Psychiatrist Pronounces Liberal Thinking a Mental Illness
filed in Civil Rights, Psychiatrists and Doctors on Nov.23, 2008
We here at CMM have been worrying that we might one day see striking workers and protesters rounded up, declared mentally ill and forcibly sedated en masse, but it seems that day has already arrived and psychiatrist Dr. Lyle Rossiter has gone much further than our worst nightmares. We thought it was actually a viral urban myth from The Onion when we first read it on several blogs and news websites, but no, former army psychiatrist and Chicago clinical practitioner Rossiter actually does have a book called The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness and his whacky writings really are being featured on Townhall.com, one of the biggest right wing media sites in the United States, which also carries columns by extremist heavyweights like Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rich Tucker and George Will.
“The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error,” writes the self-evidently moronic Rossiter. “Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche.”
Yeah, it sounds laughable. But note our bolded word above, and beware.
November 25th, 2008 on 3:19 pm
Perhaps getting a crowd of these ‘disordered’ folks outside this doctor’s office with placards might cause him to reconsider his own errors of thought – especially if doing so hits him right in the wallet.
November 25th, 2008 on 3:23 pm
An afterthought: this kind of psychiatric gobbletygook shaped policy in the former Soviet Union for many years and still happens in places like China. And that’s to say nothing of Nazi Germany or Italy’s fascist years (remember how ECT got its start?) Pathologizing dissent has long been a tactic of the ruling class.
December 4th, 2008 on 12:34 pm
I feel so much better knowing that there is a name for my illness. What is the recommended course of treatment?
And great blog by the way, I really enjoy reading it.
December 4th, 2008 on 9:08 pm
This terrible blog is really just a Videodrone-like trap to catch people like you, Spanky. The emergency mental response team is on its way.
The “cure”, by the way, is simply to read columnists on Townhall.com all day. After digesting people so far to the extreme right for long enough, even George W. starts to look like an extremist leftie, and then you too will identify as a middle of the road conservative. See how it works?