The Extreme Makeover of Hillary
Bay Buchanan Implies Hillary Clinton Suffers From Mental Illness
Partisanship and media bias can be a potent political weapon , especially in todays "Global Community" of internet news and political bloggers.
Whether you consider yourself liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, all should be aware of, and concerned about, the misuse of the media by political figures in order to advance personal agendas.
Republican strategist bay Buchanan has been busy these days making the rounds and promoting her new book, "The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton."
It isn't exactly surprising that Ms. Buchanan's book is designed to discredit Sen. Clinton. Buchanan is after all, the senior adviser for a Republican presidential candidate (Rep. Tom Tancredo), in direct competition with the former First Lady. However, it is disturbing to read Ms. Buchanan’s unsubstantiated implications of serious mental illness in Sen. Clinton.
In Ms. Buchanan's book (Regnery Publishing), she writes:
"As I studied Hillary from her early years through her days as First lady, it became more and more evident that extreme insecurity is a dominant personality trait. Not being a medical professional, I decided to look more deeply into the condition. After days of research, I was led to a fascinating field of study involving narcissistic personality style. The symptoms of the related disorder were intriguing. I have included them in an endnote. I pass no judgment as to whether this shoe fits the Lady Hillary."
Notice that Ms. Buchanan is very careful to state that she is not a medical professional, claiming in fact to "pass no judgment" as to Sen. Clinton's actual mental condition. Yet, apparently emboldened by the suspicious lack of criticism for the unfounded opinions included in her book, Ms. Buchanan recently went a step further.
In a May 14 article about the book, Ericka Anderson quoted Buchanan as saying, "[W]e are talking about a clinical condition that could make her [Clinton] dangerously ill-suited to become President and Commander-in-Chief."
The real problem with this kind of media-based propaganda is not so much that Ms. Buchanan included it in a book devoted entirely to negative assertions concerning Sen. Clinton, she is playing to her target audience after all, but that other media forums will begin to repeat it.
Like a childhood game of "Telephone", each retelling of Ms. Buchanan's tale will become slightly more skewed until this outrageous claim of serious and debilitating mental illness will appear not only plausible, but will be relayed as "fact.” This game may simply be played out in the blogs of “citizen journalists”, but increasingly these stories are picked up and relayed by trusted and "reputable" news sources.
It is also interesting to note that when the Senator’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, was in office, the opposing party was home to a number of clinical psychologists who published a flurry of articles claiming to have analyzed the psyche of the President without ever having met him.
The diagnoses?
Narcissistic Personality Disorder… of course.
