The Political Pathology Asylum: updating the hate campaign

NewsReal: "Ed Schultz to Congresswoman Bachmann: Go Kill Yourself"

Last night, MSNBC host Ed Schultz used his network’s airways to hope Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-MN, would come on his show and commit suicide. (...) His bloodlust bon mot is part of the Left’s long history of pining for the deaths of its political enemies. President Obama visibly chuckled when Wanda Sykes “joked” about Rush Limbaugh’s kidneys failing at the Washington Correspondents Dinner. One of Schultz’s many predecessors as talk radio’s Great Left Hope, Randi Rhodes, repeatedly called for the assassination of President Bush, and Air America Radio prescribed the torture of Donald Rumsfeld. I cataloged a number of the most notorious examples of left-wing hatred this May in a lead story at FrontPage Magazine (...) >>>

Sep. 3, 2009
~

PJM: "Germans in Hysterics Over Terrorist Money Tracking Program"

In the last few days, the German media and German politicians have been on an angry rampage against America’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP). The cause for their agitation are reports that the EU plans to continue permitting U.S. intelligence agencies access to some of the bank transfer data stored by the inter-bank network SWIFT. “In a ‘blitz’ action,” the margin of maneuver of U.S. terror-investigators is supposed to have been “massively extended.” The talk is of “highly-sensitive bank data” and of “American snoops [Schnüfflern]” who will be permitted “to spy on the entire range of transactions.” There is supposedly no dependable legal basis for the program and one “fears abuse.” All of the above according to Spiegel Online in an article titled “EU Allows the U.S. to Spy on Bank Accounts”. (...) Even for German standards, it is remarkable how unscrupulously falsehoods are being fired off at readers and television viewers. What an amazing concentration of paranoia, hysteria, and ignorance.

The TFTP is a program that the U.S. established in 2001 with Belgium, Spain, and other European countries, in order to trace the money flows of terror networks. The program was initially kept secret. No laws were broken and extensive precautionary measures were taken in order to assure that civil rights would not be violated. A super power’s military might is no help to it in the fight against terror networks. The conflict is not about destroying armies, but rather terror cells. The challenge is to identify the latter. In this connection, intelligence on money flows -– on the origins of payments that known or suspected terrorists receive, or on the destination of payments from known terror sponsors –- is of existential importance. Thanks to TFTP, it has been possible to uncover the ties between potential terrorists and their sponsors by following money flows. (...) >>>

Aug. 1, 2009
~

Blogging NASA psychiatrist Dr Sanity has two recent posts for the asylum page. While the first pertains to ethics rather than the political hystrionics for which this dossier is reserved, in the final analysis the lack of a moral compass lies at the root of every psychopathological phenomenon ... here's an excerpt, but the post is worth reading in its entire brilliance:

Dr Sanity: "BARBARISM, TORTURE AND MORAL COMPASSES"

(...) Ethics is the branch of philosophy that tells us how to behave in the world, or what is the proper course of action, particularly for situations like this where one is trying to determine what is "right" versus "wrong". On a fundamental level, ethics is really the manner in which we codify our most important values and act on them.

In a comment thread from a 2006 post at The Belmont Club, Wretchard, speaking about the barbaric Islamic fundamentalist terrorists with whom we were at war, wrote:

The brilliance of the new barbarism is that you cannot fight it without destroying your own value system into the bargain. Traditionally the solution has been to consider wartime a discontinuity, when civilization's rules are suspended. It becomes possible, for example, to lay waste to the Monte Cassino Abbey. Berlin was bombed without regard for its buildings, churches or people. (...) the war cannot be won without cost. And the fundamental fraud foisted on the public is to claim we can have war without horror, conduct an intelligence war without dishonesty and cunning and obtain victory without sacrifice.

His two points are particularly relevant in the discussion of torture. To the extent that we can, we have tried to maintain "civilization's rules" as much as possible, while at the same time suspending them when the situation demands--i.e., adherence to a life-affirming value system that requires you to protect innocents who might be harmed by evil. Indeed, when it comes to the issue of torture, one might even say from an historical perspective that the administration went overboard to try and find techniques that were sufficiently uncomfortable and even unbearable; and which would elicit the necessary information without inflicting lasting harm on the recipient. In this, they were obviously successful. (...) >>>
~

Dr Sanity: "NARCISSISM, PATHOLOGICAL LYING, AND POLITICS"

One type of denial is Repression , a neurotic defense characterized by a seemingly inexplicable naivete, memory lapse, or lack of awareness. Repression is often dismissed as an artifact of diminished attention by cognitive psychologists, but I find that it almost always reflects a rather creative method to resolve some inner conflict for the person who uses it. With repression, affect is out in the open, but the associated idea is out of the mind and unavailable to consider. Someone who has repressed some knowledge may be genuinely astonished that anyone would consider them to have deliberately ignored the issue. The "forgetting of repression is different from ordinary forgetting in that there is often some sort of parallel symbolic behavior that goes along with it. (...) >>>

May 18, 2009
~

To archive >>>