What are the specific illnesses of Bush and Cheney?

What is the evidence that they are ill?

What are the delusions that make them think the use of nuclear weapons in Iran will help them? * 

Bush:  The most deceitful, immature, delusional and dangerous President in American history

Bush, a narcissistic Mama’s Boy, suffers from megalo-mania which causes him to behave like an adolescent who will listen to no one, but follows his intuition with the false Messianic certitude of a sleepwalker until he comes to the edge of the precipice in Iraq from which there is no escape, causing his personality to unravel, and in his panic unleash even more destructive forces, like invading Iran with nuclear weapons, resulting in the already destructive forces to rush headlong to their final tragic destruction, as they are now in Operation Darius.

Mankind’s only hope is the emergence of a conscious and responsible citizenry to channel the released forces and Operation Darius, stop them and civilize them. 

Emotionally, Bush is still a child, a Mama’s Boy, at best a 14-year-old adolescent whose life has always been nothing but fantasies and delusions driven by a Messianic complex.   From early childhood, Bush’s mother always called him, “The Chosen One.” 

(See Barbara Bush’s comment at the sermon that Bush was to save the world.)

Bush’s close friend and Cabinet Member, Don Evans, has said “Bush knows that we’re all here to serve a greater calling … he understands that he is the one person in the country, in this case, really the one person in the world, who has the responsibility to protect and defend freedom.”

Bush has an infinitely deep inferiority complex and equally deep feeling of impotency, not being the man his father was.  Bush overcompensates these overpowering fears by a false sense of superiority and bravado.  His speech filled with endless bravado and “mano a’mano” statements to his enemies or those who befriend his enemies “… you can’t hide, no matter where you go, we will hunt you down and kill you” – yet in over five years, backed by the greatest Army and technology the world has ever known, Bush has failed to capture Osama bin Laden, or Omar, the Head of the Taliban.   Hardly the language of a mature adult, let alone the head of a great nation. 

Bush thinks war is a videogame and he’s John Wayne – while thousands of American heroes and innocent Iraqi civilians are murdered, maimed and mutilated every month.

Bush’s inferiority has solid roots in reality.  His incompetence has failed at everything he’s ever tried to do in his life, from school to every business he’s ever tried.  Only his family and his father kept him going from one venture to another based on his father’s friends, which is why he was still an obsessive-compulsive alcoholic addict at the age of 40.  The only success he ever had was when Karl Rove took over his life and made him Governor and then President.  But his greatest, most visible and colossal failures were yet to come – Bush’s failure in the war in Afghanistan, his even greater failure in Iraq, and the war on terror, including the thousands of people still homeless and destitute by his incompetence and failure in Katrina. 

Bush’s Extremely Dangerous Megalomania 

Behind Bush’s affable exterior, there is a powerful, but obscure delusional system that drives his behavior.  Megalomania refers both to a conscious and unconscious mental attitude, as well as actual behavior. 

• The megalomaniac sees himself as the center of the world, the one figure who has all the answers. 
• He tolerates no disagreement, and sees external reality as either threatening or non-existent.  In examining the cost of going to war in Iraq, when White House Budget Director Lindsey and Chief of Staff General Shinseki disagreed with Bush on his extremely unrealistic financial and manpower costs of the war – they were promptly fired.  Bush’s megalomania demands that his view of the reality be what he wants it to be to triumph over insecurity and fears, to annihilate internal fantasies of persecution and fears of being attacked. 

(In one 90-second speech he used the word “threat” 11 times in only four paragraphs.)

• In protecting himself from his fears - Bush is incapable of admitting his fears, just as he’s totally incapable of facing or admitting his mistakes.
• To externalize his interior terror, Bush either bullies others or instills fear in the hearts of his fellow citizens.  In his fear of being afraid, or even appearing to be afraid, Bush may well be one of the most frightened men in America. 

(Bush, who has no trouble sending young people to Iraq to be murdered and mutilated, was too afraid to steel himself to face the September 11 Commission alone.  Bush has always been a subliminal ego to the more powerful and dominant Cheney, and insisted that Cheney be with him.)

• Megalomania is a delusional system of power and greatness that protects the individual by serving as a defense against fear and paranoid anxieties.  In response to fears of persecution, the megalomaniac individual develops a false sense of invulnerability – belief that oneself is not only great, but all knowing.  He magically replaces hope for the future with an omnipotent belief that he knows the future. He knows what the right way is.  Everything is that simple to him, but of course the real world is infinitely more complex and difficult to understand.  Bush is permeated by omnipotent, magical grandiosity that attacks all thought … all hard thinking.  When his obvious ignorance shows itself, he celebrates it, kids about it, which helps him to preserve his omnipotent sense of self.
• Megalomania has its roots in the child’s delusions of omnipotence.  A part of every child, dating from infancy, understands the world as revolving around him.  In normal cases these childhood tendencies are socialized out, as the baby realizes the limits of its power.  Yet if the baby fails to develop the ability to recognize his capacity to hurt others willfully – and to feel compassion or the need to repair the hurt as a result – these fantasies can go underground and persist into real life. 

Bush was a bully to his younger brother, Jeb, their entire childhood.  With a powerful streak of sadistic meanness, Bush teased and tormented Jeb their whole childhood.

• The relationship between the mother and infant plays a decisive role in the baby’s development of compassion.  However, if the mother has a damaged maternal instinct, and instead of powerful empathy has a cold-blooded power animus, the child – Bush – has a permanently damaged capacity for empathy and compassion.

A horrific example shows how severely damaged Barbara Bush’s maternal instinct is – and was – making it impossible for Bush to develop his capacity for empathy and compassion.

Bush’s Sister’s Death

After a long illness back east with the Bushes doing everything they could to save her, Robin, Bush’s sister, tragically passed away.  George and Barbara Bush were back east for the illness, but George W was left at home in Texas.  The day after Robin died, Barbara and George Sr. went golfing.  The next day George Sr. and Barbara attended the memorial, but – astonishingly - did not stay for Robin’s funeral.  What mother with a healthy maternal instinct could go golfing the day after her baby died, and even worse, not stay for her child’s funeral? 

This clear, unequivocal lack of a healthy maternal instinct says everything you need to know about how severely Bush was damaged by the lack of a healthy maternal experience. 

The second example is told by Barbara Bush herself.  After Robin’s death she sucked all the life out of George and used him day and night as a compensation. As Barbara tells it, one day when Bush was around 7, she overheard George say he can’t come out and play because his mother needs him – she would be filled with too much sorrow if he wasn’t there.  “It was at that moment,” Barbara Bush recalls, “that I realized how destructively I was smothering him and turning him into a ‘mama’s boy’.” 

• At the same time this breakdown in the nurturing process from the mother impedes a child’s growing ability to integrate the destructive fantasies we all have.  He sees himself as both omnipotent and vulnerable, threatening and threatened.  This pair of self images – one inferior, one defensively overvaluing oneself – coexists with these violent fantasies, which serve only to increase the child’s need to see himself in grandiose, omnipotent terms.  The child may repress his violent fantasies, but only temporarily; they are never properly processed or integrated, and they linger in the unconscious as unfulfilled wishes, ready to be reactivated when the fears of persecution finally become too strong … as they did when Bush lost the election and was now about to be held accountable for his massive failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
• The megalomaniac is indifferent to any damage he caused, because he has been acting according to his infallible intuitions, i.e., the word of God.  He is without guilt or compassion, and incapable of even thinking about reparation.  The greater the powers of the persecutors – who the megalomaniac is convinced hides in holes everywhere, and pose limitless, unknowable dangers to our nation – the greater the power the megalomaniac personality must feel in order to face the challenge.  (Sending in more troops, bombing Somalia and Iran, etc.)

The megalomaniac makes himself exalted: “They hate us,” Bush says over and over, “because we are the greatest nation on earth, because they hate our freedom, our democracy,” etc., etc.  Never because we illegally and immorally invaded their country and destroyed their entire infrastructure plus millions of people murdered, mutilated, or displaced – all for him to steal their oil.

• ***  Bush’s impulsive behavior also provides telling glimpses of the destructive fantasies that drive him still, and which are the operating fantasies compelling him to invade Iran with nuclear weapons.   Back when the war in Iraq was still an unrealized fantasy of his, Bush’s words - “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out” – were merely a symptom of his omnipotent delusions and would not harm anybody.  Once he had rallied an army, and concocted an excuse to stick it to his imagined persecutor, Bush’s delusions now could become real, and Bush had no trouble sending Americans to their deaths to support his magical thinking - just as he’s about to do in Iran.  And when the false pretenses for his exercise in omnipotence to fill his omnipotent fantasy began to be exposed as false, Bush proved incapable of claiming responsibility or making reparations to the American people he deceived; instead he allowed the blame to fall upon others – on the vague but telling concept of “false intelligence,” a tragically apt, if misplaced, description of the real culprit – his delusions that lead him to do so.  ***  
• The megalomaniac has an egotism that brooks no contradiction.  For over four years Bush refused to say when the troops would be coming home from Iraq, because as he insisted “over and over, when the commanders in the field told him it was time to come home.”  He insisted, again over and over, that not he, but only the Commanders in the field make those decisions.  Yet, when every commander in the field – past and present – said that escalating a surge in Iraq was futile (General Colin Powell said “securing Baghdad is impossible”), and every past panel of experts said escalation would never bring success in Iraq, because Bush’s megalomania brooks no contradiction, not even from the Generals he said he would obey, Bush threw out all the advice, broke his promise, and totally isolated ordered the escalation and surge. 

(Of course no one knew this was a diversion for Bush’s real escalation – the nuclear invasion of Iran.)  

• This preening grandiosity is too often the expression of an overcompensation for grave defects of character.  The “Mission Accomplished” banner may seem intended to rally the troops and voters, but in the end its grand indulgence and magical thinking and the fantasy that a dangerous mission only just begun had, in Bush’s mind, already ended successfully – thus the fantasy was about Bush himself, about his desperate need to triumph over his internal sense of inferiority

Other destructive and dangerous behaviors typical of someone with Bush’s mental illness are Thought Disorder and Fragmentation

Thought Disorder

• A person  with disordered thinking will have an  unusually difficult time absorbing and processing the information to make well informed decisions.  Thus it is no surprise that every entity Bush has directed has failed and gone sour under his stewardship:  even the state of Texas, including Houston, became more polluted and less well educated than before he was governor.
  • The concept of disordered thought is important here:  Bush often seems to confuse cause and effect, or dismiss the role of causation as downright irrelevant.  Thus he assumes that the Iraqi people will greet American service men as liberators, because that’s what they should do – after all, we are freeing them from a despot, aren’t we?
  •  His lying and backpeddling also points to thought disorder:  disinclined to do the work of thinking things through, he shows the disordered person’s habit of relying on magical solutions.
  • The paranoid’s world is filled with persecutors.  President Bush’s continued habit of seeing the world as peopled with threats however so consistent and unmistakable that it can safely be described as paranoia.  The strict insistence of blind, absolute loyalty, as his former Secretary of Treasury, Paul O’Neill, has described, suggests how deeply his paranoid suspicions run:  Bush experiences any disloyalty or disagreement as an attack.  A remarkably isolated man for someone so ostensibly gregarious, in his personal life Bush retreats into solitude and routine.  A condition he masks with the glad handing charm he uses to keep others at a distance. (p. 199)
  • We also see evidence of paranoia in the tenacious grip that Bush exerts on mistaken ideas even after they’ve been proven false.  (p. 199)  This has been identified as a “protected delusion”, as a powerful defense against paranoid thoughts and fears.  The individual seizes and holds onto an idea that he repeats over and over, his belief in it gaining strength with each repetition, despite evidence to the contrary.  (The surge which as failed five times already.)  By tenaciously holding onto a fixed idea, the paranoid turns it into a shield.  As Bush repeats epigrammatic phrases, or idiosyncratic ideas – “Free nations are peaceful nations.  Free nations don’t attack each other.  Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction,” (gee, I thought we did that) he said in October 2003 – he fashions them into a kind of psychological cloak that protects him from the prospect of an uncertain future. After a while, the repeated phrase becomes a form of emotional armor used to block out loss or attack.

Fragmentation

• This dread of fragmentation is a relevant fear for Bush.  He’s appeared close to falling apart in public repeatedly; after wandering off track while speaking, his statements dissentigrate into often meaningless fragments until he finds his way, ends the discussion, or attacks the questioner. 
  • “He just decides this sentence is worthless to me.  It’s like we’re working tirelessly to – look, we’re tireless … look, I’m tired of this sentence.”
  • On Easter Sunday 2004, when a reporter asked him yet again about the Presidential daily briefing in which he was warned of Osama bin Laden’s intention to strike the United States, Bush actually laughed – the anxious giggle that so often comes over him when he comes under attack – before settling into a nervous smile and claiming that the memo contained no specific plans. 
  • Days earlier, in response to a similar unwanted question, he had been in full attack mode: He snapped at a reporter, “Who are you talking to?” because the reporter addressed him only as “Sir,” instead of “Mr. President.”
• One way someone really desperate not to lose his way is clinging to a belief or even a few key phrases and sticking to them is yet another way to protect against falling apart.  President Bush’s press conferences offer disturbing evidence of this ongoing anxiety in Bush, and reporters and major papers have reported that Bush’s answers were “vague and sometimes merely incoherent.” 
• In one press conference Bush depended so heavily on a few repeated phrases, that words like “Progress,” “freedom”, “justice,” and especially “the threat” began to seem like mantras.  In a 90 second speech he used them 17 times, and the word “threat” 11 times in four paragraphs. 
• The need to cling to a new object or pattern of behavior can be an act of desperation.  Bush’s rigid sleep and exercise schedule serves to protect him against the challenges of the unexpected, much as an infant must be protected against night terrors. 
  • Even the war in Iraq was not allowed to interrupt his routine.  The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Bush left for Camp David in the first hours of the war and “was not awakened to be told of the first American casualties Thursday night,” kept up his rigorous exercise regimen, and even made time aboard Air Force One to watch the Conspiracy Theory, the latest Mel Gibson movie.  
  • So powerful are his fears that he can’t even face them.  His infamous early advice to Americans less than two weeks after 9/11 – when he told Americans to continue to shop and travel as before in apparent denial of the radical measures he was at the same time taking in response to the nation’s new found vulnerability – suggests just how simplistically he viewed the situation, closing himself off to worry and anxiety. 
  • Compare his response to that of New York’s Mayor Gulliani who faced his fears rolled up his sleeves and went to work. 
• In protecting himself from his fears – and Bush is incapable of facing or admitting his fears, just as he is totally incapable of facing or admitting his mistakes – Bush may believe that he is protecting the rest of us as well, but the result is quite the opposite.  Denying anxiety is not the same as experiencing and managing it.  The baby whose parents never help him manage his fears lacks the means to face them and respond accordingly as an adult.  Bush shows no sign of consciously experiencing anxiety or fear, but instead passes it on to the rest of us either to maintain power and overcome feelings of helplessness, to evade responsibility and guilt, and deny the threat of falling apart. 
  • To externalize his interior terror, Bush either bullies others or instills fear in the hearts of his fellow citizens.  In his fear of being, or even appearing to be afraid, Bush may well be one of the most frightened men in America. 
  • Bush, who has no trouble sending young people to Iraq to be murdered or mutilated, was too afraid to steel himself to face the September 11 Commission alone. 
• Bush has been protecting himself from what he fears and relying on his simplistic inner world for his entire life, showing little awareness of the anguish or doubt that a President should feel when sending his nation to war. 
  • Instead, Bush assembles a false and brittle front of bravado out of a few borrowed phrases and gestures of pretended bravado.  His escapades on the deck of the battle ship Abraham Lincoln were carefully designed to reassure America that Bush felt good about the war in Iraq – that he had reached the end of his simplistic inner script, i.e., fantasy and delusion he was operating under, and that the “mission” had been gleefully “accomplished.” 
  • Even the Bible councils against such a response – God angrily silenced the angels rejoicing in the defeat of the Armies of Egypt, and celebrating over the killing of the enemy and their ignoring the collateral damage killing so many innocent civilians as part of the collateral damage. 

(*  This excerpted summary/draft important to explaining who Operation Darius is a real threat is excerpted from Mr. Laughlin’s upcoming book, The Psychology of Good and Evil in War and Peace:  Politics and Politicians,  the Collected Works of CG Jung, and especially the classic masterpiece on Bush’s extremely serious mental illness, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President  by Justin A. Frank, MD - an absolutely must read for every American.  In the final draft all of these quotes will be properly annotated and credited.)

For more on the breadth and depth of Bush and Cheney's mental illness and how it has bungled and destroyed America at home and abroad, click here.