His orders come from far away no more

My favorite new Republican whipping boy is Rick Moran at the aptly named RightWingNuthouse. I took him on re: Coulter-thing here last week when he said:

We may violently disagree with their politics.

Dude, I don't violently disagree with anyone's politics, except the KKK, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or similar groups. I strongly oppose damn near everything the Republicans stand for, but violent? That's creepy.

Can you imagine some liberal commentator making similar remarks about Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame, III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon and who is fighting to keep the 9/11 Memorial from being hijacked by the anti-American left?

Just who exactly is this anti-American left? I don't remember being invited to this club. Name me one person on the left who hates America. Straw man, arise! And of course no liberal commentator would make the comments he suggests. Why? Because no one on the legitimate left hates anyone. We just want them the hell out of office!

In another stellar example of even-handed thuggery, he says this:

We still don’t know what happened at Haditha. And it is very clear that the truth of the matter is proving more elusive than the anti-war left will admit. To do so would ruin their campaign to delegitimize our troop’s efforts in Iraq as well as build support for withdrawing our military before the job is done.

Rick, I'll take that. I'll gladly be the anti-war left since you are so clearly the pro-war right. And to expose the straw man again, the effort I want to delegitimize is that of GWBush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al, not the poor grunts on the ground who are treading water as fast as they can in an effort not to drown in the morass into which they were sent.

However the Haditha incident shakes out, the blame goes straight to the top. GWBush & co. And their ideological supporters.

That means you, Rick.

Wipe your hands. The blood is messy.

al-Zarqawi: Political ends, as sad remains, will die.

Jeff Goldstein works with the only audience that would find him actually funny-a dead guy:

protein wisdom: “I don’t know about you, but I think Gerry Rafferty is one of the most underrated rock/pop voices of our generation...”

al-Zarqawi:

protein wisdom: “Baker Street’? ‘Right Down the Line’? That’s some sophisticated pop sound, man.”

al-Zarqawi:

protein wisdom: “And in fact, ‘Baker Street’ may be responsible for bringing the sax back into pop music. Although I guess some people would point you to Springsteen—who for the record is completely derivative of John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown band.”

al-Zarqawi:

protein wisdom: “Of course, not many people know that, because JC didn’t achieve any measure of fame until much later on. With the Eddie and the Cruisers soundtrack.”

Now he's a faux music critic. Gerry Rafferty? He was what bad Top 40 radio in the late '70s thought was 'serious' music. Of course we see how well that worked out.

More deep thoughts:

protein wisdom: “For instance, a question I bet a lot of my readers would be interested in hearing your answer to is, why did you target Iraqi civilians if what you were trying to do was win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi population?”

al-Zarqawi:

protein wisdom: “I mean, was it to try to foment a civil war?—which, if that happens, will likely happen thanks to years of brutal Sunni-Ba’athist oppression of the majority Shia and not because al Qaeda fooled anyone into thinking their attacks were anything other than pure barbarism. Or was there something else involved? Some other grand strategy?”

al-Zarqawi:

protein wisdom: “-- Like, I dunno, maybe the real target of your attacks was the Western media, which has shown itself to be easily manipulated toward anti-war sentiment by ‘insurgent’ brutality. Something along those lines.”

al-Zarqawi:

What's really sad is this, from Jeff's BFF, Rick Moran at the not-at-all ironically named RightWingNutHouse:

Jeff Goldstein has an interview with the now dead terrorist that had me laughing so hard I almost emptied my bladder.

One word, dude: Depends.

Note: Ralph Wiggum graphic stolen from Atrios. So sue me.

Well Be Bop A Lula she's my baby

When I joined the first rock band I played with, things were, well, a bit different. To start with, it was '63, and the music business was much simpler. And musicians were in many ways more open, as well as naive.

Although certain songs were always associated with specific artists, it had been common practice for some time for artists to freely record songs by other artists, especially if the song had been a hit. While that still occurs today, it was much more common "back in the day." Even the first 2 Beatles albums were largely 'cover' tunes, many of which were common in bands' repertoires. Often, competing versions of the same song were on the chart at or near the same time with some clearly awkward juxtapositions. Witness Chubby Checker singing "The Twist" shortly after Hank Ballard & The Midnighters recorded it. Or in probably the most egregious example, Pat Boone having a hit with Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally".

Gene Vincent was an early 'rockabilly' star, long before that word even was coined. He will always be associated with the song "Be-Bop-A-Lula", and his career, and life, sadly were not as long as they might have been. Many people to this day do not know that he had a badly injured leg and often wore a metal brace which was hidden in most publicity shots. During my years working at Capitol Studios, I daily walked by a picture in the hall of him posing with his band in Studio B, one leg hidden behind one of the other players.

Here's Gene Vincent performing Long Tall Sally in Brussels, 1963. His crutches can be seen while he walks out onto the stage:



For the techie geeks among you, one of the amps onstage is a Vox AC30. While starting to become common in Europe at the time, they were unheard of in the US, leading me to speculate that it was "hired" for the show. Also, the lead guitarist and bassist appear to be playing Burns guitars, for which the same caveat applies. Burns pickups are the heart of the sound of Brian May's "Red Special".

Here's a site that has hundreds of pics of Vincent: http://www.rockabillyhall.com/LatestNewsGV.html

And the public gets what the public wants

My friend Brad Friedman at Brad Blog is all over this issue:

We do, however, have copious and documented evidence to suggest there is no reason in the world to have any faith that Bilbray won the race.

The fact that the thin margin between the two at this hour (with "100% of the votes counted", according to the CA Sec. of State's website) is a mere 4,732 votes -- in a race where 125,882 votes were reportedly cast in a county with more than 355,000 voters registered -- is not even the largest question. Neither is the so-far unclear question of how the race will be affected by the 68,500 absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted in San Diego County according to the SD Registrar of Voters website at this hour.

The biggest concern about the race, by far, is that San Diego County uses two types of Diebold voting systems -- optical-scan and touch-screen -- both of which have not only proven to be disastrously unreliable in San Diego County and California in the past, but have also been demonstrated over the last six months to feature dozens of exceedingly well-documented and remarkable security vulnerabilities, making them extremely accessible to tampering. Especially if anyone has unsupervised physical access for more than a minute or two with them.

The voting machines used in Tuesday's election were sent home with volunteer poll workers the night before the election, according to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters office today. As well, The BRAD BLOG has received reports that in some cases, poll workers may have had the machines alone at their houses, unsupervised, for a week or even two prior to Tuesday's election....

Last February, California Sec. of State Bruce McPherson, himself, commissioned and released an independent security analysis [PDF] regarding just one aspect of both types of Diebold voting machines used in yesterday's San Diego race, after the memory cards used in those machines were found to have been extremely vulnerable to tampering. A mock election in Leon County, Florida last December revealed that tampering with the memory cards enabled the results of a mock election, run by Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, to be completely reversed.

They took the machines home?

THEY TOOK THE MACHINES HOME? WTF?

These are machines based on generic Windows boxes, with all the security features of he average teen gamer's PC. (Of course, they would be better off using Macs.)

To allow them to be taken home, however, is frightening. In a criminal case, regarding evidence, chain of custody is paramount. Imagine blood samples from a murder scene being taken home in a CSI technician or detective's car. Oh, wait, that's not a good example.

But really, these are your secret ballots. Lives were lost to gain suffrage. At the beginning of this country only "landed gentry" could vote. Today, all citizens enjoy the power of the ballot.

Unless, of course, the polling place worker's kid needed to look at some internet porn. If traces of his web activity can be erased from mom's prying eyes, so can your vote.

Get pissed, people!

Dreamboat Annie my little ship of dreams

I am sick and tired of this shit!

tbogg mentions Rick Moran, who, (ahem) is slightly off-put by Ann-thing Coulter's latest spew:

She has descended into a black hole of necessity from which there is no escape; where she is forced to please her rabid base of red meat conservatives usually by going beyond the bounds of decency and proper public discourse in order to make a point that could have been made without resorting to the kind of hurtful, hateful, personal attacks that have become a hallmark of her war with liberals.

Make no mistake. Ann Coulter is a brutish lout, a conservative ogre who should be denied a public platform to spout what any conservative with an ounce of integrity and intellectual honesty should be able to see as unacceptable. To descend to the level of your opponents in order to criticize them is not an excuse. And for such a gifted wordsmith, Coulter does not have the excuse of ignorance.

Yeah. Well, problem is, he doesn't really mean it. He is either too gutless to align himself with her raving, or just embarrased by her bad publicity.

Here's why:

We may violently disagree with their politics.

Dude, I don't violently disagree with anyone's politics, except the KKK, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or similar groups. I strongly oppose damn near everything the Republicans stand for, but violent? That's creepy.

Can you imagine some liberal commentator making similar remarks about Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame, III, captain of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon and who is fighting to keep the 9/11 Memorial from being hijacked by the anti-American left?

Just who exactly is this anti-American left? I don't remember being invited to this club. Name me one person on the left who hates America. Straw man, arise! And of course no liberal commentator would make the comments he suggests. Why? Because no one on the legitimate left hates anyone. We just want them the hell out of office!

And this:

But my commenter SSheil put it nicely:

I think this post (and several others relating to the same topic) is illustrative of what I see is generally the largest difference between blogs on the right and left. As with Rick’s blog, most blogs on the right are not shy of taking our leaders, writers and speakers who represent the Right to task when they individually or collectively “step on their d*cks.”

When was the last time you saw one of Ted Kennedy’s incoherent rants brought to task by Kos kids or readers over at DU? Or Pelosi? Or Dean? Or Durbin?

Where are you looking? Clearly not Kos, where Dem pols are raked over the coals every day. Clearly not Atrios, FireDogLake, or any other popular left leaning blogs. They all proudly criticise the "leaders" of the Democratic party.

On the other hand, Limbaugh, Hewitt, AssRocket, PowerTools, the usual idiots, never loose their lips from dear leader's sphincter long enough to criticise. It's party line all the time.

Rick, you own Coulter. She says what you are too emasculated to say, she gives voice to what your base believes. If someone criticises GWBush, they have to be reviled, marginalised, shunned. Dissent is not allowed. And rather than open dialog, you resort to the kind of insults that sometimes even you find unattractive.

But make no mistake about it. Ann Coulter is the face of the Radical Right. Here's my evidence, from some of your commentors:

I think that Coulter has a point. Just as Sheehan has reveled in her son’s death, so have some of these women. Many are affiliated with Code Pink and other outrageous groups. Burlingame on the other hand, doesn’t self identify by any group affiliations and misuse her status as a widow to promote these groups’ causes. Burlingame speaks for herself on her own beliefs not with the groupthink espoused by Sheehan and the other moonbats.

And:

I don’t think you’re quite getting her tact, wit and methodology.

The left typically have plenty of personal anger. Never seen any in Coulter. Seen her angry and incensed about things while simultaneously quite lacking in the internal ugly anger that is so often vomited at her by those that hate her. And you got to love her response: a chuckle.

And:

Rick – you are putting too many words into what she says – you are not being reasonable. If the widow happens to enjoy a new car bought by the compensation due her husband, would it be wrong to make a factual statement that she actually enjoys driving a new car without accusing the speaker or the widow of insensitivity? Is the speaker saying that she does not grieve her husband? Is the speaker saying that she caused the death of her husband to gain a car? Stop seeing monsters in the clouds. This is the kind of narrow rationality the language-obsessed meaning-challenged cultural leftists use to make argument, IMO

And:

So what is Coulter is the dragon-woman and the flamethrower. For heavan’s sake there is a multitude of whackier ones on the left. As dumb as the left thinks we are, I mean we know the diff when Ann is rolling in the frags grenades for effect. And frankly, in spite of her take no prisoners style, she’s often not that far off mark. And it’s delightful to see the lefties pulling out their hair out and about to absolutely go into hysteria when she run’s a few magazines of rhetorical tracers into their sensitive litlle ego’s. They can dish it out, but can’t take it. I note she hasn’t been invited back on to Maher’s show after tap dancing on his head and the his atheist-left audience.

And:

I am usually fairly moderate except when we speak about some of these moonbats and the MSM. Their aim is always the same. Destroy the country and in particular attack the WH and military. This group is no different. They did NOT conduct themselves as widows. So you say how does a widow conduct themselves? That we can not attack back because of their statis?

That is precisely Coulter’s point. They put an old man that that served in the military out as their mouthpiece. He says on TV that our guys “killed in cold blood”. How do you ignore that fool? They send a CIA husband out to call the President a liar but you can NOT answer the lies because he can hide behind CIA. They sent these Jersey Black Widows and they sat on my TV almost everyday…...forever…..trashing the WH. They appeared as TV stars of our foreign policy. We have to sit with our mouths shut BECAUSE they are WIDOWS. Another example was their own grieving mom that was supposed to have the “absolute moral authority” to speak for all of us. This is what you wrote (Rick) about Sheehan on 9/16/05.

This is your Party. This is YOU! Whine and waffle all you want, it doesn't matter. These Radical Right true believers support Coulter, and GWBush, and Rumsfeld, and, well, the list goes on.

Rick, I'm sure you think yourself a decent fellow, but when you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.


Cross-posted at Huffington Post.

That's the way God planned, that's the way God wants it to be

From Billy Preston's web site:

The great singer-songwriter and performer Billy Preston, the real "Fifth Beatle" has died after a long illness as a result of malignant hypertension that resulted in kidney failure and other complications. As a result of a medical insult he'd been in a deep coma since last November 21st, but was still struggling to recover. He died at Shea Scottsdale Hospital in Scottsdale, Arizona where he'd lived for the last couple of years.

Watch this video of Billy talking about music as God:



As I told John Amato earlier today, Billy was in Capitol Studios several times while I worked there in the late '90s. He was always, gracious, friendly, and funny. He also came into Larrabee once while I worked there, to play on the Jet record.

I remember one time at Capitol he was warming up on the B3 in Studio A, while next door in Studio B the seasoned studio musicians playing on a TV scoring date were taking a break.

Hearing Billy, they all came running to see who was playing so freakin' amazingly. Even the session keyboard player stood smiling and groovin'. Billy was that good. Just blew everyone away.

Lots of people make music, fewer are really about music. Billy was one of those. The last time I saw him he was loving life, loving playing music, and happy to be there. I was happy he was there too.

Thanks, Billy.

Whos gonna steal the show, you know, baby its the guitar man.

More music. I just gots to have me more music. Ahem.

It's tragically hip in some circles to diss Bach. After all, he worked for a living as a composer, got paid to write his little ditties. I mean, he really never busked on street corners or paid to play at the Whiskey in hopes the A&R guy from A&M might stop by. So how could he have any real cred? Well, for starters, the dude could compose. In among all the contrapuntal frenzies were such show-stoppers as "Air on a G String" and "Sheep May Safely Graze." And he takes some heat for recycling. As one example, the same melody shows up as:

• "Sinfonia to Cantata #29" BWV 29
  
• "Partita for Solo Violin, E Maj" BWV 1006
  
• "Suite for Lute, E Maj" BWV 1006a
  

What is so special about this melody, that ol' Johann Sebastian Bach used it no less than 3 times? I will try to explain. Last year a Music Meme was passing through the Bloggersphere. One of the topics was "Favorite Instrumentals." Here's what I wrote at the time:

Top 5 Instrumentals

1. Cliffs of Dover, Eric Johnson

A rollicking romp on the strings, soaring ever higher, to an impossibly beautiful conclusion.

2. Partita for solo violin No. 3., E major, Prelude, J. S. Bach

A rollicking romp on the strings, soaring ever higher, to an impossibly beautiful conclusion.

3. Miserlou, Dick Dale

Made recently famous by Pulp Fiction. Listen to how tough and assertive it sounds, and imagine how that played in '61. Damn scary guitar playing.

4. In The Mood, Glenn Miller
This was a transition from mannered swing music to R 'n' B of the '50s. It's really all rock 'n' roll.

5. Walk, Don't Run, The Ventures
Pre surf guitar, post jazz, proved that intense doesn't have to equate to loud. This song swings really hard, but keeps the lid on the volume pressure cooker. Rocks with subtleties, not volume. But it's fun to play loud, too.


Honorable mention:

Peter Gunn Theme, Henry Mancini

My friend Al Schmitt recorded this, along with all Mancini's work. Bob Bain, later of The Tonight Show, played lead guitar.

Parkening Plays Bach, Christopher Parkening

Andres Segovia wrote the entire book on classical guitar, esp. re: Bach transcriptions of violin, cello, keyboard, and choral pieces. Parkening took it to a new level with this album. Technically daunting ( I made it through Prelude in C, Well Tempered Klavier, but that's about it), and breathtakingly beautiful, it emphasises not only Bach's contrapuntal art but also the melodies. Ah, the melodies...

Embryonic Journey, Jefferson Airplane (Korma Kaukonen solo)

Starting to get the ideal that I play guitar? Not as well as Jorma. Just a quick slice of lovely fingerstyle guitar playing, with a wonderful melody and flawless tone. Anybody really into fingerstyle would do well to study this man's work.

Steppin' Out, Cream: "Live Cream, Vol. 2

Back in the day, when Eric Clapton was young and hungry, he helped define the vocabulary of rock guitar playing. This 14 minute exercise shows the dexterity and depth of this guy's fingers. He never plays the same lick twice, and, while it would be foolish to compare him to Charlie Parker, the similarity is that both played with passion, skill, and new ideas in their day. Contrast this to the later work done by Mr. Clapton, pop star and much calmer persona. The young Eric really had something to say.

For additional homework, and to learn more about guitar music, look up: Clarence White, Doc Watson, & Lenny Breau. Especially Lenny Breau.

So yes, the Bach piece really does it for me. It's a fantastic melody, folded inside an intense rhythm and chord structure. And it doesn't start off softly. Instead it immediately jump out, grabs your ears, and pulls you along for the short breathtaking ride. It's a little bit like a great roller coaster, if they could figure out how to start at 60 MPH rather than have to build up to that speed. In this way, music demonstrates that this intangible art can supercede the laws of physics, which is one of its great appeals to us mortals.

Which of the three settings is best? Is Chateau Lafite better than Petrus? Come on, that's a silly question. The violin version is the most exciting, because of the nature and scope of the instrument. And the limited ability to hint at chords makes the musical tension exquisite. As with all solo violin work, the listener must interpolate the chords at which the instrument only hints. And the variety of bow attacks and dynamics gives the piece drama unavailable elsewhere.

Here's a great version of the solo violin version:



The lute setting is the most restrained and introspective, again, due to the delicate nature of the instrument. (For guitarists who have never played a lute, the instrument is surprising. It looks large and physically intimidating, yet the voice it produces is so subtle, so soft, that it forces the player into a competely different, smaller, more intimate mind-space.)

And the Cantata (vocal) version is pretty over the top, especially if one favors solo instrumentals. But it still rocks, pretty hard.

Now the guitar version, of any of the 3 actual Bach arrangements, gives yet takes away. Yes, there is the ability to chord, also present in the lute. And there is greater dynamic range and tonal palette than the lute, although not as diverse as the violin. So it perhaps is the richest variation of the Bach melody.

As I have mentioned before, Christopher Parkening has taken classical guitar, especially Bach transcriptions, to a completely new level. I made my way through his Parkening Plays Bach slowly, mastering only the Prelude #1 in C, for the Well Tempered Clavier.

Here's Chris playing the choral version, with only a slight harpsichord accompaniment.


This rocks. Enjoy. And compare/contrast to the violin version above.

As an added attraction, here's Li Jie performing Bach's Prelude to the Solo cello Suite in G Maj:


Don't know much about her, except that she plays with a maturity and soul that's unexpected in someone who seems so young.

John Kerry: Johnny, show me that you care, really care for me

Several bloggers here in Los Angeles had a chance to hear a speech by Sen. John Kerry (D-He Really Won) today, and then sit down with him for a private chat afterward.

(That's Pam & me, bottom right corner)

Folks, I take back everything I ever said about him post 11/04. He completely understands what happened, how he was defeated, and how his legitimacy is still being questioned by the Swift Boat Bastards from hell. In fact, in direct response to my pointed comment about his current response to them, he looked me right in the eye and outlined exactly what his counterattacks had been, many of which I had forgotten. And then, rather than getting defensive, he simply said "I should have fought back harder." Word.

Pam & I were Kerry supporters in '04. Frankly, we would have supported Charlie the Chimp (don't ask) against GWBush, so that's no real praise. Kerry clearly was intelligent, but on the campaign trail, even at open town hall meetings, any question got a predictable answer: the question about Iraq gets answer 14B. But today was off the record, and as a result, unscripted.

Kerry did a better job of answering the blogger questions than he did the questions from the audience after his speech. He was impassioned, engaged, and not afraid of criticism. When asked why other Dem pols seem to be cowardly, he said that other members of the Dem caucus still didn't get it. And when asked about the ennui that seems to affect the Democratic party, his response was a challenge: we need to win elections. Then we can do work, with a majority in at least one house.

We both came away feeling that this guy really gets it, that he has the 'rock star' vibe that only Al Gore & the Clintons have today. He said he felt like he was in the unique position, having been to the 'mountain top', to make some waves, both in Washington DC and in the Democratic Party, by helping articulate a message as well as helping to support other national and local Democratic races.

Had I heard those words on TV, I might have said "Whatever." Hearing them to my face, I believed. This is a really smart guy, who has a real grip on international politics and issues, and who doesn't seem to rely on flacks and flunkys for data. He is in command of facts, figures, and statistics. Not because he reads them, but because he cares about them.

Dante Atkins has a really thorough piece up, as do Pamela Leavey and the Hollywood Liberal, who were also at the meeting today.

08 is a long way away, and Kerry says he's focused on 11/06, as we all should be. But Pam and I talked about how America would be today if he had actually won in '04. And clearly we would have been much better off.

And he plays guitar.

Update: added pic from The Democratic Daily (Thanks, Pamela.)

Mr. Bass Man, you've got that certain somethin'

As I have posted here before, sheer technical virtuosity with nothing to say musically is a pretty empty exercise. That's why, as a guitar player, I don't care for Steve Vai, for example, or some of the other "shredders" out there. Sure, there's technique galore, but fer gawdsakes, just play me a melody that makes me cry.

Virtuosity in the presence of musical taste, however, is another thing entirely. As I have posted here before, Django Reinhardt, Segovia, and lots of other string benders display a talent combining both technical skills and musical soul.

In terms of bass players, in the "modern era," certainly Jaco Pastorius is a worthy talent. And in the rock arena, Chris Squire, who never learned to play on 1 & 3, is fun to listen to. And Jack Bruce, late of Cream, opened doors that many bass players still haven't walked through.

Victor Wooten, of Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, (wikipedia entry here) stands ready to assume the mantle of Bass God of the 21st Century. What, you don't believe me? Just watch, listen to him play Amazing Grace, and believe:

Dubya: Father? Yes, son? I want to kill you. Mother? I want to...

Bush on the Couch, the bio/analysis by Dr. Justin Frank, is certainly not conclusive in its theories critical of GWBush. Any analysis done by long distance, without direct contact with the subject, is immediately suspect. And of course Right-Wing psychoanalysts would never use that tactic:

Krauthammer said that Vice President Dick Cheney "did the manly thing" in withholding information from the public concerning his accidental shooting of lawyer Harry Whittington during a hunting excursion in Texas on February 11.


Krauthammer repeated the unsubstantiated assertion, advanced by the Bush administration, that terrorists would like President George W. Bush to lose the November election. Krauthammer wrote: "Of course the terrorists want Bush defeated. How can anyone pretend otherwise?"


Charles Krauthammer, on FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume, on May 26:

It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.

(Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated Washington Post columnist, Time magazine columnist, and FOX News contributor. He holds a medical degree from Harvard and worked as a resident in psychiatry in the late 1970s before moving to Washington.)

No, of course they wouldn't.

Regardless, Frank's book notes some troubling episodes, ones that, if true, might make anyone drink heavily. Quotes from the book, through wikipedia:

George Bush's next-eldest sibling, Robin, died of leukemia at the age of three, when he was seven years old himself. Frank argues that this loss, and the way his parents handled it, has had a lasting impact on Bush's psyche.

At the time she became ill, Robin was the future president's only sibling (although Jeb Bush was born before she died) and a favorite playmate. His parents never told him that she was sick, although he was asked to stop playing with her. Only after her death did they disclose to him her illness, which had lasted longer than doctors expected it to and had led the Bushes on a frantic quest back East to find a specialist who could treat her. These efforts kept them away from their son for long stretches of time, and he was not present when Robin died, nor at her burial.

After the service in Connecticut, Barbara and George H.W. Bush returned to Houston the next day. There was no further attempt at closure or a protracted mourning process, in keeping with WASP mores of the time.

Frank argues that the apparent abruptness of his little sister's passing and the lack of any way to deal with it have had a strong impact on George W. Bush's later personal development. Barbara Bush has since said the way she handled Robin's death with her son was one of the few mistakes she made as a parent. Frank documents several incidents in Bush's life related to Robin's death at various points through Bush's childhood and adolesence.

. . .

Later on in his teen years, he began drinking and eventually developed the alcoholism which would plague him for much of the rest of his life. Frank asserts that Bush was a very heavy drinker from the age of 15 until the age of 40. While alcoholism can have many origins, Frank argues that the unresolved pain from his sister's passing could be one motivator for this self-medication. Frank describes several incidents during Bush's presidency leading him to suspect that Bush resumed drinking during one or more of his many long vacations from the White House.

Bush's struggles with his father's shadow have been well-documented — he was never the athlete or student that George H.W. Bush had distinguished himself as. Bush's military career was lackluster as well, where his father had earned medals and was considered a war hero. Frank argues that Bush may subconsciously blame his parents, his father in particular, for taking his sister away from him, aggravating an already difficult father-son relationship.

Another direct quote from Frank's book:

Robin died in New York in October 1953; her parents spent the next day golfing in Rye, attending a small memorial service the following day before flying back to Texas. George learned of his sister's illness only after her death, when his parents returned to Texas, where the family remained while the child's body was buried in a Connecticut family plot.

Golfing? WTF?!? And didn't attend the burial! These are some coldass people. On some levels, GWBush wasn't given much of an upbringing. But who knows? Some people grow up in misery and rise to greatness. Others grow up with a silver spur in their mouth and turn out, well, special.

From Jeffrey St. Clair writing in Counterpunch we learn more about Mom:

His mother, Barbara, is a bitter and grouchy gorgon, who must have frightened her own offspring as they first focused their filmy eyes onto her stern visage.She is a Pierce, a descendent of Franklin, the famously incompetent president, patron of Nathaniel Hawthorne and avowed racist, who joined in a bizarre cabal to overthrow Abraham Lincoln. (For more on this long neglected episode in American history check out Charles Higham's excellent new book Murdering Mr. Lincoln.)

Here's more about Babs:

Understandably, George Sr. spent much of his time far away from Barbara Bush's icy boudoir, indulging in a discreet fling or two while earning his stripes as a master of the empire, leaving juvenile George to cower under the unstinting commands of his cruel mother, who his younger brother Jeb dubbed "the Enforcer." This woman's veins pulse with glacial melt. According to Neil Bush, his mother was devoted to corporal punishment and would "slap around" the Bush children. She was known in the family as "the one who instills fear." She still does...with a global reach.

How wicked is Barbara Bush? Well, she refused to attend her own mother's funeral. And the day after her five-year old daughter Robin died of leukemia Barbara Bush was in a jolly enough mood to spend the afternoon on the golf course. Revealingly, Mrs. Bush kept Robin's terminal illness a secret from young George, a stupid and cruel move which provided one of the early warps to his psyche.

Overblown rhetoric, but it still paints a picture that ain't pretty. This is the same loving Mom who famously said this:

...dismissing the escalating body count of American soldiers in Iraq. "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many," the Presidential Mother snapped. "It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Yeah. I'm guessing she won't be helping with bandages at Walter Reed, or going on any USO tours any time soon.

St. Clair continues, name checking Dr. Frank:

Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, zeroes in on the crucial first five years of W's existence, where three factors loom over all others: an early trauma, an absent father and an abusive mother. It is a recipe for the making of a dissociated megalomaniac. Add in a learning disability (dyslexia) and a brain bruised by booze and coke and you have a pretty vivid portrait of the Bush psyche.

Lovely imagery, that.

Other books seek to answer the question of GWBush's humanity, or lack thereof. From Salon:

Nevertheless, if you can hack your way through the underbrush, "Bush on the Couch" brings together a lot of provocative information, and some genuinely enlightening hypotheses, from which the resourceful reader can assemble a portrait of Bush that accounts for his seeming contradictions. Combine it with Peter Singer's "The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush," a clear-headed and superbly reasoned dissection of Bush's much-touted morality, and the forthcoming "Personality, Character and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents," a comparative evaluation of Bush and his predecessors in the office, by Steven J. Rebenzer and Thomas R. Faschingbauer, and the portrait gains more heft.

What emerges is the image of a man shaped by rage and fear. Frank, who subscribes to the variant of psychoanalysis formulated by Melanie Klein, has his own ideas about where Bush's anger and anxiety come from. Some of those ideas are silly and difficult to support, like the belief that newborn infants blame themselves for their expulsion from the paradise of the womb, and feel both guilt about and fear of their own destructive capabilities. Others make sense, like the probability that Bush, who surely experienced the usual sibling rivalry, felt some unconscious guilt over the death of his younger sister Robin, from leukemia, when he was 7 and she was 3.

Bush's parents dealt with Robin's death by squelching any expression of grief; there was no funeral and they played golf the day after she died. This, according to Frank, is a key example of the family's approach to all such painful emotions, and the result was to distort and cripple the psyche of their firstborn son. Frank provides an elaborate description of how the healthy process of psychological "integration" is supposed to work, some of which is based on such unconvincing Kleinian theories as the "good mother" and the "bad mother." But in general, his thesis is credible: If a child's parents teach him that his feelings of suffering, fear, weakness and rage are so unacceptable that they can't even be acknowledged, he is likely to spend his life projecting those feelings onto other people and punishing them for it. It's one of the ways bullies are minted.

While Mommie Dearest receives most of criticism, not much is said about "Poppy" as a father figure, except that he managed to succesfully do virtually everything little GW could never do, except, you know, that Saddam thing:

George W. would find plenty of opportunities to practice the art of projection as he grew up. Frank, who is always on firmest footing when he's working from concrete biographical material, points out that from an early age, George W. Bush consistently failed in everything at which his father excelled. He got poor grades at the same schools where his father did well, and was a disaster in the same industry (oil) where his father made his fortune. His father was a varsity athlete; George W. had to settle for the cheerleading squad. His father was a torpedo plane pilot in World War II; George W. was a desultory member of the Texas Air National Guard.

Frank's psychoanalytic training pays off in one aspect by giving him an eye for the eloquent detail. There's George W.'s first, abortive engagement at 20, the same age at which his father married. And then there's George W. celebrating his role in the purchasing of the Texas Rangers by printing up baseball cards with his picture on them, a pathetically transparent effort to erase the fact that "he could never be the baseball star his father was." Even the exhaustively analyzed "Mission Accomplished" charade on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 takes on new meaning when you interpret it as a "pantomime of [George W.'s] father's war heroism."

Some observers have read George W.'s obsession with ousting Saddam Hussein as motivated by revenge for Saddam's attempted assassination of his father. It could also be seen as the determination to pull off something that his father failed to achieve. But dig a little deeper and it also looks like an attempt to exorcise what must be one nasty case of Oedipal resentment. By Frank's formula, families like the Bushes, where difficult emotions are banished, produce children who cast other people as the symbols of their own unintegrated negative urges and feelings: "I don't want to kill my father, he does, and to prove that I'm devoid of such bad impulses, I'll take him out."

Maybe Morrison was writing about GWBush when he said:

The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived
And then he paid a visit to his brother
And then he walked on down the hall
And he came to a door
And he looked inside
Father
Yes son?
I want to kill you
Mother, I want to. . .