Pop Psychology

Seven Days in December?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 5, 2007

I'll make you two promises: a very good steak, medium rare, and the truth, which is very rare.
-Ava Gardner in Seven Days In May

Back in October, Maureen Dowd evoked the dark comedy Dr. Strangelove to ridicule the relentless push for an attack on Iran. Now, as a National Intelligence Estimate pulls the rug out from under the neocon call for war, Dowd recalls the classic political thriller Seven Days In May. Kirk Douglas foils a coup d'état led by charismatic general Burt Lancaster. Norman Podhoretz is forgetting who the bad guys were in the movie:

Even though Norman Podhoretz is conjuring up a “Seven Days in December” spy thriller scenario in which the intelligence agencies colluded to sabotage the president and prevent him from the noble mission of air strikes on Iran, W. insisted he felt “pretty good about life.”

The N-Podian doublethink is elucidated in his Commentary article where Warhawk Norm makes the argument that since the intelligence community was wrong about Iraq building nukes, it must also be wrong about Iran NOT building nukes. The conspiratorial part of the delusion comes with this quote:

But I entertain an even darker suspicion. It is that the intelligence community, which has for some years now been leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush, is doing it again. This time the purpose is to head off the possibility that the President may order air strikes on the Iranian nuclear installations.

This rationalization extends to Dubya’s worldview according to Dowd:

If W. can shape the intelligence to match his faith-based beliefs, as with Iraq, then he will believe the intelligence — no matter how incredible it is.

If he can’t shape it to match his beliefs, as with Iran, then he will disregard the intelligence — no matter how credible it is.

Dowd then explicitly points out the 1984-ish paranoid paradox of W., Cheney and the neocons (which would be a good name for a very out of tune rock band).

The president, who has shut out reality for seven years, justified continuing in his world of ideological illusion by saying that he would not be “blinded” to the realities of the world. You can’t get more Orwellian than that.

“And so,” W. concluded triumphantly, and nonsensically, “kind of Psychology 101 ain’t working.”

Bush The Elder once called Reagonomics “voodoo”, but Dubya is dismissive of another soft science:

W. loves to act as though psychology is voodoo even though his whole misbegotten foreign policy has been conducted from his gut, by checking the body language of his inner circle and looking into the hearts and souls of dictatorial leaders.

If I were looking at the latest fiasco from a Psych 101 point of view, I’d say it was another daddy issue for W.

Poppy Bush, who was once C.I.A. director, loved the agency and liked to sign notes: “Head Spook.” The C.I.A. headquarters bear his name.

W., by contrast, has voiced contempt for the intelligence community. In 2004, he dismissed a pessimistic National Intelligence Estimate that didn’t match his sunny vision of the Iraq occupation, saying that the analysts were “just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.”

Armchair pop psychoanalysis of Dubya is a cottage industry including books and articles describing the various pathologies that he exhibits. Many theories cover the long tumultuous history Bush 43 had with Bush 41. Wikipedia describes an infamous encounter:

The most notorious episode, reported in numerous diverse sources including U.S. News & World Report, November 1, 1999, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq by Robert Parry, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty by Bill Minutaglio, and W: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty by Elizabeth Mitchell, has 26-year-old George W. Bush visiting his parents in Washington, D. C. over the Christmas vacation in 1972 (shortly after the death of his grandfather) and taking his 16-year-old brother Marvin out drinking. On the way home George lost control of the car and ran over a garbage can, but continued home with the can wedged noisily under the car. When his father, George H. W. Bush, called him on the carpet for not only his own behavior but for exposing his younger brother to risk, George W., still under the influence, appears to have retorted angrily, "I hear you're looking for me. You wanna go mano-a-mano right here?"

Dowd takes this encounter and others like it and makes it a metaphor for the entire Bush legacy.

When W.’s history is written, he will be seen as the rebellious teenager crashing the family station wagon into his father’s three most cherished spots — diplomacy, intelligence and the Gulf.

While many rumor that Dowd has a soft spot for Pappy, she clearly understands which Bush was the wise patriach and which prodigal son squandered a legacy.

Dowd Declares War On Iran

Maureen Dowd's sense of sarcasm is a little subtle and something got lost in translation. Al Kamen of the Washington Post reports that an English language Iranian news agency picked up Dowd's mock-Cheney interview and passed them along as dire warnings of more American sabre rattling. Someone must have tipped them off, because the report go quickly buried. According to Kamen:

It seems New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd brought us closer to the brink with a Sunday column in which she purported to interview Vice President Cheney. This is how it played on Press TV, the first international Iran-based news network to broadcast 24-7 in English.

"Cheney: Iran has WMDs, just like Iraq," said the headline on the online edition, posted Sunday.

"The US Vice President, Dick Cheney, has accused the Islamic Republic of having weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 'just like Saddam,' " the story read.

"While the negotiations are underway between Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog, the hawkish US official said the White House considers Iran's nuclear dossier in 'the final stages of diplomacy,' " the report said.

" 'We are not going to get hung up on democracy this time,' Dick Cheney said in an interview with the New York Times on Sunday. 'It's time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them,' said the Vice President, when asked how close Washington was to launching military strikes on Iran. "

Note that the Iranians confuse Tim Russert with a New York Times reporter. All these MSM types look alike. Kamen continues:

The item was no longer on the site yesterday, maybe because someone realized Cheney would no more sit down and chat with Dowd than he would with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Chatting with us yesterday, Dowd noted that satire has its risks.

Ya think?

According to National Review Online mediablog, this is not the first time that an Iranian news agency has picked up Dowd's commenting as reporting. Her earlier Cheney as Madman column (and they are beginning to get hard to keep straight). The NRO spin is nicely summarized in the title Islamic Regime’s New Pin-up Girl: Maureen Dowd. It goes on to say:

First Maureen Dowd writes a piece of agit-prop against the American government, and it is published in The New York Times yesterday under the title “Madness as Method.”

Then today, the Islamic Republic News Agency – one of the propaganda arms of the Iranian regime, and an outlet that has helped Ahmadinejad deny the Holocaust – repeats much of Dowd’s column almost verbatim (although without Dowd’s by line)

The Iranian version of her column is online here. I hope Maureen is getting royalties from all these reprints.

OMG! Cheney on MTP

W.M.D. in Iran? Q.E.D.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 28, 2007

Quod erat demonstrandum: a Latin phrase used at the end of a definitive proof

This week, Maureen Dowd’s dental fillings are picking up a Meet The Press episode that hasn’t happened yet.

RUSSERT: How close are we to war with Iran?
CHENEY: Well, I think we are in the final stages of diplomacy, obviously. We have done virtually everything we can with respect to carrots, if you will. It’s time for squash. Not to mention mushrooms, clouds of them.
RUSSERT: Isn’t Secretary Rice still pushing carrots for Iran?
CHENEY: The more carrots Condi feeds ’em, the better they’ll be able to see the bombs coming.

Dowd must be on a truly strange diet because she has become obsessed with vegetables. She has mentioned using carrots as a motivator with Iraq back during In A Dinner Jacket’s speech and earlier this week as well. The vegetable stew recall Condoleezza Rice’s testimony that the smoking gun in Iraq could be a mushroom cloud.

Another Dowd fascination is with the career backgrounds of Middle-Eastern dictators. She dismissed Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an engineer with PhD, as a traffic planner.

CHENEY: Syria is not a country, Tim. It’s a way station run by an eye doctor.

Sure enough, according to Wikipedia, Syrian hereditary president Bashar al-Assad has an ophthalmology degree. Dowd’s preoccupation with mocking the previous jobs of politicians is intriguing. If being an engineer or doctor isn’t good enough to run a country, what is? Actor? Rancher? Housewife? Journalist?

We then get a brief lesson in the 20th century handling of dangerous dictators.

CHENEY: Why don’t we just give the Islamofascists Sudetenland, Tim? Peace in our time.
RUSSERT: The Europeans are upset that you might start another war in their backyard.
CHENEY: (Rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath) Eurappeasers.

Both Sudetenland and Eurappeasers evoke the efforts of pre-World War II European leaders to satiate Hitler’s lust for territory. The Sudetenland was a part of Czechoslovakia that Hitler really, really wanted. ImaginaryCheney here has clearly lost the debate by invoking Godwin’s Law.

CHENEY: You really want Rudy Giuliani playing with the nuclear button, Tim? Now, that’s insane.

According to Dowd, Cheney is going to be the insane Slim Pickens riding the bomb down to Tehran. That must make Rudy President Merkin Muffley.

Riding The Crazy Plane

Madness as Method
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 24, 2007

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–206

Today, Maureen Dowd levels her shotgun at Dick Cheney but with a wide spread takes on plenty of other familiar targets.

Dick Cheney’s craziness used to influence foreign policy.

Now it is foreign policy.

He may have lost his buddy in belligerence, Rummy. He may have tapped out the military in Iraq. He may not be able to persuade Congress so easily anymore — except for Hillary — to issue warlike resolutions.

According the the UK Telegraph:

[Senator Clinton] was the only Democratic candidate who voted for a resolution last month that called on Mr Bush to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group.

Clinton’s position on Iran lets her get pilloried on both the left and the right as Dowd later points out:

Rudy is using his more martial attitude toward Iran as a weapon against Hillary, painting her as a delicate ditherer on the topic.

And delicate ditherer is both our Alliteration of the Afternoon and a new Hillary epithet fitting with the Hamlet reference in the title. But the main thrust of the article is that not only does Cheney, as the biggest of the chickenhawks, want to bomb Iran, he’s crazy enough to do it.

Cheney seems to enjoy giving the impression that he is loony enough to pull off an attack on Iran before leaving office — even if he has to do it alone, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in “Dr. Strangelove” to the sentimental tune of “We’ll Meet Again.”

Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb is a Stanley Kubrick black comedy classic about a rogue Air Force officer that starts a nuclear showdown with the old Soviet Union. It’s full of classic ironic quotes like:

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.

Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

Ambassador de Sadesky: Our doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we had been spending on defense in a single year. The deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a doomsday gap.
President Merkin Muffley: This is preposterous. I've never approved of anything like that.
Ambassador de Sadesky: Our source was the New York Times.

See, even in the movies, the Times is undermining national security.

And then we start getting some callbacks like a stand-up comedian.

The neocons who have their heart set on bombing Iran to stop I’m-a-Dinner-Jacket and the mullahs from getting nuclear capability were thrilled and emboldened by the placid reaction to the Israeli air strike on Syria.

That is, of course, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose Couric-inspired nickname you will remember from the fruitbat column. That column also used a carrot and stick metaphor that gets trotted out again.

In his new book, the former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton scornfully accuses Colin Powell, and later Condi Rice, of appeasing Iran, including some carrots to get them to cease their nuclear plans.

Hit with sticks, the bogyman responded with sticks. He said that Iran will not negotiate with anyone about its right to nuclear technology.

And even though Dowd invokes Slim Pickens in the Dr Strangelove reference, the better comparison is to General Jack D. Ripper who says:

[Clemenceau] said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

Substitute “Communist” with “IslamoFascist” and “bodily fluids” with “oil resources” and I think you have Cheney’s next speech, right before the rogue B-52s head for Tehran.

Fruitbat In A Dinner Jacket

‘Fruitbat’ at Bat
by MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 26, 2007

“Casey At The Bat” is a famous poem about a small-town baseball hero that endures humiliation when he strikes out in a clutch situation. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was called a fruitbat by Greg Gutfeld of Fox News upon the event of his delivering a speech at Columbia University.

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran — the mullahs — can love.

According to Wikipedia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s doctorate is in transportation engineering and planning, a subdivision of civil engineering. His undergraduate entrance exam scores ranked him 132 out of 40,000.

But while challenging the policies and ideology of the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan understood he had to engage Mikhail Gorbachev, not ignore or insult him.

Reagan was able to help the Soviet Union — and world communism — to fall apart. All W. has managed to do is destroy the country he wanted to turn into a democracy and make Iran more powerful than it was before.

In Iranian eyes, the U.S. has behaved in a way that continually diminishes their country” — from U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup that reinstated the Shah to W.’s branding them as part of the “axis of evil.”

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire” in a speech on March 3, 1983. The Soviet Union dissolved amid political and economic chaos in 1991. Dubya described Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as members of the “Axis of Evil” in his State of The Union speech on January 29, 2002. The United States invaded and defeated Iraq in March of 2003. North Korea tested a nuclear device in 2006. Iran, well, that's the point.

Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?

“Carrot and stick” is a frequently debated metaphor that either means a combination of rewards and punishments is the best combination of motivations or it implies that the hope for a reward, no matter how illusory is an effective incentive.

Sticks and stones may break my bones / But words will never hurt me is a common schoolyard rebuttal to verbal insults. Maybe stones and carrots like in the stone soup fable would be the best solution.

The president’s irrelevant U.N. speech was a bad combo with the schoolyard name-calling of Lee Bollinger.

Complete the following the analogy:

Kettle:pot::Lee Bollinger:_________

(Hint.)