Still More About The Misuse Of Science

Charles Krauthammer takes a look at an article in the newly re-launched New Republic. He identifies an entirely new syndrome - Bush Derangement Syndrome - Cheney Variant.

"What is wrong with Dick Cheney?" asks Michelle Cottle in the inaugural issue of the newly relaunched New Republic. She then spends the next 1,900 words marshaling evidence suggesting that his cardiac disease has left him demented and mentally disordered.

The charming part of this not-to-be-missed article (titled "Heart of Darkness," no less) is that it is framed as an exercise in compassion. Since Cottle knows that the only way for her New Republic readers to understand Cheney is that he is evil — "next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don't automatically assume that he's a bad man," she advises — surely the generous thing for a liberal to do is write him off as simply nuts. In the wonderland of liberalism, Cottle is trying to make the case for Cheney by offering the insanity defense……

……I was at first inclined to pass off Cottle's piece as a weird put-on — when people become particularly deranged about this administration, it's hard to tell — but her earnest and lengthy piling on of medical research about dementia and cardiovascular disease suggests that she is quite serious.

And supremely silly. Such silliness has a pedigree, mind you. It is in the great tradition of the 1964 poll of psychiatrists that found Barry Goldwater clinically paranoid. Goldwater having become over the years the liberals' favorite conservative (because of his libertarianism), nary a word is heard today about him being mentally ill or about that shameful election-year misuse of medical authority by the psychiatrists who responded to the poll. The disease they saw in Goldwater was, in fact, deviation from liberalism, which remains today so incomprehensible to some that it must be explained by resort to arterial plaques and cardiac ejection fractions.

Worse yet, I think, is that the former Soviet Union did things like this. Labeling of people who disagreed with the system as mentally unstable and placing them into psychiatric wards. That is very dangerous territory, indeed. I have not read Cottle's piece directly (the last thing I tried to read at TNR required a lengthy and intrusive registration - a game I will not play) so I have no idea what, if any, credentials Cottle has to make such a diagnosis. My guess is almost none based on her stated resume.

Michelle Cottle has been a senior editor at The New Republic since February 1999. She is a 1992 magna cum laude graduate of Vanderbilt University with a B.A. in English and a minor in European Studies.  

At the risk of sounding snarky here, a BA in English does not give one the ability to make medical or psychiatric diagnoses. Just because you can use the words doesn't mean you actually understand them. To those inclined to believe Cottle's take on Cheney ask yourself: would you let her diagnose a pain in your side? I have a BS in Mathematics and Psychology (dual major) and graduated summa cum laude (I am not kidding). That makes me more qualified than Cottle!