reign forever. Calvinist christianity disagrees with this at three points- 1. heaven is not a place on earth (despite what madonna wants you to believe), 2. the people to whom the messiah is returning to are not the visible church, but the people whom God has chosen (which does not even roughly correlate with those who are associated with the physical institution of christianity and the church) and 3. the only role that christians have in this is to present the words of the bible to anybody they meet and let God do the rest.
So what am I trying to say- basically, that Bush is taking what he wants from the doctrines of Christianity to support his own insane cause, with which he is hoping to fulfill a desire that all of us are familiar with- wealth, power, etc. This is a product of what our post-modern society has done to religion and true faith- making it a buffet of our own delight. We twist other peoples faiths into something that we can use for our own devices. Everybody has their own faith, Bush included, and there seems to be no universal standard. I, along with the calvinists and puritans, believe that there is one. As far as the existence of God, which is what all of us really want to know- I think it takes faith to believe either way.
My question is, will it really make a difference who gets elected? I believe God sees in
black in white, and that this is a very good thing, but leave it up to any one person, on their own or with all the earthly faculties aiding them, to try to discover, let alone implement this knowledge, and I think you will find the blackest of God’s black in the whitest of that person’s white. In my opinion, power and everything that leads to it is always corrupting. I don’t believe in the possibility of peace. As long as any man believes that he has the ability, let alone the right, to exercise his will to rule over anyone, including himself (and believe me when i say that every single one of us has this potential within us and we all exercise it and condone it to some degree), we will be at war. I have left a lot unsaid and plenty of loose ends to nip at, but I hope someone got something out of this (other than feelings of rage or pity).
October 24th, 2004 at 11:08 pm
No rage. No pity. Just boredom.
I much prefer evidence.
Not only is Bush severely out of touch with reality, the same is true of many of his supporters as evidenced by this study.
While it is most certainly true that we all have mistaken beliefs and that we “fill in the gaps,” the difference is that many are content with faith to fill in the holes and seek no evidence to support their beliefs, others create theories to fill in the holes and then test those theories out, discarding what cannot be shown to be true.
The latter are the people who have consistently moved the human race forward, while the former have consistently held the human race back by being content to believe rather than to know.
For them, faith does not fill in gaps, it is a substitute for knowledge and an excuse to avoid the difficult work of looking for the truth–that which actually exists.
October 25th, 2004 at 6:26 pm
I suppose I should have expected the evidence argument- and I already agree with you on the evidence that Bush is insane and so are many of his followers, but I still must contend with your general statements that strongly link the kind of faith that I was referring to above and the kind that ignores rational fact. First off, let me make a side point that my last statment was, in a way, an attempt to further expose and clarify the “faith” of Bush and many of his followers and differentiate it from the faith that I was trying to defend. I hope I was somehow convincing of that possibility
Introducing myself as a medical student should lend me no credibility except in that I am familiar and practiced at the art of experimentation, including statistical analysis. Indeed, it can only go to show that I am desperately trying to procrastinate for my upcoming exam. Anyways- when I read that article, I pretty much agree with what it says and don’t try to look into the details- this is because I already agree with the content. However, just for kicks I wanted to see their statistical and analytical methodology. While their research design for a social survey was impecable (and my spelling isn’t), there was something a bit suspect about the data in that they did not present the raw data anywhere or any analysis of it. Who cares, right? We can believe that they were telling the truth, and even if they did present all that info, they could still fudge the data. But that can’t be! We live in a scientific era where all experiments are done multiple times in different settings by people of all different backgrounds!
Without going on and on like I did the last time, my two points are: 1. We all look at data from our own perspective, something that surely the most novice post-modernist could understand, 2. we eliminate, ignore, or twist data that is not consistent with our own views (which can happen on a popular level- again I refer to Bush’s post-9/11 ratings). To say that the human race has “moved forward” is a judgement that I can agree with you on certain points, and disagree with on others.
Science, then- is still a form of faith. As much as you and I would like to believe that the facts being presented to us are facts, we must admit that those people who research and bring these facts to us are humans- they make mistakes, they have opinions, they fudge data. This is the best that we have as far as rational thinking is concerned, but my argument is that maybe we should hesitate to depend on it completely. In addition, by ignoring the even finer details in the quest for anecdotal or solid evidence, perhaps you are guilty of the same crime you accuse. As a medical student- I have to realize that most of what I am learning right now is going to be wrong or obsolete at some point in my career. I try to take Dylan’s advice-
admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
OK so I did ramble on- sorry. If I might- I have heard these two quotes a million times, but it never seems to strike anybody intelligent- shame. I’ll let you figure out who said them.
“It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.”
“A little science estranges men from
God, but much science leads them back to Him.”
Sorry to get all poetic and mushy. Back to studying for the test.
October 25th, 2004 at 8:33 pm
You just can’t help yourself can you?
Where there are voids, there is nothing. Some people are so uncomfortable with nothingness and the concept of nonexistence, that they have to make stuff up to fill in the gaps.
Where there are voids, I say let them be.
Stephen Hawking said that when he had figured out all the laws of the Universe he would see the face of God. I don’t disagree with him.
But that God would not be a human invention. A sky-daddy. He would be the force that lead to the existence of man and everything else in the Universe. He would BE the Universe.
Just as the human body is more than the sum of its cells, perhaps the Universe is more than the sum of its components. And maybe that is God.
October 25th, 2004 at 10:38 pm
The universe is vast beyond all human comprehension. Therefore there is a God?
The space between atoms and their make up is vastly greater than the space occupied by atoms and their make up. If all matter were compressed such that no space existed between matter, the universe would be the size of a golf ball. Therefore there is a God?
Time and space are infinite. Therefore there is a God?
You want to believe. Therefore there is a God?
There is no point in trying to prove or justify the existance of God. It’s the act of believing in God and making proclamations based on these beliefs that leads to problems, including this thread of discussion on God. In every war, killing the enemy is ultimately justified by temporarily dismissing one’s belief in God or by believing that is His wish, which is to temporarily dismiss one’s religion or to act upon it. How is the dismissal justified? It’s justified by believing in His forgiveness, which is itself a religion … a belief in God. The act of murder is justified through a belief in something we cannot see, feel, touch, sense, or know. If you want to believe in God, do it for your own cause, not others.
You passionately hug your child. Your child feels warmth, security and contentment … feels loved. Is there a God? Does it matter? Is not to make life as close as it can be to this wonder and warmth that a loved child can feel, even if only for that finite moment, not enough of a challenge that we need to be trying to convince others of God’s supposed attributes or existance?
November 5th, 2004 at 12:21 pm
I’m working on a website, where I’m explaining the connection between art, tennis, and mental illness. I’m claiming to be the first artist/ tennis player to be healed. Primarily, my healing was based upon being raised up above the delusion associated with the believing in false concepts.
From my perspective Bush suffers from multiple cases of delusion, as well as the rest of this country.
Art and Mental Illness
http://genesisofart.tripod.com/artmentalillness.html/#top
January 19th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
[…] As if having George Bush, Osama bin Laden and Pat Robertson speaking for God isn’t enough, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin got in on the act a couple of days ago. NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that “God is mad at America” and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting. […]