Why Some People Vote for Bush

It's difficult to understand why anyone would vote for Bush, given his record. It's been the most disastrous presidency in our lifetime, characterized by deceit, incompetence and extremism. It has resulted in untold suffering at home, and death and more suffering abroad.

Bill Moyers' Now on Friday catalogued the ideologically driven deceit leading up to the war in Iraq, with the help of a man who had been an intelligence expert in the Bush state department, a career expert named Thielmann. His commentary on what American intelligence knew and was analyzing totally devastates the Bush case. (We've stolen from this segment for some of our 99 reasons.)

But he said something quite profound that goes to the heart of American support for Bush. He called it the psychological element: "a desire to believe the President of the United States. The realization that the President of the U.S. would knowingly distort issues, or even negligently misinform them on issues that will result in the deaths of American sons and daughters, is so monstrous, that most good and decent and patriotic Americans can't believe that. They don't want to believe that. That's just too awful to contemplate, that the President would do that to them."


Speaking of psychology, here is C.G. Jung's description of an inflated consciousness:
"...always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own presence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing the right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead."