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Cheney's brain

An article purporting to diagnose the vice president as demented is silly, and as former chief resident of a psychiatric consultation service I should know.

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Washington Post Writers Group
Published March 16, 2007

WASHINGTON - "What is wrong with Dick Cheney?" asks Michelle Cottle in the inaugural issue of the newly relaunched New Republic. She then spends the next 2,000 words marshaling evidence suggesting that his cardiac disease has left him demented and mentally disordered.

The charming part of this not-to-be-missed article titled "Heart of Darkness," no less is that it is framed as an exercise in compassion. Since she knows that the only way for her New Republic readers to understand Cheney is that he is evil - "next time you see Cheney behaving oddly, don't automatically assume that he's a bad man," she advises - surely the generous thing for a liberal to do is write him off as simply nuts. In the wonderland of liberalism, Cottle is trying to make the case for Cheney by offering him the insanity defense.

She doesn't seem to understand that showing how circulatory problems can affect the brain proves nothing unless you first show the existence of a psychiatric disorder. Yet Cottle offers nothing in Cheney's presenting symptoms or behavior to justify a psychiatric diagnosis of any kind, let alone dementia.

What behavior does she cite as evidence of Cheney's looniness?

(a) Using a four-letter word in an exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy. Good God, by that standard, I should have been committed long ago.

(b) "Shoot a man in the face and not bother to call your boss 'til the next day?" Another way of putting that is this: After a hunting accident, Cheney tried to get things in order before going public. Not the best decision, as I wrote at the time, but understandable. And if that is deranged, what do you say about a young Teddy Kennedy being far less forthcoming about how he came to leave a dead woman at the bottom of a pond?

(c) Longtime associate Brent Scowcroft quoted as saying, "Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." Well. After 9/11, Cheney adopted a view about fighting jihadism, America's new existential enemy, that differed radically from the "realist" foreign policy approach that he had shared a decade earlier with Scowcroft. That's a psychiatric symptom? By that standard, Saul of Tarsus, Arthur Vandenberg, Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan - to pick at random from a thousand such cases of men undergoing profound change of worldview - are psychiatric cases.

I too know Dick Cheney. And I know something about the effects of physical illness on mental functioning. In my younger days, writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, I identified a psychiatric syndrome ("Secondary Mania," the title of the paper) that was associated entirely with organic (i.e. underlying physical) disorders. The British medical journal Lancet found this discovery notable enough to devote an editorial to it.

And as a former chief resident of the psychiatric consultation service of the Massachusetts General Hospital, I know something about organically caused dementias. And I know pseudoscientific rubbish when I see it.

I was at first inclined to pass off Cottle's piece as a weird put-on, but her earnest piling on of medical research suggests that she is quite serious.

And silly. Such silliness has a pedigree. It is in the tradition of the 1964 poll of psychiatrists that found Barry Goldwater clinically paranoid. The disease they saw in Goldwater was, in fact, deviation from liberalism, which remains today so incomprehensible to some that it must be explained by resort to arterial plaques and cardiac ejection fractions.

[Last modified March 16, 2007, 01:01:20]