mobilization of the police state apparatus, news media like US News and World Report of
September 23, 1991 have conceded that the Justice Department case against Noriega is
"shockingly weak," and legal experts not friendly to Noriega have asserted that the first
month of the prosecution case had utterly failed to provide convincing evidence of any
violations of US law by Noriega.
Bush's performance during the Panama crisis was especially ominous because of the
president's clearly emerging mental imbalance. Several outbursts during the Noriega
press conferences had resembled genuine public fits. Racist and sexual obsessions were
reaching critical mass in Bush's subconscious. These gross phenomena did not receive the
attention they would have merited from journalists, television commentators, and pundits,
who rather preferred studiously to ignore them. One public figure who called attention to
Bush's psychopathology was political prisoner Lyndon LaRouche, who made the
following courageous observations from a jail cell in a federal prison in Minnesota after
viewing several of Bush's press briefings during the last days of December:
George is a very shallow-minded person, very impulsive. He's a person of rage-driven obsession,
and impulses flowing from rage-driven obsessions. Very shallow-minded. He's sort of a jock of
one kind or another, in his mentality. He talks like it, he acts like it, his body language is that of it.
He can't present a concept. The man is incapable of carrying a concept in his head. He's a poor
little fellow who's so rage-driven that very little intellectual activity can occur in his head; that's
his conceptual style. He's a man characterized by sudden fits of jock-style rage, of obsessions
which flow from seizure by that rage, and of impulses which flow from those obsessions.If you were a psychiatrist and you had such a fellow on your couch, what's your prognosis of the
way he's going to react to this situation? He'll react only when he becomes sly. And he becomes
sly in the face of great pressure. He'll duck, he'll be sneaky, when he faces something he knows he
can't cope with. And he'll duck and hope to come back to hit another day.But now he's in a manic fit. He's the President. He said so at his press conference. "I'm the
President. I'm Queen of the May." So you've got a rage-driven man, with rage-driven obsession
with impulses flowing from that, in a man who thinks he's the Queen of the May. In other words,
in Aeschylean language, A LAW UNTO HIMSELF. What's your prognosis? [fn 47]It was during these waning days of 1989 that Bush's mental disintegration became
unmistakable, foreshadowing the greater furors yet to come.
NOTES:
- Washington Post, January 21, 1991.
- Evans and Novak, "A Note From Saddle River," Washington Post, April 10, 1989.
- For Fukuyama's "End of History," see The National Interest, Summer, 1989, and Henry Allen, "The End.
Or Is It?", Washington Post, September 27, 1989. - Washington Post, December 8, 1988