Bush's preferences

[Ivo Skoric]

Need to read also Karl Meyer's article in World Policy Journal 
"Postcards from Planet Jupiter" drawintg a parallel between GWB and 
kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany: "Yet some also noted his tendency to 
swagger, his love of uniforms, his intellectual shallowness, and his 
repeated references to Germany's providential mission." What followed 
was two world wars, demisse of four empires, creation of the Middle 
East problem, attempt to extinguish a race, and the first ever use of 
weapons of mass destruction, by Germans, of course, at Ypres....

ivo

On 14 Aug 2003 at 1:04, Miroslav Visic wrote:



From: Dr Peter Hall <phall at GN.APC.ORG>
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I have long considered Bush to have too fragile a sense confidence to
be comfortable with uncertainty .

Here psychologists "peer into the psyche of President George Bush, 
who
turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his 
preference
for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance. "

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the
familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose
simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the
Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the
aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain
the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that
contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Peter Hall

==============================


        Study of Bush's psyche touches a nerve

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday August 13, 2003
The Guardian

A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism
can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear
and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the
report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the
rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered 
from
the same affliction.

All of them "preached a return to an idealised past and condoned
inequality".

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the
report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, 
received
$1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who
turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his 
preference
for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the
familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose
simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the
Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the
aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain
the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that
contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to
trigger, added a disclaimer that their study "does not mean that
conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are
necessarily false".

Another author, Arie Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland, said
he had received hate mail since the article was published, but he
insisted that the study "is not critical of conservatives at all".
"The variables we talk about are general human dimensions," he said.
"These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and
commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of
ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less 
loyal."

But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post
columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted,
tartly: "The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of
our psychological needs and neuroses."



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bad conquerors.