April 29, 2007

The NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTS ITSELF

        The New York Times has a daily "Corrections" department that should be incorporated as part of the Entertainment section. While they may not have corrected their lies on behalf of Stalin, Mao, Castro and Hitler they're on top of the really important stuff: "A report in the April 15 In Transit column, about wine-oriented tours in Tuscany, misstated a popular dish there. It is pollo con peperoni (chicken with peppers), not pollo con pepperoni."

April 25, 2007

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE THERAPEUTIC CULTURE: THIRTY-THREE DEAD

Many years ago—before the sixties, when activist reformers discovered the notion that mentally ill patients were an oppressed people, like Negroes (as Blacks preferred to be called then), women, and homosexuals (as Gay men were identified then), and decided that they must be set free from their sadistic doctors and nurses (deinstitutionalized) in order to become independent (homeless)—I was a resident physician studying psychiatry at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.

As first-year residents, I and my colleagues spent many long and interesting hours in the admitting office seeing hundreds of men and women like Mr. Cho, the psychotic killer at Virginia Tech, to determine whether they were an imminent danger to themselves or others. The admitting office was the point of triage in the hospital. Because the hospital was designed to hold 350 patients and our usual daily census was about 700, the critical clinical decision to be made in that office was whether the patient needed to be admitted for further study and treatment.

On a summer Saturday night the two or three residents on duty there might see a hundred or more patients between ten p.m. and one a.m., so we didn’t have much time to waste.
Almost every patient was brought in by a pair of policemen, and on a hot weekend night there were as many as forty or fifty policemen milling about in the waiting room. One of the things I discovered quickly was that it wasn’t easy to get sent to our admitting office. In a tough and apathetic city like New York you really had to behave in an extreme or bizarre manner to get a New York city cop, who, they like to say, has seen everything, to escort a patient to the Bellevue admitting office. And I found out that their clinical judgment was pretty sharp. It was rare that a patient escorted by a policeman was not admitted.

Usually I’d see the patient alone and perform what is called the Mental Status Examination, which assesses all of the patient’s mental functioning. Usually, the exam revealed quickly that the patient’s everyday judgment was so impaired—was so out of touch with reality—that he was a candidate for admission.

But there were occasions when it was difficult to tell the degree of impaired reality testing and this required a report of the patient’s recent behavior. And since the only sources available were the patient and the policeman who brought him I would have to call in the policeman. Sometimes the cop would not know anything but sketchy and unreliable information. At other times he would wearily pull out his black leather notebook and start to report extensive descriptions of the patient’s behavior, which the patient was reluctant to share but would more or less acknowledge when he was confronted.

The patients who were most reluctant to share their thoughts with me and who were most evasive about the details of their everyday life were patients like Cho—seriously paranoid: they knew that their thinking was weird or bizarre and they didn’t want others to know. But their evasiveness gave them away and usually I would admit such individuals. At first, when I was new to the work, I felt that I was on shaky ground and worried about such admissions. But after a number of them I discovered that the patterns of mental functioning are extremely reliable, and that if a patient behaves evasively and is uncommunicative about himself, there is usually a good reason. After admitting such cases I would follow up by speaking to their families and their friends—if they had any— and inevitably found that there was evidence of much psychotic behavior during the recent and distant past.

Common sense is one of the rarest of commodities these days. And it has been made rarer by the gradual transformation of our society, in the past half century, into a “therapeutic culture.” There does not seem to be right or wrong anymore, no good or bad behavior, no problems that cannot be cured, no complications that cannot be solved, no flaws that cannot be removed, and no flawed people who cannot be made perfect. Freud cannot be blamed for all of this; after all, he warned that all that psychoanalysis could do at best was to change neurotic misery into everyday unhappiness. It was those social reformers who came after him, in the twenties and thirties, who took his ideas and ran with them, too far, too fast, and with too much arrogance. Philosophers like John Dewey, progressive educators, the Child Guidance Movement, and social work schools.

Unfortunately, the dynamics of the therapeutic culture were at work at Virginia Tech during the last couple of years and have contributed to the deaths of thirty-three people. Benedict Carey, a New York Times writer, describes these dynamics: “Seung-Hui Cho seemed indifferent to every small act of human kindness, any effort to connect. According to classmates of Mr. Cho…one student made several attempts to speak to him, even after reading his frightening writings. Mr. Cho’s suitemates, and some teachers, too, made an effort to engage him. And there were undoubtedly others. Maybe they signaled their openness with a slight nod, a friendly widening of the eyes. Those acts of genuine decency failed to prevent Mr. Cho’s rampage on Monday.” Why? The unintended consequences of the therapeutic culture.

The three basic values of the therapeutic culture are tolerance of aberrant behavior, a non-judgmental attitude, and a sense of understanding for the suffering patient. This is what Cho was being offered by the community at Virginia Tech. Their response goes against the commonest of common sense and only served to protect Cho’s illness from being acknowledged, diagnosed and treated. It only enabled him only to continue his psychotic existence and get worse.
During his last two years at Virginia Tech there is no doubt that he was severely, psychotically ill. What is the evidence?

First and foremost he isolated himself socially almost completely. He had no friends at all and permitted little or no communication with anyone. This in itself is characteristic of psychosis. The individual doesn’t realize how bizarre such behavior appears to others. But when he does communicate his thinking is also strange and dominated by unrealistic ideas. In his junior year, Mr. Cho told his then-roommates that he had a girlfriend named Jelly. She was a supermodel who lived in outer space and traveled by spaceship.

In that same year his roommates mostly ignored him because he was so withdrawn. If he said something, it was weird. During Thanksgiving break, Mr. Cho called his roommate to report that he was vacationing in North Carolina with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

In class, he sat hunched behind sunglasses with a baseball cap yanked tight over his head. Sometimes he introduced himself as “Question Mark,” saying it was the persona of a man who lived on Mars and journeyed to Jupiter.

In a poetry class in his junior year, women said he would snap pictures of them with his cellphone beneath his desk. Several stopped coming to class.

English teachers were disturbed by his angry writings and oddness. According to the New York Times, “Lucinda Roy, then head of the English Department at Virginia Tech, began to tutor him privately. She, too, was unnerved. She brought him to the attention of the counseling service and the campus police because she thought he was so miserable he might kill himself.”

Even his classmates sensed his underlying psychosis. One of them said that after he finished reading one of Cho’s weird plays one night, he turned to his roommate and said, “This is the kind of guy who is going to walk into a classroom and start shooting people.”

Late in 2005 he became fixated on several real female students. Two of them complained to the police that he was calling them, showing up at their rooms and bombarding them with instant messages. After the second complaint against him in December 2005, the police came by and told him to stop.

A few hours after they left, the New York Times reports, “…he sent an instant message to one of his roommates suggesting he might as well kill himself.”

All of this added up to an individual who was significantly out of touch with reality. Like most psychotic people he was a quiet “loner” who avoided social relations, afraid of other people finding out how fantastic his thoughts were. The point is that he should have been under psychiatric care and close observation at least from December of 2005. That he was not is partly the result of the dominant attitude at Virgina Tech and most other schools—the therapeutic culture’s requirement that bizarrely behaving students be “tolerated,” handled with kid gloves, and that the offending behavior be treated as though it does not exist—pretending that there is no elephant in the room. Unfortunately, the laws enacted since the seventies protect this state of things. A school may not suspend or expel a student with mental illness who is or becomes psychotic—more absence of common sense. And further, the school may not share any information about the student and his aberrant behavior with anyone, even if such information might be helpful in the patient’s treatment.

This is what happened in Cho’s case. After he threatened suicide the campus police were called, and Mr. Cho was sent to an off-campus mental health facility. After a counselor recommended involuntary commitment, a judge signed an order deeming him a danger and he was sent for evaluation to Carilion St. Albans Psychiatric Hospital in Radford, Va. A doctor there wrote a cursory report: “Oriented X4. Affect is flat. Mood is depressed. He denies suicidal ideation. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment are normal.” The doctor who wrote that Cho had normal judgment and insight—insight in this case meaning the capacity to understand how sick he was—was either quite inexperienced or incompetent if he could not see what so many of Cho’s classmates and teachers could see. In any case if the examining psychiatrist had been informed that Cho had been behaving in ways that suggested that his reality testing and judgment were impaired, he might have required that the patient spend a couple of weeks being observed on an inpatient unit. While there the degree of his psychopathology would have been ascertained and realistic treatment plans might have been formulated.

But the system failed Cho and the University. And although the judge ordered him to undergo outpatient treatment, as far as we know he never even tried and thirty-three people died.
The forces that can be unleashed in severe mental illness—psychosis—are very powerful. And of course it is a mistake to focus on Cho’s guns. As his videos show he could have killed with a hammer, or a hunting knife, and he could have become a serial killer with these. The gun was only more effective and dramatic. Psychotic killers can use anything as a weapon. A distraught mother can kill her five children by drowning them in a river or the bathtub. Or he could have become a “Unabomber” like Theodore Kaczynski, another psychotic loner whose final score was 3 killed and 23 mutilated.

The most important thing is to see aberrant behavior realistically as a sign of a possible psychosis and deal with it realistically—not tolerate it as an aspect of the individual’s “creativity”or politely ascribe it to simple shyness, in accord with the attitudes of the therapeutic culture.

The attitudes and techniques of the therapeutic culture—non-judgmental toward behavior (moral neutrality), empathic, understanding—have only one useful and proper place—a treatment venue: a consulting room or hospital. There is no place for these in schools or in any other life situations. Their use outside of clinical situations can only result in a perversion of normal guidelines for social behavior, confusion for teachers and students, and ultimately resentment and mischief.

These attitudes and the clinical techniques based on them emerged out of the practice of psychoanalysis in the early part of the century to deal with clinical problems unique to analysis but with no other application outside of analytic therapy. This came to be misunderstood by those who fell under the influence of psychoanalysis either as patients or students in schools of education and social work. Aping their analysts or teachers, they came to believe that these attitudes were in and of themselves therapeutic. And over the years these misunderstandings have gained ground and replaced reality—and common sense—as the guiding principles of education and social work.

It would be highly desirable to change the laws that stress the “civil rights” of the mentally ill in schools and that encourage the view that the privacy of the mentally ill individual trumps his health and well-being to laws that support early recognition of severe mental illness so that he may be helped to treatment and management of his psychosis in a timely way, and prevented from doing serious harm to the innocent.

April 22, 2007

PSYCHOBABBLE ALERT: LIFE AS A BARBARIAN IS HARD. PALI KILLERS NEED EMPATHY

They really are conflicted. The psychotherapeutic solution is obvious: restore a sense of shared victimhood at the hands of the evil Israelis, and remember to kill Jews rather than each other.

Palestinian forces suffering from emotional issues
Infighting, tensions between Palestinian and Muslim groups, leads security forces to seek counseling for tension, depression
Roee Nahmias
Published: 04.21.07, 20:29 / Israel News
Palestinian security forces have been seeking emotional counseling, following "internal infighting in Gaza". Dr. Riad al-Aqra, the director for the Gaza hospital for mental health, said that "although the occupation is a major cause for emotional depression for Gaza residents…Palestinian infighting plays a striking role in the increase of shock, tension and depression, present in previously unseen amounts."

See the rest here.

April 16, 2007

THE RACE POLICE OR IMUS: WHICH IS WORSE

Three or four powerful energic forces collided last week to create a perfect cultural storm that ended in toppling one of the giants of radio entertainment from his current venue. The forces at work were a) the culture of offensive humor and its audience of millions of lovers of pie-in-the-face comedy led by Don Imus; b) the paranoid hypersensitivity of black, moth-eaten, demagogues Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their grievance collecting, loser minions; c) tens of millions of dollars in advertising fees whirling around in the ether and in danger of encamping to safer venues; d)and billions of watts of hypocrisy radiating from CBS, which is no newcomer to Imus’s brand of humor, and the multitude of media people—whited sepulchers all.

Don Imus is a gifted entertainer who has been practicing his art—offensive humor—for decades, and has won a following of millions, and a salary estimated at $10,000,000 a year. His morning show, listened to nationwide, consists of commentary on sports and politics and interviews with figures in the news. Sprinkled in among these items is his Shock-Jock humor—his trademark. Nothing , noone, no group, religion, race, or class seems spared from his insults, if they are in the public eye. He’s very good at this kind of thing and he is almost never out of control, it never becomes a rant. That is what makes it entertainment rather than an assault. His tone is never mean—the shock part of his insult is only in the words and not in the emotion.

The humor of insult and shock is an art, a very old art. It goes back to a time when man learned that it was almost as satisfying to hurl an insult as it was to hurl a stone or a spear—and much safer. Almost all comedy involves the expression of hostility and even when it appears to be gentle it is only well disguised hostility, as the following example will demonstrate. Spike Milligan, the great Anglo-Irish writer of low comedy, wrote what is reputed to be the best joke ever created:

A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?"

The humor of insult has its origins in Aristophanes’ Greece in what came to be called the “Old Comedy.” This was comedy that addressed itself to social commentary, using the language of farce, burlesque, and travesty. The point is to make fun of politicians, social institutions, and the foibles of the powerful. The “outsider” always plays an important role in this form of comedy. They may be slaves, non-Greeks, Persians, Jews, nappy-headed ones, ones with funny accents, and these “others” become the butt of comic insult or appearance. These “outsiders” always function as characters against whom the society measures itself.

The legacy of comic otherness is the legacy of ethnic humor and comic stereotypes like “Amos ‘n Andy” and Steppinfetchit in the thirties. By the time of Plautus, comic otherness had transcended the role of the target of insult to become the low comic hero like Pseudolus, the slave character in Plautus’ play which became “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum” with Zero Mostel as Pseudolus, the fake, the liar, the trickster. In modern times it was Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp—the low comic hero, impoverished eternal outsider, who was always ready to stick his finger in the eye of the fat rich guy.

Old comedy seems to have its legacy in vaudeville, physical burlesque and farceurs like the Marx Brothers. Groucho, the modern champion of comic insult, has been replaced by comics like Jackie Mason, and the great British comics like Spike Milligan, creator of the Goon show, and who once caused a stir by calling the Prince of Wales a "little grovelling bastard" on television in 1994. Instead of being fired he was made a Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). And it was the zany, obnoxious humor of Milligan and the Goons that inspired the Monty Pythons. Who can forget the hundreds of sketches targeting high and low alike—stuffy ministers, stupid policemen, gays, women. All human foibles were equal to them. Probably their ultimate and greatest example of the Old Comedy was “The Life of Brian,” a brilliantly witty satire on the follies of religion and a poke in the eyes of two billion Christians.

Whatever else Imus is or is not, he is a member of this tribe, this long line of social critics who are both funny, irreverent, and ignoble.

Part of what makes Imus funny in the context of his show is the unscripted nature of the interchanges between him and his claque. It takes a lot of courage and skill and a little luck to pull off that kind of routine day after day for years without crashing. Unfortunately, he ran out of luck that day. And, although he has uttered many more obnoxious insults and pseudo racist remarks over the years, two things went wrong in this case. The first is that the Rutgers Women were totally innocent of any fault—they are intelligent, educated, hard-working, gifted athletes, mature, and gracious. And what was worse, they were powerless—they had no access to a public voice—which made Imus into a bully-boy. It’s okay to insult big guys—celebrities, politicians, movie stars—they can protect themselves.

What Imus should have done that day was to call the women and arrange for transportation for them to come and meet with them for a private apology, and as an expression of good will offer a contribution to the team’s monetary needs. He should not have made any public apology, but handled whatever criticism came with humor. He should have made fun of the critics and of himself.

Instead he allowed two nappy-headed demagogues to crawl out of the woodpile—hos to their eyeballs—who then pre-empted the situation. Sharpton and Jackson, clever racist hatemongers who live on the misfortune, ignorance, and stupidity of their tiny constituency which is growing smaller every year as black America works its way into the middle class.

We have come to judge public events and motivations nowadays by subjective perceptions rather objective evidence. In Washington or in the media, more and more judgements are made on appearances rather than realities. Down the drain with “innocent until proven guilty.” And these changes in cognitive values and justice is what men like Sharpton and Jackson count on. Every day, somewhere in America, there is a perception or misperception (misperceptions mostly, since most perceptions turn out to be incorrect or incomplete) of injustice done to somebody of color. And there is always a small community of losers nearby—on the dole and “victims of the white man’s oppression” who will take up the cry of injustice and reach for their cell phone to call one or the other of these racial demagogues. And the next day Sharpton and/or Jackson are Johnny-on-the-spot with an angry demonstration making claims and threats just in time to get on the evening news.

That is the way these men operate, the Race Police, just as corrupt policemen work by selling their power. The Race Police can threaten politicians or businessmen—in this case CBS and their sponsors, by getting on the evening news no matter what the rights and wrongs of the matter are.

The most regrettable aspect of this matter was the strength that racial demagoguery achieved. Everybody lost but Sharpton and Jackson. And in this matter the fault lies with Imus for caving in to the real racists and CBS for allowing themselves to be snookered by the Race Police.

Everyone has already commented on CBS’s hypocrisy, no need to beat a dead horse, but their retreat in the face exaggerated accusations was a betrayal to their and Imus’s fans—their rightful constituencies. These folks were their first responsibility. They should have fought the good fight and told Sharpton and Jackson to buzz off and that they were still in command. And then perhaps they should have made a major public relations effort to give democracy a chance by letting Imus’s fate be determined by voting on the internet. Should we keep Imus or not? Just the way the life or death of Tinker Bell is determined—by the love and applause of the audience.

April 14, 2007

COURAGE AND COWARDICE: THE CASE OF DON IMUS

        While the pundits and politicians continue a second week of thumbsucking, self-flattering moralising, Horsefeathers awards its Samuel Johnson prize for intellectual courage to Jason Whitlock.

        The Sound of Silence prize for cowardice must be shared by many of Imus's liberal friends, including John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Harold Ford, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert and others. Next time the Jihadis come at us, you don't want them in the foxhole next to you.

April 12, 2007

THE DEATH OF LIBERALISM: IMUS AND SHARPTON

        Horsefeathers' combined 80+ years of clinical observation make us aware of how difficult, how really difficult it is to believe in the actual reality of other people, that they have their own unique individuality and don’t exist only in relation to oneself and one’s own needs. Childhood narcissism takes years to overcome. It’s quite a blow to realize that the world exists and has existed comfortably for quite a while without you in it. Most of us find some benefit in relinquishing that childhood stance, even if only partially. Doing so, however can lead to a respect for other individuals, their needs and rights and to actual, real relationships. Some cannot; for them Liberalism is the perfect ideology.
        Horsefeathers remembers when Liberalism was a philosophy that protected freedom of thought, defended individual rights and stood for the uniqueness of each individual. Contemporary Liberalism, however, views the individual not in his or her uniqueness, but rather as a member of a group---race, class, ethnicity, religion. The absurd hypocrisies in the Imus flap make sense if the man is regarded as representative of a particular group-- white, patriarchal, racist, males. Who cares if the actual man has done more for young black children, their health and well being than Al Sharpton has ever done? Who cares that he’s raised large sums of money for autism research, that he and his wife personally run a ranch for kids with cancer where they can have fun and find some relief from their disease? Who cares if he raised money for medical care for war wounded? Who cares if he apologized for offending the Rutgers women?
        Personally, Horsefeathers switched Imus off a few years ago when he began acting like a mouthpiece for the Democratic party, calling Dick Cheney a murderer and constantly bashing the President in a time of war. It was all permeated by condescension, and it wasn’t funny. When his producer Bernard McGuirk weighed in with repeated assertions that the neo-Con Jews had taken us to war for the benefit of Israel, Horsefeathers permanently switched to his i-Pod. Yet the current spectacle of Al Sharpton as judge and jury, the same Al Sharpton who is responsible for actual deaths of people at the hands of his Jew hating followers, is too rich. When did he and Jesse Jackson get themselves anointed arbiters of racial justice? Was it after Jackson’s multiple anti-semitic remarks, like his description of New York as ‘hymietown’? We’re not shedding any tears for Imus, who has, in our opinion done far too much groveling before these race baiting shakedown artists. One apology to the Rutgers girls would have been enough. Especially irksome is Imus’s attempts to insist that he’s a good liberal, not a crazy right winger. Strange, the most blatant racists are liberals who view everything under the aspect of black victimhood and white racism.
        Meanwhile, as Imus falls all over himself apologizing over and over for his insulting words, who will apologize to the Duke Lacrosse players for the far worse trauma they endured than the Rutgers’ basketball players? Will Jackson and Sharpton apologize for endorsing the lying accusations of a black woman? Will Selena Roberts, the New York Times sports writer, cum sociologist, apologize for hurling around charges of racism, sexism, and white privilege, while suggesting that actual innocence would not purge the deep sickness of white racism made manifest by the Duke scandal? And how about the courageous Duke administration and faculty, who eagerly leapt—not to the defense of their own customers, the students—but to the defense of a lying accuser who proclaimed her black female victimhood? Will they apologize to the lacrosse coach they eagerly dumped overboard? Will the craven, politically correct President of Duke resign? Don’t hold your breath, because, you see, Liberals are not interested in the lives of actual real individuals—the young student athletes and their families, nor even the real life of the accuser. Instead these politically correct race hustlers and self-flatterers choose to lump individual human beings into pre-formed templates. They employ a “narrative” in place of factual truth, thanks to their ‘education’ as good PoMos. The narrative is about Amerika, a country poisoned by racism, sexism and capitalism. As the evidence against the lacrosse team emerged and collapsed in all its flimsiness, Roberts deplored the temptation to view the athletes as innocent; they were, after all, part of a larger system, college sports, sexist values, white racism, capitalism, etc. so even if the evidence supported the athletes’ story, that mattered less than that they were part of a racist, sexist culture. The accuser was also not seen as an individual, but rather a member of a victim class. That worked for Tawana Brawley and we expect the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson to continue working the strategy even after the case has been dismissed. Watch to see the various Liberal politicians condemn Don Imus while empathizing with the poor black woman who tried to destroy the lives of ‘white men of privilege’. Liberalism means never having to admit you're wrong because you're heart is with the oppressed.

April 06, 2007

BILLIE'S BIRTHDAY

"There's two kind of blues. There's happy blues and there's sad blues."--Billie Holiday
She did both kinds to perfection.

        As Dhimmitude becomes politically correct and Liberalism becomes synonymous with appeasement, let us turn away from the dimwitted eyesore, Nancy Pelosi, to remember the greatest female jazz vocalist, Billie Holiday, on the eve of her 92nd birthday. We wrote an appreciation of her two years ago-BY, Before Youtube- titled Happy Birthday Eleanora Fagan. (Read it here) Now we can offer a glimpse of her greatness, accompanied by Lester Young. The year was 1957, her body and voice ravaged by drugs, but still surpassingly beautiful. She died less than two years later.

April 05, 2007

NANCY PELOSI'S MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR IS DYING TO TAKE YOU AWAY

"...Defying the White House's Middle East policy by meeting with Syrian President Bashar Assad, Pelosi said, "The road to Damascus is a road to peace..."

        Contemporary liberals constantly remind the rest of us how much more intelligent they are. I personally heard a retarded man express disbelief that anyone could have voted for President Bush because “he’s so stupid.” Calling someone like the President ‘stupid’ is an indirect way of asserting one’s own superior intelligence. Long ago, Liberalism devolved into a psychotherapeutic stance, a set of attitudes, rather than a coherent body of ideas. Horsefeathers regards Liberalism as the therapeutic religion of the playground. Its aim is to assuage hurt feelings, to reassure true believers that they really are better, smarter and more empathic creatures whose exquisite sensibilities entitle them to decide what’s best for the rest of us. After all, they care, they ‘understand the other’, they're "in touch" with their inner child. They know that war is foolish and misguided as well as bad for children, that Amerika is the greatest problem, and that victim status trumps everything. They were the good little girls and boys who told the teacher about those dreadful boys in the playground who just wanted to win the stickball game and didn’t care that the losers felt bad.
        Enter Nancy Pelosi, a creature stuffed full of platitudinous, politically correct beliefs and possessed of fatuous self regard, based on no actual real world accomplishment. Her plastic surgeon’s multiple efforts to sustain her denial of biological reality have, instead, made her into a bizarre looking caricature of the human condition, female variety. In a way, she is the perfect physical representation of Liberal fantasies about human nature: utopian fantasies trump reality. It's possible to remain, in the words of a Bob Dylan song, "forever young".
        This would all be laughable, were it not that Nancy Pelosi is number three in line for the Presidency, and as such she encourages the belief in followers of totalitarian Islam that the United States is too decadent, too in love with its comforts, too feminized to actually fight against our enemies. While she hasn’t literally proclaimed “Peace in our time”, her smiling photo session with Basher Assad is filled with obvious self-satisfaction. She will return to Washington convinced that she is a better person than the President. She would be eager to remind us that Neville Chamberlain was a "good" man, a man who just needed more time to talk things out with Hitler. How sad that Chamberlain never got the chance for one more meeting, one more opportunity to bond with Hitler and acknowledge the validity of his grievances. Meanwhile, American marines are dying while Damascus Nancy gazes into the eyes of Basher Assad and shows respect for our enemies by donning their garb of female enslavement. But of course, she's so, so intelligent. Just like Neville Chamberlain.
        "The magical mystery tour is dying to take you away, Dying to take you away, take you today.."

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