The Bush Syndrome

To know George W. Bush is to know psychopathology. More than ever people are writing about different sides of his behavior -- from the Huffington Post to the NY Daily News to the New Yorker; from detachment to delusional to paranoid.

If one studies Bush in depth (the task I undertook in writing "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President") one discovers that Bush presents symptoms and particulars of all the major psychiatric disorders, including bipolar illness, sociopathy, schizoid disorder, narcissism and alcoholism. Let's call it "the Bush syndrome."

The same used to be true for syphilis. Before penicillin the adage went, "to know syphilis is to know medicine." By studying syphilis in depth one discovered that it too presented with symptoms running the gamut of medical syndromes -- from cardiac to diabetic to psychiatric to neurological.

Syphilis is now curable, thanks to penicillin. Unfortunately there is no cure for the Bush syndrome. But there is a remedy for our nation: Bush must be quarantined -- either by invoking the 25th Amendment (which deals with a president too incapacitated to govern) or by impeachment. Both processes take a long time, but failure to act will only mean debt that keeps rising, more soldiers dying, more destructive judges being appointed, more global warming, less health care and an educational system that disgraces us all.