George Bush’s presidency is the culmination of a lifelong history of sadistic practices that he must deny in order to maintain his fragile psychological equilibrium. Since childhood, Bush was labeled a bad child, a troublemaker, and a delinquent. He stuck firecrackers into frogs and exploded them; he shot and wounded his little brothers with a b-b gun; he branded fraternity pledges at Yale with red-hot coat hangers; he mocked others and was a verbal bully, irreverent about anything serious.
Now, as this bad-boy president prepares to leave office, many of his critics are pinning his failures on bumbling incompetence. The conventional wisdom holds that Bush is either a good hearted guy who got in way over his head—or the puppet of Dick Cheney. But if he were simply good-hearted he wouldn’t have mocked his own reasons for committing our young men and women to war; if he were a puppet, he was a puppet who chose his puppeteers. In my psychoanalytic exploration, the trail of destruction wrought by Bush over the last eight years is the direct consequence of handing a man with a destructive personality profile tremendous power.
By January 20, George W. Bush will have inflicted enough damage worldwide so he can retire to a quiet life of watching others scramble to clean up his mess. The missions he accomplished as president all bear the personal brand of his destructive streak: astronomic debt to China, horribly wounded veterans, a crippled health care system, and America’s damaged international reputation. And they will continue to be felt for years to come. What once started as cruelty to animals, siblings, and fraternity brothers has blossomed exponentially.
Eight years of him pulling the wings off the biggest fly he could have ever imagined - the world and all the people in it. His mother and father must be very proud.
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