March 20, 2003
George W. Is High on Killing
Every once in a while we experience one of those little moments when a small tear breaks through the social fabric and allows us a glimpse of its underlying workings.A Knight Ridder reporter was treated to such a rare glimpse and apparently couldn't resist including it in his story, though it was tangential to the narrative. And no editor cut it out, so we are left with a gem, a glimpse into the strange personality of George W.
The article was a description of Bush's speech announcing that he had ordered strikes to begin on Iraq.
Here's the quote: "Minutes before the speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. 'Feels good,' he said."
Dubya is now at the brink of what he has pushed for relentlessly for years, perhaps as far back as 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected and ruined Daddy Bush's chance to continue his agenda and get in a few more armed engagements, which surely would have included a return to Iraq to take revenge for his embarassment over people talking about "the wimp factor" and saying he was a little feminine.
CNN started hyping "Iraq: The Unfinished War" with its own logo back in December 2001 even before George W. took office. It has been a long time coming. It took 911 to clear the way for the war Bush desired so passionately. Now he is so close he can taste it. The blood has begun to flow, and it is exhilarating. Soon he will have Saddam Hussein's head.
We are talking now about a guy who as a kid put firecrackers in frogs and threw them into the air to watch them explode. He cracked himself up in an interview with Talk magazine by mocking a woman on death row whose cries for mercy he scorned, screwing up his face and saying, "Please don't kill me!" in an impersonation of the deceased.
He presided over more executions as governor of Texas than any governor since capital punishment was legalized. His own people said he never spent more than 15 minutes deliberating over whether to sign the order to kill. This included at least one case in which the public defender slept during the trial, and many other cases in which the court-appointed lawyers obviously just took the money and ran, leaving their clients to the mercy of a vicious and corrupt system.
This is a man who enjoys killing. He is totally in his element when it comes to killing. Everyone is different. This is the way he is.
It reminds me of something in Ed Sanders' book on the Charles Manson murders The Family, in which Sanders described Manson as one who, even more than the excessive drug use and sex of his little tribe, got off on murder. Some people like it.
Then there was Ted Bundy, the serial killer. In one documentary film, a police detective who had worked to track down Bundy seemed uncharacteristically amazed when he said, "I never encountered anyone who was so consumed with murder."
So here is George preparing to give his speech announcing that the killing has begun in Iraq, the long-awaited moment. And there he is pumping his fist and saying, "Feels good!" It makes perfect sense, too much sense.
That's one for the history books.
More on Georgie's frog-exploding activities:
Someone asked me for the source on young George W.'s frog-exploding experiments, so I did some searches and came up with some ... interesting stuff. Interesting? How about terrifying? This is a real life horror story. It ain't no Stephen King movie. The real life Dubya inspires images of the devil's child in the movie "The Omen". Or worse.In biographical sketch of Bush in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff quotes Bush's boyhood friend Terry Throckmorton as saying, "We were terrible to animals." When the frogs came out after a rain, the kids would get BB guns and shoot them, Throckmorton said, or worse. "Or we'd put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up."
To really stoke your fears of this guy's capacity for psychopathology, check out "Shrub Bush's Pathological Focus On Saddam Hussein" by Alvin Wyman Walker, PhD, PD, PC.. It refers to the frog assassinations, among other things.
This was the son of the head of the CIA we are talking about. Try to grok that for a second.
The article I had on file for the frog anecdote was in an article by Myriam Miedzian, called "Growing up is hard to do," originally published in the Baltimore Sun, September 12, 2000.
Here's a key section:
So when he was a kid, George W. enjoyed putting firecrackers into frogs, throwing them in the air, and then watching them blow up. Should this be cause for alarm? How relevant is a man's childhood behavior to what he is like as an adult? And in this case, to what he would be like as president of the United States?
Cruelty to animals is a common precursor to later criminal violence. But in rural West Texas, where George W. grew up, it was not uncommon for some boys to indulge in such cruelty....
His blowing up frogs or shooting them with BB guns with friends does not have the same significance it would have if, for example, a city boy blew up the family cat. In fact, George's childhood friend, Terry Throckmorton, openly and laughingly admits, 'We were terrible to animals.'
But there were surely many boys in George's hometown of Midland, Texas, who would have been repelled at the thought of blowing up frogs. So how much importance should we attribute to this early behavior?
Is boy George's lack of empathy and cruelty not just childhood insensitivity, but rather a personality trait still present in the man? If so, we have much to be concerned about.
I received this e-mail today:
Hi,
I was drawn to your site by an article about George 'Feelgood' Bush - it's a dangerous place for a person who should be working!
It seems like a startling (not to say scaring) coincidence that you should compare him to Bundy et al. As soon as I saw Bush on tv the first time I felt that he was the kind of person that one shouldn't turn the back on. There's simply something about his ... 'aura' if you will; he seems to emanate something horribly wrong, like there's no actual person inside. Even today I simply switch away from his appearances on tv.
So, I very quickly started believing that he is a psychopath. I've read a good deal about the subject, and it fits too well, I think. Psychopaths tend to have this air of 'innocense' about them - like they can't for their lives imagine why people are so cross about what they do - whether it is lying, stealing or killing. Bush reminds me about something I read many years ago, in a book by C.S.Lewis ('Perelandra' I think it was called). It's a kind of 'science fiction', and the main character (named 'Ransom' I think) is on Venus engaged in a mental battle with the evil guy, and in one scene he finds the bad guy engrossed in killing frogs in a painful way. What really took my breath away about this situation is the way he meets Ransom with a totally innocent smile - this is a guy that quite clearly and simply enjoys what he is doing and finds nothing wrong about it.
I think when we begin to see pictures of little children blown apart or whatever, Bush will simply not feel anything, and he will be surprised that others do. That I believe is also the reason why he always talks as if he doesn't know what he is saying - because he doesn't. It doesn't come from the heart, there is no heart, no soul. This is not the emperor with no clothes, it's the clothes with no emperor.
It is probably hard for most to imagine how it is to be Bush - or any other psychopath. Normal people feel something whenever they say or think something; it's not possible not to. Even when you say a neutral word like 'car' it evokes feelings, and of course emotional words evoke more. Apparently psychopaths aren't that way - they are 'semantically blind'.
For more about Bush's frog killing see Revenge of the Bush Dynasty, by Elizabeth Mitchell published by Hyperion Press, 2001 ISBN: 0786866306.