He cannot stop himself so we must stop him ourselves

Something snapped. It finally happened. The long awaited coin finally dropped.

Maybe it was his delusional New Years' Eve edition of the weekly President's Radio Address, where he said the economy is booming, the Iraqi people are rejoicing in the afterglow of their new-found democracy, the people of the Gulf Coast are celebrating their return home, and there's practically nothing wrong anywhere in the whole wide world.

Or perhaps it was his swaggering and defiant attack on reporters at a military hospital in San Antonio the next day who had the audacity to ask again why he thought it was okay to break the law and spy on Americans.

There have been so many signs over the years. Sometimes the episodes are amusing, sometimes just confusing. Increasingly they are threatening. But at some point Americans need to begin to wonder what's going on in his head. Sooner or later we'll all have to come to grips with the fact that the state of mind of the President of the United States is a matter of national and worldwide security.

Consider this: A man struggling with his own anxiety and feelings of inadequacy will employ various strategies throughout his life:

1) through alcohol and other substance abuse;

2) by being a born-again Christian, being connected to God, by feeling that he'll be saved in any kind of a rapture, by feeling that he's always on the side of the Good;

3) by making other people anxious, so he can project his anxiety into the rest of us;

4) simplifying things, dividing the real world from his own inner world, into good and bad, into black and white;

5) by being dismissive or cruel to other people, by making them anxious, and by gratifying his own sense of power to compensate for feeling helpless;

6) and by becoming detached from the consequences of his behavior.

In the words of psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, "Bush will not stop of his own choosing. He will only have to be stopped."

Bush's Mental State Raises Serious Questions - Uniorb

Bush on the Couch : Inside the Mind of the President - Justin A. Frank