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from Bush on the Couch, by Justin Frank:
'As any parent of a son knows, one thing that every little boy loves to get his hands on is his penis, the focal point of another common developmental phase that is particularly pronounced in boys with over-active fantasies of grandiosity. In this phase of 'phallic narcissism,' the boy of three to sic years old has a sense that his penis is the biggest and strongest in the world, and that it should be admired by everyone around him. Most boys go through this phase in one way or another, and some even manage to get perspective on it. But there are those who fear shame or humiliation, who have perhaps been shamed by the inattentiveness of their parents, (my comment: bush was ignored and neglected by both mom and dad throughout his life) who compensate by becoming the cock of the walk - - - or, more accurately, the cock with the walk, the walking penis, who embodies his phallic narcissism in his erect posture and fastidiously developed and maintained physical strength. We see traces of this in the adult George W Bush's compulsive devotion to exercise; he is so obsessed with making sure his body remains unequaled, unbent by age or aggression, that even only a month after the attack on the Twin Towers - - - a tragedy that takes on new symbolic resonance to an individual who seems never to have completely outgrown this stage of childhood phallic narcissism - - - he needed to remind reporters that he had just run a mile in under seven minutes. And eighteen months later, he looked even stronger when he landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in his hyper-masculine flight suit, standing proudly before the fraudulent "Mission Accomplished" banner.
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. . . Many parents can remember their sons waving their penises around and proudly declaring their strength, and we see derivatives of this in adult men who emphasize the size of everything from their car to their football team to their capacity to consume beer. As commander-in-chief, Bush now has the largest symbolic penis in the world to wave around, with aircraft carriers larger than any SUV to help him fulfill his superhero fantasies and "defeat the evildoers."
Defeating evildoers who humiliated his father - - - whether he is relentlessly criticizing and attempting to destroy all of Clinton's successes, or bombing Baghdad to settle a family score with a barely competent ex-tyrant - - - has pr oven an effective way for this President Bush to disguise his own wish to defeat his own father. . . even from himself. He must be good, he can tell himself; after all, he's protecting daddy, by beating daddy's bogeyman. Thus, he attacks his father's attackers, externalizing his murderous rage, even as his aggression lays waste to the international coalition his father helped build. George W. Bush is so profoundly conflicted, it's no wonder he needs so much time off.
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But Bush doesn't have to leave town to be absent, as Paul O'Neill's look inside the Bush White House has confirmed. Bush's father was AWOL from the family; now Bush is an AWOL president, and not just when he is in Crawford. He turns away from truth, from what is important; he is, in O'Neill's phrase, the "blind man in a room full of deaf people." But his absence is more than a passive lack of presence; it is a malign indifference, a repudiation of the commitment to public service that his family worked so hard to make central to its reputation.'
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