{"id":6310,"date":"2018-01-04T09:10:16","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T08:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6310"},"modified":"2018-01-04T09:49:22","modified_gmt":"2018-01-04T08:49:22","slug":"political-quackery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/6310\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Quackery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whenever I hear someone from the medical profession in the news, it’s a fair bet they are engaged in politics rather than medicine. Probably the best examples are the public health fascists that Christopher Snowdon<\/a>\u00a0and Dick Puddlecote<\/a> talk about, but what I saw this morning was quite different:<\/p>\n

Lawmakers concerned about President Donald Trump\u2019s mental state summoned Yale University psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee to Capitol Hill last month for two days of briefings about his recent behavior.<\/p>\n

In private meetings with more than a dozen members of Congress held on Dec. 5 and 6, Lee briefed lawmakers \u2014 all Democrats except for one Republican senator, whom Lee declined to identify. Her professional warning to Capitol Hill: \u201cHe\u2019s going to unravel, and we are seeing the signs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That would be this Dr Bandy X. Lee<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an interview, she pointed to Trump \u201cgoing back to conspiracy theories, denying things he has admitted before, his being drawn to violent videos.\u201d Lee also warned, \u201cWe feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress. Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wonder what this “internationally recognized expert on violence” is basing her evaluation on. Has she even met Trump, let alone examined him? If a structural engineer were to issue a public statement declaring a bridge unsafe on the basis of a photo or drone footage, he’d be laughed out of his profession and rightly so.<\/p>\n

Lee, editor of \u201cThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,\u201d which includes testimonials from 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts assessing the president\u2019s level of \u201cdangerousness,\u201d said that she was surprised by the interest in her findings during her two days in Washington.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pray tell, what is the difference between the behaviour of Lee and her 27 colleagues and that of a preacher in rural Texas clutching handfuls of rattlesnakes?<\/p>\n

The tweet resuscitated the conversation about the president\u2019s mental state and the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal of the president from office if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet deem him physically or mentally \u201cunable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Isn’t retaliating to a nuclear strike one of the duties of his office? Or have these professional psychiatrists divined a first-strike intention from his tweet that passed me by?<\/p>\n

The amendment is purposefully set up to require a high burden of proof…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, yes. The drafters didn’t want a bunch of quacks sitting down with the President’s political opponents, declaring him insane, then running to the press with their findings.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Lee and two other medical professionals released a statement following Trump\u2019s late night Tweet baiting Kim Jung Un into a potential nuclear war. \u201cWe write as mental health professionals who have been deeply concerned about Donald Trump\u2019s psychological aberrations,\u201d the statement read.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe believe that he is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threats. … We urge that those around him, and our elected representatives in general, take urgent steps to restrain his behavior and head off the potential nuclear catastrophe that endangers not only Korea and the United States but all of humankind.\u201d The statement, released on behalf of the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts, was signed by more than 100 medical professionals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

During the Cold War, one of the most damning criticisms the Western powers made of the USSR was their practice of declaring political opponents insane and locking them away, subjecting them to all sorts of nasty treatments to “cure” them. The willingness of doctors to break their Hippocratic oath in this manner was monstrous, but at least the Soviet quacks actually met the people they were certifying and pretended to carry out an examination. In modern America they don’t even bother to do that. How anyone can support this, let alone put their name to it, and call themselves a medical professional is beyond me. They’re political hacks and nothing more, just like their Soviet counterparts were.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever I hear someone from the medical profession in the news, it’s a fair bet they are engaged in politics rather than medicine. Probably the best examples are the public health fascists that Christopher Snowdon\u00a0and Dick Puddlecote talk about, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[20,44,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6310"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6310"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6313,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6310\/revisions\/6313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}