Maybe that's what the Oedipal myth is really is all about: the hidden desire to kill daddy stemming from the intimate knowledge that daddy doesn't care if you live or die.

I like this theme of yours regarding the relativity of Crazy. I'm going to repeat it.

She should have said "You people are really disgusting".That would be right on target. Isn't it?

A to-the-right-of-Bush friend told me she had seen on the Internet that Obama DIDN'T PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART FOR THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE!!! She saw a video of it, so that proves he's a commie--uh, an Islamfascist, a baby killer, a....
Maybe it isn't our leaders who are nuts.

A to-the-right-of-Bush friend told me she had seen on the Internet that Obama DIDN'T PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART FOR THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE!!! She saw a video of it, so that proves he's a commie--uh, an Islamfascist, a baby killer, a....
Maybe it isn't our leaders who are nuts.

I agree with you frequently, but here you've left for a distant planet where all communication consists of Spock-like rational statements of the literal truth.

When I, or Atrios, or Anita Esterday observe that the mavens of our national media seem like a bunch of silly, twittering nuts, what we're doing is being deliberately insulting. We're engaged in a rhetorical strategy designed to encourage those around us to disregard those people's sober claims to authority. If in the process we happen to occasionally chip away at the media people's (large, but surprisingly fragile) self-regard, that's a political benefit too.

It may or may not be effective, but it is in fact typical of the way political communication happens on planet Earth. And it doesn't mean anyone is ignorant of where the self-interest of national media employees lies.

It may or may not be effective, but it is in fact typical of the way political communication happens on planet Earth

Dear (most of the) U.S.Americans,

Please realize that Earth ≠ the U.S.A/Western Hemisphere.

KTHXBYE!

Better than being insulting by calling them "nuts" is to try to appear dangerous by calling them "evil." We treat the sane but malicious differently than the poor deluded souls.
Saddam, for instance, in the final instance did not get therapy.

I promise, if a large number of people with any power start calling Russert "evil" and deliberately destructively malicious, with an implication of appropriate steps to silence him, he will take notice. "Crazy" he will just laugh at.

YOU want crazy??? Well hewe's crazy---Call Nancy Pelosi @1-202-225-0100 and DEMAND IMPEACHMENT. (what's REALLY crazy is that it's CRAWLING BACK ON THE TABLE.)

AND MY SPELLING.

I won't go at length here, but even if they don't go as far as I do, Jonathan & Scruggs are much more correct than Atrios or PNH. Our enemies are not educable or healable, cannot be removed from power and then reasoned to enlightenment, really cannot be allowed to fester like a gangrenous sore waiting to re-infect the system. Only a rhetoric of evil and elimination will empower the carpenters to build the guillotines.

But liberals never get it. And so millions of innocents die, and the rich eat the poor. Until we all live with the jackboot on our necks.

Patrick wonders about the effectiveness of the madhouse imagery. From a rhetorical point of view, it is weak because it is as much a statement about ourselves as it is about the other.

Consider:
(1)
A. "I'm going to cross Antarctica on a unicycle."
B. "Man, you are nuts!

(2)
A. "I'm going on a hunger strike: Gitmo's gotta go!"
B. "Wow, that's crazy!"

(3)
A. "Check out my proof of Poincare conjecture!"
B. "2000 pages? Geez, you are one big-ass fuckin' mad scientist!"

(4)
A. "How was shock and awe?"
B. "Let me tell you: it was insane!"

(5)
A. "I hear voices."
B. "Shine on you crazy diamond."

Now look at the insulting power of the loony lingo. In

(1) you congratulate someone on his physical courage (presumably compared with yours).

(2) you congratulate someone on her moral character and thereby acknowledge your inferiority;

(3) you recognize your own intellectual limitations;

(4) you confess your inability to cope;

(5) you show compassion in the face of mental illness.

Doesn't exactly make you the Mike Tyson of the debating universe.

No matter how you cut it, to call someone nuts leaves the door open for the possibility that it is you who just doesn't get it.

Hey, if you call me nuts, I'll just point out that your brain is simply too small to absorb the full greatness of my thinking. If you call me a giant asshole, then, well, I'll have to check about the greatness of another part of my anatomy. Or just concede the point.

Over the last six years the more I have seen Bush and the more I have found out about his background the more I have thought that he is psychopathic.

But I've been reading a book on the subject and now I'm not quite so sure. The true psychopath cannot truly feel emotion or empathy towards another person. Dubya is certainly able to dismiss other people's suffering. But in a true psychopath that can result in an absolute lack of trustworthiness. You don't see Bush screwing his own. He's constant that way.

I suspect that many of the elements of psychopathy are adapted by the ruling class. Certainly, a lack of caring for others and the ability to lie, as well as a lack of concern about the pain and death of others, are all valuable tools for a despot.

I think that some upper-class families, like the Bushes, tend to teach their children how to be controlled psychopaths. This requires a kind of compartmentalization that most people can't manage. For example, while World War Two raged and his son was a pilot in the Pacific Prescott Bush had no problem managing Nazi investments and Nazi funds. He was aiding the enemy while his son was fighting it. He was able to dismiss what the Nazis were doing with Jews and Slavs and others while hiding their money. And after the war he was rewarded for his work when the Nazi-owned Union Bank cashed out.

George H. W. Bush and his wife were parents to criminals. George H. W. probably had been recruited by the CIA while he was at Yale, his career path suggests it, and suddenly became head of the CIA the last year of Ford's Administration (1976) where he served the Agency by blocking access to much of the information that various Congressional investigations (assassinations, CIA spying, etc.). He undoubtedly was behind the Letelier assassination, so you can add murder to his rap sheet. Think about Neil, Jeb and Dubya's business profiles. If they were of a lower social status they would have been no better than a criminal enterprise, and Barbara would have been the equivalent of Ma Barker. Bank robbers, swindlers, con men, sprung from the loins of that hideous woman.

The CIA is the moral equivalent to a mob, only with legal status and the ability to hide its criminality.

When you examine Dubya's dubious psychological history (killing little animals, torturing pledges at Yale), he of all the Bush Family offspring displays the most psychopathic behavior. There have been persistent rumors about Dubya being gay. Having something so central to one's own personality, and having to hide it, submerge it, can really warp one's "self." I suspect that Hitler's abusive childhood and his hidden homosexuality functioned to sculpt him in the same way, although I don't think that in the Bushes' case this development is all by chance.

That is, I think that a kind of controlled kind of psychopathy is being taught from generation to generation. I would suspect that a study of ruling classes where power is inherited would show elements of this.

Could I add "Stop calling them stupid" to the list?

George W. Bush, for example, is an absolute genius when it comes to the only thing that matters to him: the personal advancement and enrichment of George W. Bush.

If, back in 2000, Bush couldn't tell us the name of the President of Pakistan, it's not because he's stupid, it's because he doesn't give a shit who the President of Pakistan is. If George Bush thought he could make a buck or score some coke off knowing the name of the President of Pakistan, you can bet he would know.

When Upton Sinclair said, "“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” he wasn't making a comment about stupidity, he was making a comment about intelligent self interest. And people like Bush have the intelligent self interest thing down cold.

SteveB, the operational word here is "cold."

Crazy becomes the norm when the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

1.ok, what would you like us to call them? you could have an ATR contest or something. How about "imperious shitmonkeys?"

(the US media, not the gov't leaders.) that's my entry, if you do decide to have a contest.

2. almost: KTHXBYE?

I guess I just don't cotton to cutesy fads, almost, but thanks for the explanation.

I think things would be a lot better if we had an Eisenhower in the White House and 2 Oldsmobiles in every garage, even if one of them was a hybrid. I also miss the New Deal.

can you tell me where you found that time machine?

or at least the hallucinogens?

This quote (from Esterday) was one of the best things I've read in a while. In this celebrity-obsessed society she deserves a lot of credit for choosing to deflect rather than bask in the attention of the all-seeing eye, and especially for doing it with such righteous indignation. It was a beautiful slapdown, and I admire her for delivering it.

As for what she actually said, I agree with her completely, and I think your criticism is misplaced in this case. There's no contradiction between saying that the media is nuts to focus on such mindless trivia and realizing that they're rationally attending to their own self-interest; it's just a matter of which perspective you're speaking from at that moment. By the same token, from a strictly pragmatic viewpoint I can accept that it's perfectly rational for Chevron to continue pursuing its economic interests at the expense of destroying the planet. From a human perspective, though, it's crazy. And from a rational standpoint I can agree that boiling dissidents alive is a sensible and likely very effective strategy for Islam Karimov's government, but from a moral or ethical standpoint I think it's not only repulsive but insane.

It all comes down to the voice one is writing (or speaking) with at the moment. There's a time for speaking analytically and there's a time for speaking from the heart, and I think it's important to recognize the difference. In this case Esterday was clearly doing the second and not the first.

Not everyone who calls people in our government insane is speaking rhetorically, though. It needs to be emphasized that these people are not insane. The insane are not fully responsible for their actions in the eyes of the law. These people don't deserve an insanity plea.