What's Wrong With The President?
No, this isn't a trick question. I was standing in the parts department of the Honda dealership yesterday, waiting for an over-priced part that I could only get there, and watching the tv they had going. As I stood there watching Mr. Bush switch back and forth between (a) lame attempts to be jokey with reporters and (b) weird flashes of anger, I started thinking "there seems to be something wrong with this man." In fact, I found that by the time the press conference was over, I was fairly alarmed. More alarmed than I was before, that is, about the fact that this is the most powerful man in the world.
Um, anybody else get this? Did he seem a little...um...off? Or was I hallucinating this?
No, this isn't a trick question. I was standing in the parts department of the Honda dealership yesterday, waiting for an over-priced part that I could only get there, and watching the tv they had going. As I stood there watching Mr. Bush switch back and forth between (a) lame attempts to be jokey with reporters and (b) weird flashes of anger, I started thinking "there seems to be something wrong with this man." In fact, I found that by the time the press conference was over, I was fairly alarmed. More alarmed than I was before, that is, about the fact that this is the most powerful man in the world.
Um, anybody else get this? Did he seem a little...um...off? Or was I hallucinating this?
posted by Winston Smith at
10:41 AM
12 Comments:
I would suggest you find a video on the Web of the conference and watch it a few times, paying attention to one element of it at a time(watch it with the sound off, watch what he does with his hands, etc).
Did you ever read the essay by Oliver Sacks about the stroke victims who laughed at a Reagan p.c. because they could detect the difference between his words and his body language(or something like that)? I'll try to dig it up, it's interesting in more than a biological way.
Duhbya has had some kind of organic brain abnormality for as long as he has been a national figure. Whether it's related to alcohol or cocaine is anyone's guess, but it's there frequently enough in his odd behavior that it's hard to miss.
Yeah, I remember that essay. That's the kind of thing that I would normally dismiss, but I always thought there was something very odd about Reagan's mannerisms anyway.
They were like aphasiacs or agnosiacs or something like that.
A few people have had that observation as well. The man has left me stunned a number of times, so I guess I am not as shaken up by it. But, yeah, he does seem unbalanced.
Great blog name, btw.
If you have a copy, replay the first presidential debate. It was scary.
I once saw footage from his days as Governor of Texas. Back then it seems he was rather articulate, personable, and even engaging. Compare this to the present day W, who stutters, slurs, jumbles his words, and is even a bit cantankerous. I'm no doctor, but either he's back on the booze or he could have a degenerative neurological disorder.
Check this out:
http://dearleadersdailythought.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-have-not-started-drinking-again.html
This is what Bush looks like when he's comfortable. He even let Helen Thomas (predictably) harangue him.
I imagine he seemed more normal when he was governor, when a mispeakment couldn't trigger a global war if not Armeggedon. As president, his RAM buffer is full to overrun.
Still, he's said fewer disastrous things than his last two electoral opponents have. (I marvel at the man.) But that the three of them are the best that we as a nation can come up with speaks volumes about our own asininity and corrosiveness.
This one's better and older, Mr. Doyle. :-)
Uh...WHAT? You "marvel at the man"???? What the hell are you talking about, Tom?
And what did Gore and Kerry say that was so "disastrous"???
Dude, you are dangerously close to the tipping point here... You do realize you are defending the most dishonest, dopey, and incompetent president in anyone's memory? I mean "yeah, he's an idiot but waddaya gonna do?" is one thing...but "I marvel at the man"...jeez, I can't believe your stardards for marveling are THAT low...
A few months ago, there was a video clip montage of him doing some sort of wierd jaw rolling motion and the question was: "What's this about?"
To me the answer seemed pretty obvious: He's back on his cocaine addiction. I don't do drugs, but I remember hearing that coke-heads *GRIND* their teeth a great deal. This would lead, I would think, to very sore jaw muscles, which would case someone--even someone of sound mind to begin with--to rotate the jaw as he did, in order to "massage" the muscles. Sorta like prodding a troublesome tooth.
So combine his obvious-to-me cocaine use, with mad-for-power, misplaced religious ferocity (and knowing hypocrisy), his dancing at the end of Cheney's and Rove's strings, his mental retardation, and the fact that he's once again doing *worse* than Daddykins--and he knows it--and it's easy to see how he's the mess he is.
---Lonzrick
(didn't want to make a full account for the one comment)
Someone close to me has extrapyramidal syndrome. The specific diagnosis is Tourette syndrome, which is famous because a tiny minority of sufferers shouts out random obscenities. During the Bush-Kerry debates I recognized the familiar patterns, especially in the facial tics, on Bush. But, nearly everybody I mentioned it to seemed to not have seen it. Mostly they seemed to think I was exaggerating it to discredit the President. I do remember reading some speculation at that time about the possibilities of a stroke or organic brain damage, but again, apparently people just did not recognize it without some kind of personal experience with neurological disorders. I have not spent much time watching him since the debates, but from the little I have seen, I think that he has deteriorated.
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