O Mental? Shrink Thinks So

[WilliamW]

A Shrink Asks: What's Wrong with Obama?

June 11, 2010
By Robin of Berkeley

So what is the matter with Obama? Conservatives have been asking this question for some time. I've written a number of articles trying to solve the mystery.  

Even some liberals are starting to wonder. James Carville railed about Obama's blasé attitude after the catastrophic oil spill. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd revamped Obama's "Yes We Can" motto into "Will We Ever?"

The liberal women of the TV show "The View" have expressed sympathy for Michelle Obama's living with a man so out of touch. Peggy Noonan, hardly a vehement Obama foe,  recently pronounced him disconnected.  

Obama's odd mannerisms intrigue a psychotherapist like me. He also presents a serious diagnostic challenge.  

For one, Obama's teleprompter and the men behind the Blackberry keep him well-scripted. We know so little about the facts of his life.

But it's more than just a lack of information. Obama himself is a strange bird. He doesn't fit easily into any diagnostic category.

Many people attribute Obama's oddness to his narcissism. True, Obama has a gargantuan ego, and he is notoriously thin-skinned.

Yet a personality disorder like narcissism does not explain Obama's strangeness: his giggling while being asked about the economy; his continuing a shout-out rather than announcing the Ft. Hood shootings; or his vacations, golfing, partying and fundraising during the calamitous oil spill.

Take also Obama's declaring on the "Today Show" that he wants to know whose ass to kick. Consummate narcissists would never stoop to this vulgar display of adolescent machismo.

Obama is flat when passion is needed; he's aggressive when savvy is required. What's most worrisome is that Obama doesn't even realize that his behavior is inappropriate.

So if it's not just simple narcissism, what is wrong with Obama? Since I've never evaluated him, I can't say for sure. But I can hazard some educated guesses.

If I saw a client as disconnected as him, the first thing I would wonder: Is something wrong with his brain? And I'd consider the following theoretical diagnostic possibilities.

--Physical problems: There are a multitude of physiological conditions that can cause people to act strangely. For instance: head injuries, endocrine disturbances, epilepsy, and toxic chemical exposure.

It makes me wonder: Did Obama ever have a head injury? His stepfather in Indonesia was purportedly an alcoholic abuser. Was Obama subject to any physical abuse?

-- Drugs and alcohol: Damage to the brain from drugs and alcohol can also cause significant cognitive impairments. Obama once said that there were 57 states -- and didn't correct himself. Memory problems can be caused by both illicit and prescription drug use.

Obama admits to a history of drug use in his youth. Did his usage cause some damage? Does Obama still use?  

--Asperger's Syndrome: Also known as high-functioning autism, Asperger's causes deficits in social skills. A person with Asperger's can't read social cues. Consequently, he can be insensitive and hurtful without even knowing it.

Could Obama have Asperger's? He might have some mild traits, but certainly not the full-blown disorder. In contrast to Obama, those with Asperger's get fixated on some behavior, like programming computers. Obama lacks this kind of passion and zeal.

--Mental Illness: Obama's family tree is replete with the unbalanced. His maternal great-grandmother committed suicide. His grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was particularly unhinged: He was expelled from high school for punching his principal; named his daughter Stanley because he wanted a boy; and exposed young Barry to not just drunken trash talk, but unrestricted visits with alleged pedophile Frank Marshall Davis (who might or might not be Obama's biological father). Barack Sr. was an abusive, alcoholic bigamist.

Since mental illness runs in the family, does Obama have any signs? Yes and no. No, he is not a schizophrenic babbling about Martians. But there are red flags for some other conditions.

While Obama doesn't appear to hallucinate, he seems to have delusions. His believing he has a Messiah-like special gift smacks of grandiose delusions. His externalizing all blame to conservatives, George W. Bush, or the "racist" bogeyman hints at persecutory delusions.

Along with a delusional disorder, Obama may fit for a mild psychotic disorder called schizotypal disorder. It may explain some of Obama's oddness.  

People with schizotypal disorder hold bizarre beliefs, are suspicious and paranoid, and have inappropriate and constricted affect. They have few close friends and are socially awkward. A schizotypal is someone like your strange cousin Becky who is addicted to astrology, believes she is psychic, and is the oddball at social gatherings.

Schizotypal Disorder does ring some bells vis-à-vis Obama. One way the diagnosis doesn't fit, however, is that schizotypals are generally harmless, odd ducks. Not so with Obama.

--Trauma: My gut tells me that Obama was seriously traumatized in childhood. His mother disregarded his basic needs, dragged him all over the place, and ultimately abandoned him.

But I think there may be something even more insidious in his family background. While I can't prove it, the degree of Obama's disconnect reminds me of my sexually abused clients.

With serious sexual abuse, the brain chemistry may change. The child dissociates -- that is, disconnects from his being -- in order to cope. Many adult survivors still dissociate, from occasional trances to the most extreme cases of multiple personality disorder.

Apparently, young Barry was left in the care of Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who admitted to molesting a 13-year-old girl. As a teenager, Obama wrote a disturbing poem, "Pop," that evoked images of sexual abuse -- for instance, describing dual amber stains on both his and "Pop's" shorts.

Would trauma explain Obama's disconnect? In many ways, yes. A damaged and unattached child may develop a "false self." To compensate for the enormous deficits in identity and attachment, the child invents his own personality. For Obama, it may have been as a special, gifted person.

Let's return now to my original question: What is wrong with Obama? My guess is a great deal. The answer is complex and likely includes some combination of the above.

Along with the brain issues are personality disorders: narcissism, paranoia, passive-aggressiveness. There's even the possibility of the most destructive character defect of all, an antisocial personality. Untreated abuse can foster antisocial traits, especially among boys.

If my assessment is accurate, what does this mean?

It means that liberals need to wake up and spit out the Kool-Aid...and that conservatives should put aside differences, band together, and elect as many Republicans as possible.

Because Obama will not change. He will not learn from his mistakes. He will not grow and mature from on-the-job experience. In fact, over time, Obama will likely become a more ferocious version of who he is today.

Why? Because this is a damaged person. Obama's fate was sealed years ago growing up in his strange and poisonous family. Later on, his empty vessel was filled with the hateful bile of men like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers.

Obama will not evolve; he will not rise to the occasion; he will not become the man he was meant to be. This is for one reason and one reason alone:

He is not capable of it.

[ham]

Oh really?
Let me re-cap, ok?
He's possibly mentally ill...
Not born in the country...
Falsified or doctored his CV
and they went that far to elect him?
Don't tell me just because he was a humbugging mestizo and whigroes, hippies and whatever communists call themselves this term, wanted to go down in history for breaking another taboo...
That tells more about the rotting society where that happened than about him.

[Albert Hidel]

Apparently, young Barry was left in the care of Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who admitted to molesting a 13-year-old girl. As a teenager, Obama wrote a disturbing poem, "Pop," that evoked images of sexual abuse -- for instance, describing dual amber stains on both his and "Pop's" shorts.

What is up with that?  If GW Bush had written a poem about "amber stains" on his and his daddy's undies you can bet it would have been front page news in the socialist fish wraps.

Here's what the referenced article says:

Well regarded bloggers have raised the provocative question about whether Davis violated Obama, perhaps by molesting him.  (Read Obama's college era poem Pop, especially the lines, "Pop. . . points out the same amber stain on his shorts that I've got on mine, and makes me smell his smell, coming from me," and see what you think.)

Sounds like something Chip would film and sell to perverts.  Read the whole thing here, if you can:

Obama Fails To Pass The Smell Test

Also this article by Jack Cashill: What I Learned from Obama's Pop.  Aside from suggesting that Obama plagiarized the poem he submitted while at Occidental College, Cashill also makes it clear that there's some weird, sick shit going and like usual Dear Leader is covering it up.

March 07, 2010

A little more than a month ago, I began my first descent into the rabbit hole of Barack Obama's origins, a place known to swallow reputations whole. What prompted my inquiry was an e-mail from a correspondent asking my opinion of "Pop," a poem published under the 19-year-old Obama's name in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine, Feast. Having no prior bias going in, here is what I have concluded coming out.

• Questioning Obama's origins is a legitimate enterprise. Even by their own humble standards, the major media -- including Obama's biographers -- have done an impressively slack job in tracing the president's uncertain roots.

• Obama was almost assuredly born in Hawaii. There is no evidence that puts him elsewhere. Undoing the Kenyan possibility is the high likelihood that the "marriage" between Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham was a sham.

• Much depends on that marriage. "My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation," said Obama, establishing the romantic narrative in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His father was from Kenya. His mother was from "a town on the other side of the world, in Kansas."  

• To paraphrase Harry Reid, Obama was no ordinary "Negro." Said Joe Biden of Obama's background, "I mean, that's a storybook, man." Enough depends on this story that Team Obama would and has dissembled to preserve it.

• For starters, Ann Dunham spent her formative years in Washington State, several of them in the progressive cocoon of Mercer Island. It was to Washington that she returned for a year immediately after Obama's birth, a fact missed by every Obama biography I could find.

• Baby Barack spent most of his first year in Washington as well, another fact overlooked by the biographers.

• There is not much storybook to a romance in which the mother leaves home immediately after her son's birth. Barack Sr.'s close friends have no memory even of a relationship between him and Dunham.

• When Barack Sr. left Hawaii a year after Obama's birth, Ann's father Stanley was there to see him off with smiles. He would always speak well of the black man who knocked up his daughter and then abandoned wife and child -- mighty unusual behavior from a father-in-law.

• There was a marriage license from another county, Maui -- a classic way to avoid local notification -- and a divorce, but if there was a wedding, then no one attended it. There was no ring, no photos, no leis.

• Ann Dunham met Barack Sr. in Russian class. (In 1960, people like Lee Harvey Oswald took Russian classes.) The possibility that the Dunhams recruited Barack Sr. to front for a less savory impregnation of Ann by a black man makes more sense than the fabled romance. Obama looks nothing like Barack Sr.

• No, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the father was Malcolm X.

• This brings us back to "Pop." Every mainstream reviewer I could find has argued that the subject of the poem was Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham. None of them asked why Obama would write a poem about his "Gramps" and title it "Pop." None addressed the questions of paternity implicit in the title and in the confrontation between son and father figure.

• On closer examination, the poem is almost assuredly about Obama's African-American mentor, the communist Frank Marshall Davis. There are two good reasons to assert this. One is that "Pop" recites a poem that he had written. Davis was a poet. Dunham was not.

• The second reason is that "Pop" actually appears to have been written by Davis about his own relationship with Obama.

• A stronger case can be made for Davis's authorship than for Obama's. For one, "Pop" has a different style altogether from a silly adolescent poem called "Underground" published under Obama's name along with "Pop" in Feast. Critic Warwick Collins rightly describes "Pop" as "by far the more powerful and complex" of the two, and his is the consensus opinion.

• For another, "Pop" closely resembles in style, language, and subject a matter a poem published by Davis in 1975 called "To A Young Man." The literary analyst who unearthed this poem -- I have referred to him as "Mr. West" -- has argued for Davis as "Pop" from the beginning.

• In each of the two poems in question, the young man is the narrator. In each, the old man, the Davis character, is discussed in the third person. In the 1981 poem, the narrator calls him "Pop," in the 1975 poem "the old man." In each poem, when this older character speaks to the young man, he does so without benefit of quotation marks.

• In "To A Young Man," the Davis character says on one occasion, "Since then I have drunk/ Hal a hundred liquid years/ Distilled Through restless coils of wisdom."

• Note the similar flow of language in "Pop": "Pop switches channels, takes another/ Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks/ What to do with me, a green young man."

• As is evident in these two short samples, both poems are written in free verse and make ready use of what is called "enjambment" -- that is the abrupt continuation of a sentence from one line into the next.

• There are parallels in word choice as well as style. "Neat" means without water or ice. "Neat" and "distilled" both suggest a kind of alcoholic purity. Each of these words is emphasized by isolating it from the flow of the text.

• Both poems are published with a seeming typo that may, in fact, be a pun.

In "To A Young Man," as cited above, the old man says, "Since then I have drunk/ Hal a hundred liquid years/ Distilled." On first reading, I presumed the capitalized "Hal" to be a reference to young Prince Hal of Shakespeare's Henry IV with an allusion to the old man as Hal's wayward guide, Sir John Falstaff. The sentence reads better, however, if the old man, fifty years older than his young friend, says, "I have drunk half a hundred liquid years."

• In "Pop," the older man "Stands, shouts, and asks
/ For a hug, as I shink." Most reviewers simply dismiss "shink" as a typo, the right word being "shrink." Still, as poet Ian McMillan notes in the U.K. Guardian, "shink" literally means "to be hit in the face with a penis." I am not making this up.

• In each case, too, the older man shares his wisdom with a "young man" who may not be eager to hear it. The young man of "Pop" dismisses that wisdom as a mere "spot" in his brain, "something
/that may be squeezed out, like a/ 
Watermelon seed between/
 Two fingers."

• Comparably, the narrator of "To A Young Man" observes that the old man "walked until/ On the slate horizon/ He erased himself." Whether "squeezed out" or "erased" from the young man's consciousness, the Davis character understands just how tenuous is his hold on the lad.

• For all his awareness, however, the older man finds a certain drunken satisfaction in the exchange. Towards the end of "To A Young Man," the old man "turned/ His hammered face/ To the pounding stars/ Smiled/ Like the ring of a gong." "Pop" also concludes on an upbeat note: "I see my face, framed within
/ Pop's black-framed glasses/ 
And know he's laughing too."

• There is no reason to believe that the "young man" of the 1975 poem is Obama. The reader is told that the younger fellow is twenty years old and that the old man is fifty years older. Davis was precisely seventy in 1975, but Obama was no more than fourteen. Lacking too in the 1975 poem is the intimacy and anxiety that characterizes "Pop."

• In fact, "Pop" hints at both a blood relationship between the two men and a sexual one. The very name of the poem implies paternity, and in the poem the young man uses reflections and mirrors to show a physical resemblance between himself and the old man.

• As to a possible sexual relationship between Obama and the admittedly bisexual Davis, the poem offers some intriguing evidence: "Pop ... points out the same amber/ Stain on his shorts that I've got on mine, and/ Makes me smell his smell, coming/ From me."

• It is impossible to confirm that Davis either sired Obama or sexually abused him, but this imagery does at the least reek of some unsavory boundary violation.

• As compensation, Davis may well have slipped this "green young man" a poem for publication. Such an everyday fraud would not have seemed unethical to an old man used to the "flim and flam" ("Pop") of a world where "one plus one" does not necessarily make "two or three or four" ("To A Young Man").

• Trained to believe that nothing adds up and the deck is stacked against him, Obama has seemed from the beginning entirely comfortable with his counterfeit literary career.

• This chicanery would reach fruition in Dreams, the acclaimed literary success that laid the foundation of the Obama-as-genius myth. The evidence that Obama pal and mentor Bill Ayers largely ghosted this memoir now overwhelms the objective reviewer.

• In the final analysis, Davis, a pornographer with a stated fondness for young white women, makes as likely a suspect to be Obama's blood father as Barack Sr. Team Obama's evasiveness about the birth certificate and other questions of origins may have something to do with paternity issues.

• Questions about Obama's citizenship remain in play. His seeming adoption by the Muslim Lolo Soetoro and his removal to Indonesia cloud the issue of nationality. Obama was, in fact, registered at school there as "Barry Soetoro," a "Muslim" and an Indonesian citizen.

• Contrary to rumor, Obama could have traveled to Pakistan on an American passport in 1981. Whether he did or not is another question. It was not until April 2008 at a San Francisco fundraiser that Obama casually let it be known that he had traveled to Pakistan at all. Curiously, he had not mentioned this trip in either of his two books or in any prior public discussion of Pakistan.

• Raising suspicions further was the fact that two weeks before the Pakistan admission, someone had improperly accessed Obama's passport on three occasions. That someone worked for John Brennan at Analysis Corp., a company with fewer than a hundred employees. A former CIA operative then advising Obama, Brennan is now Deputy National Security Adviser.

[ham]

or his vacations, golfing, partying and fundraising during the calamitous oil spill.

Ah, these racists!
I bet they are ready to run away with the fact mr. Shamboim, dr. Swinestein and rep. Sam Priest (born Shmuel Cohen ) all support a certain line of middle eastern policy...

To be honest, even Bush senior went to play golf during the Kuwait crisis...but back then, mr. conservative columnist claimed that the great leader wanted the great nation to feel reassured...PFFT!

[Cogito Ergo Odi]

Oh really?
Let me re-cap, ok?
He's possibly mentally ill...
Not born in the country...
Falsified or doctored his CV
and they went that far to elect him?
Don't tell me just because he was a humbugging mestizo and whigroes, hippies and whatever communists call themselves this term, wanted to go down in history for breaking another taboo...
That tells more about the rotting society where that happened than about him.

Well, gee, don't bother backing up your accusations with facts now.

That article is a joke. What kind of psychotherapist diagnoses someone that she hasn't even met? Better yet, what species of lemming does it take to accept what she says as fact?

[ham]

Oh really?
Let me re-cap, ok?
He's possibly mentally ill...
Not born in the country...
Falsified or doctored his CV
and they went that far to elect him?
Don't tell me just because he was a humbugging mestizo and whigroes, hippies and whatever communists call themselves this term, wanted to go down in history for breaking another taboo...
That tells more about the rotting society where that happened than about him.

Well, gee, don't bother backing up your accusations with facts now.

That article is a joke. What kind of psychotherapist diagnoses someone that she hasn't even met? Better yet, what species of lemming does it take to accept what she says as fact?

I graduated A.A in tarot card reading from Mole University and can tell you dropped out of school at 15...how can I? Well, are you saying you are privy to top secret insider's info none has access to? If you do, call the press and close the deal before someone else does. Or is yours just opinion n.676756774470? What makes your sources more credible than anybody else's?
Are you disputing the fact that hippies, queers, whigroes and the merry bunch of the left considered appointing a mestizo a giant step for mankind next to gay marriage?

[Yancy Derringer]

That article is a joke.

So Obama's account of matching amber undie stains doesn't trouble you at all?  How about Chip's gay boy porn empire?  Or is that just another day at the ranch for your family?