Courtesy of Thoughts from Kansas comes a link to this site where a short test using the standard diagnostic criteria for psychopathy allows you to decide if Bush is a psychopath. My own assessment gave him 38/40, which is well above the dividing line of 30/40, although it is likely I was marking the whole administration, particularly Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rove, as well as Bush. The average so far is around 31/40.
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That seems to be the conclusion of the psychoanalyst Justin Frank who wrote Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President fairly recently. Buzzflash has an interview with Frank done Dec 27th that gets into GWB's Oedipal and sociopathic tendencies.
I never took any interest in psychology, but "Oedipal" means Bush wants to have sex with his mother right?
Give me a break. No one could ever accuse me of being a fan of our current President, but this is about as big a piece of bullshit as I have ever seen and has about as much validity as Tarot cards.
I'm with Orac here: this type of sideline-psychologizing is rank nonsense. There was a thread on dailyKos the other day where they considered a similar hypothesis (the GWB has narcissistic personality disorder).
The main problem is that any such diagnosis is made on the assumption that it is an inference about an individual's traits, but in this case there is a strong case to be made for the idea that all these behaviors are situational (created and/or reinforced by context). As outside observers, we tend to focus on the individual, while neglecting his context. It's a classic case of the actor-observer bias. The perception that these behaviors are traits is reinforced by the apparently eduring quality they have. Guess what? The context in which GWB is showig these behaviors is enduring as well.
Most of these things could have been said (and were) about President Clinton as well.
This is what ad hominem attacks look like these days. The use of psychometric test just supplies a patina of scientific legitimacy. If we want to retain our edge, we need to avoid this type of silliness, because frankly, we should know better.
Who is this "we"? I think that Bush is psychopathic because of his actions. I think that about a number of political actors. It's not a psychological diagnosis, because I'm not a psychologist, but I can assess the actions without recourse to DSM-IV.
Sure, the test is silly. The actions aren't.