Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Psycho Babel

Photo by Brian Lary from inside a radio tower

Clinton Derangement Syndrome abounds in the media in a sickening incarnation:

During the April 7 edition of Fox News' America's Election HQ, radio host Tammy Bruce joined the growing list of media figures who have purported to diagnose Sen. Hillary Clinton with a mental disorder, asserting of Clinton, "Well, there's an actual psychiatric term called mythomania, and it's part of a larger psychiatric scheme of people who make up fantastic stories to bolster their own image." As supposed evidence of Clinton "literally making up things out of whole cloth," Bruce claimed that Clinton had discussed "Chelsea being at the World Trade Center on September 11th." In fact, Hillary Clinton did not claim that her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was "at the World Trade Center on September 11th"; rather, as Media Matters for America has documented, Hillary Clinton said that her daughter had "gone, what she thought would be just a great jog. She was going to go down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and -- and that's when the plane hit."

As Media Matters noted, in a February 25 National Review Online blog post, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow wrote, "Now I'm no psychiatrist, far from it, but I think a simple answer is that Senator Clinton could be depressed." In a February 27 New York Times column, Maureen Dowd wrote that Clinton "has turned into Sybil," an apparent reference to a book and movie about a woman who developed multiple personality disorder after being severely abused as a child. On the February 26 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, commentator Jack Cafferty claimed Clinton "[r]esembl[ed] someone with multiple personality disorder." And on the February 25 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Chicago Tribune reporter Jill Zuckman asserted that Clinton's behavior "comes across as a little schizophrenic." As Media Matters further documented, in her book The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton (Regnery Publishing, 2007), Republican strategist Bay Buchanan suggested that Clinton may have a disorder "involving narcissistic personality style," and was quoted in an article about the book as saying, "[W]e are talking about a clinical condition that could make her [Clinton] dangerously ill-suited to become President and Commander in Chief."

A clinically-trained mental health professional would never attempt a psych evaluation from afar but these pundits--who aren't qualified or evidently self-aware enough to diagnose their own shameless behavior--do. Puh-leeze. They're snarling Hillary-hating loudmouths with a megaphone at their disposal to disseminate mindless irresponsible pronouncements and fork-tongued propaganda.

You can't miss the misogyny in some of the rhetoric, in Kudlow's case, a blog post entitled, "Hillary's Mental Roller Coaster"...

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed Hillary's erratic, roller-coaster, mood swings these past few weeks?

She's all over the map. Irritable and angry. Manic. Pessimistic and sad. One minute she's shedding tears, the next minute she's shouting and attacking, then she's sarcastically ripping on Obama, and on and on it goes.

C'mon. We know a sexist dog whistle when we hear it, the implication that Hillary acted like an unhinged, hysterical female. The "sarcastically ripping on Obama" likens to Marc Rudov's whiny characterization of "when Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, 'Take out the garbage.' " What Kudlow wrote doesn't unveil anything truthful or relevant: it's chatter exposing him as an exaggerator, whose embellished tale delivers a dramatized slimeball he can toss.

Not only is our media the worst, sleaziest press corps possible, but they're predatory and paid handsomely, some of them multi-millions, to say depraved, toxic, inflammatory nonsense. They do it to get people to watch The Show, to read Their Words, to listen to Their Shtick and they're smirking all the way to their estates in Nantucket having reeled in the rubes who lap up their craptoids as if they're M&M candies. Those media darthlings who haven't made it that big yet are slobbering rapaciously in their quest for "Millionaire Pundit Values."

The sane choice of any sentient being is to turn 'em off with the realization, "Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park." Which applies to the Tower of Noise, the babbling bobbleheads, the media's hit men, The Village.

UPDATE: Susie Madrak picked up on Dick Morris' lie, his contribution to the towering Psycho Babel.