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Memories of the 28th Century

Ill Fitting

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At some point is the past I wrote about how most people end up working in a field that doesn’t suit them. I won’t repeat that, but I just want to particularize it to people running for President of the U.S.A. and people who have served as President.

“It turns out that about half the presidents between George Washington and Richard M. Nixon suffered from some sort of psychiatric disorder.” (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...tric_heal.html) I hadn’t thought it was that bad, but I wasn’t thinking about all of the, only about the ones in my lifetime, but that is an interesting article. I had known that Lincoln and a few others suffered from depression, but I hadn’t thought that Eisenhower was depressive. From everything I could tell he was very normal; although he had a serious heart problem.

Kennedy displayed some signs that he might have problems, especially is so far as his apparent need for more women, but the pshrinks didn’t diagnose anything. Johnson was also diagnosed as bipolar, which makes a lot of sense, but he seemed to have other problems. There were times when LBJ seemed to off in fantasyland, but I never met the guy.

I was shocked that Nixon wasn’t diagnosed as schizophrenic. He was quite delusional at times. Nixon saw a pshrink at various times, and the pshrink thought Nixon was very normal. But Gerry Ford really was very normal. To the best of my knowledge he never did anything that was “odd”; although he was caught on camera falling a number of times.

Jimmy Carter was not worse off than most dedicated religious people, but that is an indicator of delusional thinking that go too far in some cases. His biggest problem probably was that he thought that he could run the country the way that he had run Georgia; that was delusion.

As best I can tell, Reagan was very ordinary, but he did have Alzheimer’s, and that may have started being a problem while he was in office. It has been observed that most people who suffer from dementia in their later years usually suffered from memory problems earlier but managed to cover the problem, and Ronnie may have done that. He managed to learn his lines, but that was about the limit of it.

The pshrinks think that George H. W. Bush was perfectly sane, and I agree on that. I may not have agreed with him all of the time, but he seemed to think clearly.

Clinton was deemed normal, but he showed a leaning toward psychopathy that can be seen in his apparent need for many women, and his tortured thinking to try to justify himself or show himself in a better light. His peculiar definition of sexual intercourse was just an extreme and public example of him trying to make himself look good. There may be a better term for the way he played people for his advantage, but that behavior is something that is typical of intelligent psychopaths.

G. W. Bush may have multiple problems. His defenders would try to blame his problems on cocaine use, but the twists of thought that cocaine can bring on end when one stops taking it. It is possible that he returned to cocaine use as President, but I have never seen anything to indicate that, so I suspect that it was mental illness, perhaps in combination with low intelligence that convinced him that he could go to war in Iraq and win outright. We'll have to wait until later his death to get all of the dirt.

Obama is another who shows signs of delusions, and like W he was a drug taker, so he will try to blame that, even though recreational drugs seldom cause mental problems. A little more perspective would be necessary to make a complete judgement, but his delusions will still remain.

The people running for President for the 2016 election are interesting, but it's too early to say much beyond that anyone would have to be crazy to run for President. Trump seems top have his own version of reality that is only partly shared by others, and some of the other may have problems, but nothing as obvious.

I'll get back to this subject later in the election cycle, but I started with the thought that the people who have become President were not well suited for the position, rather than which Presidents had mental illnesses, but that is relevant.



On Nixon's pshrink
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/15/local/me-12618

I write like Ursula K. Le Guin acording to https://iwl.me/

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