From psychologist Oliver James, as printed in the Guardian, comes this fun piece of psychoanalysis: So, George, how do you feel about your mom and dad? It isn’t anything new, but it’s nice to see it mentioned again.

It’s interesting to me that this story is more or less completely absent from TV. If you get your information from there, you’ll never hear about George Bush as the screwed-up, emotionally stunted eldest child of a neglectful, overachieving dad and a vindictive, abusive mom. But it is precisely that fact (that Bush’s failings are essentially invisible when your only source of information is television) that allowed him to “win” the election and assume office.

There’s a symmetry to it. Bush is the first president in the history of this country to have been raised almost exclusively on television, to the point of being functionally illiterate. Which, as long as you were raised on TV yourself, is no big deal. If anything, his inability to speak in complete sentences is comforting. He sounds like one of us. True, he doesn’t actually say anything coherent once you rise above the level of the scripted sound bite, but if you’ve never read much yourself, that doesn’t come off as a failing. You don’t even notice.

But it matters. What it means is that on a fundamental level, the man is incapable of critical thought. He cannot effectively analyze complex issues. He can’t understand subtle interactions. As I’ve written before, that doesn’t make him a bad president all by itself, but it’s a huge handicap. And combined with his other failings, it’s really, really bad.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2003 at 7:52 am and is filed under george_w_bush. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.