I posted a message here earlier today, in one of the topics (
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x1088069 ) about the Suskind article in the NY Times, referring people to an article in the Guardian last year (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1033904,00.html ), a psychologist's analysis of W's personality.
The psychologist quoted David Frum, Bush's former speechwriter, at both the start and the end of the article. The quote at the end has Frum saying that "Bush is a man of fierce anger."
I just used Google to do some quick checking, and ran across the transcript of a lengthy interview of Frum earlier this year, an appearance at Berkeley. This is from one of the web pages with that transcript, at
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Frum/frum-con3.html :
Q: So you also make a point of emphasizing the fact that he is both disciplined and evangelical. Talk a little about that, because in the media sometimes they don't take those virtues or vices, however you look at them, seriously. It is perceived that he is pretending to be those two things.
A: Well, on the discipline, this is a man who went through a crisis in midlife. People are often baffled: how can somebody who's born to a wealthy and influential family, as George Bush was, have the kind of accord with ordinary Americans that he seems to have? Isn't that odd? And the answer is this great crisis he went through, that whatever the advantages of his early life, George Bush was someone who needed a second chance. And this is a country in which that's a very familiar experience. You could write the story of his forty, or even forty-five years, and call it a "study in failure," which is the title of the famous biography of Winston Churchill, up until the age of 60 -- not a success at school, unlike his father; he had a very spotty military record, unlike his father; not a great athlete, unlike his father; went into business, failed at it, unlike his father. And a lot of people will say, "Well, he had a wealthy father and his brothers were successful," as if having successful relatives makes one's own failure easier to bear. After the last of his failures in business, which lost a lot of his father's friends a lot of money, he began hitting the bottle pretty hard, and it created a crisis that he had to overcome.
The way he overcame it was by locking himself inside this iron carapace of discipline: he gets up early, he goes through the day, he does the same thing. He watches his words. If you've seen him on television in close-up, that thing that he does with his mouth, which looks like he's swishing mouthwash around, what he's doing is holding back words. And a lot of his problems with the English language come not because the words don't come into his mind, but because the words do and he's trying to bite them back and look for other words that are maybe less harsh. So he's a person under tremendous restraint. The religion is part of it. It is from the religion that he gets the strength to do that. It's not phony. It's who he is. I don't think anyone who's ever had contact with him has any doubt that the religion is completely genuine and an important key to understanding his personality.So W's incoherence isn't due only to stupidity that makes him unqualified for the job. And his bizarre mouth movements aren't due only to some possible neurological problem that would also make him unfit for office. It's "only" nearly uncontrollable anger (deeply rooted anger that the Guardian article explains), anger so great he can't control his mouth movements or come up with the right words.
And the media whores keep nattering on and on about how "likable" he is...
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