THE GEORGE W. BUSH HYPNOSIS FILE

by Russell M. Drake

Call him hypnotist-in-chief. He earned it.

Among modern era statesmen, only Adolf Hitler comes close to George
W. Bush's skill level as operator of the public consciousness.

Consider: After three years of terror and death at the hands of a
terrorist band run by two guys hiding in caves, after a bloody,
failed invasion of the wrong country in search of who knows what,
after a jobs market crash matched only by the Herbert Hoover
Administration, and after mismanaging huge national budget surpluses
into over-the-cliff national deficits – all supported by the most
outlandish lies – Bush still holds a firm grip on the minds of more
than half of the people who say they're going to vote.

The hypnosis has been so effective that it has enabled Bush to
survive repeated blunders that might well have led to another man's
impeachment and removal from office, even by members of his own
party.

He did it with fear hypnosis, verbal confusion hypnosis, peace
hypnosis, deference hypnosis, radio hypnosis, the help of the press,
and the Big Lie technique pioneered by Hitler.

"In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of
credibility, since the great masses of the people....will more easily
fall victim to a great lie than to a small one." – Hitler, Mein
Kampf.

Bush's political hypnosis talent, like Hitler's, lies in taking
classroom hypnosis theory and technique and projecting it to mass
audiences.

Verbal Confusion Hypnosis

Bush's most famous lies have centered around the reasons (23 counted
by University of Illinois senior Devon Largio in her 2004 honors
thesis) given for going to war against Iraq. The ever changing
justifications for the war put Bush groupies into a state of verbal
confusion hypnosis where they more or less gave up thinking for
themselves and believed anything Bush said, a condition explained by
Jesse E. Gordon in Handbook of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.

"The verbal confusion technique, which is quite difficult to
administer, involves an approximation of double-talk in which
instructions of a somewhat contradictory kind are given in rapid
succession making it impossible for the attentive subject either to
quite comprehend or quite acquiesce to any of them. Finally, he
simply gives up all attempts and more or less collapses into a
hypnotic state." Trying to sort through 23 reasons in search of the
right one can be confusing, particularly when they're given in rapid
succession, over and over again.

Some might see Bush's 23 reasons as nothing more than a scoundrel's
desperate scramble to cover his trail except that he does it
elsewhere, as in his rambling State of the Union addresses where he
may produce a dazzling list of jobs creation spending that quickly
evaporates into thin air. Remember the hydrogen car, or launching a
man from the moon to Mars?

Fear Hypnosis

The initial reason for war advanced by Bush was that Saddam Hussein
posed an intolerable threat to the safety of Americans.

In a hysterical, almost panicky call to war at the Cincinnati Museum
Center, October 7, 2002, Bush belabored Saddam as a "murderous
tyrant" with "an arsenal of terror" that included "a massive
stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and
is capable of killing millions." Further, Bush cried, Saddam had the
know-how and materials to make nuclear bombs and "a growing fleet of
manned and unmanned aerial vehicles" capable of delivering chemical
and biological weapons "in a region where 135,000 American civilians
and service members live and work."

Later exposed as pure hokum, Bush's hypnotized minions bought this
swindle lock, stock, and barrel.

With his Weapons of Mass Destruction charges under increasing
scrutiny after none were found, Bush shifted to torture themes which
he used to high effect in his January, 2003 State of the Union
address: "This dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous
weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of
his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us
how forced confessions are obtained by torturing children while their
parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have
catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq:
electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin,
mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape."

In The Group Mind, first published in 1920 by Putnam, author and
social psychologist William McDougall says, "It is well recognized
that almost any emotional excitement increases the suggestibility of
the individual, though the explanation of the fact remains obscure."

According to recent research, the answer lies in the fact that fear
messages induce subjects to react not with their logical "left brain"
but with their more emotional "right brain." The theory is explored
in Mindsight, a soon to be published book by psychiatrist Daniel
Siegel.

Always a step ahead of his critics, by March, 2003, on the eve of his
invasion of Iraq, Bush had whipped the American public into a frenzy
of war hysteria hypnosis with his fevered visions of the peril posed
by Saddam.

War and Power

Bush began preparations for war long before 9/11 and Hussein.

The Bible on which he swore to uphold The Constitution was still wet
with his palm print when the gears of war began grinding in his
brain.

Soon, the new president was issuing belligerent statements against
other countries and their leaders, trashing traditional allies,
bullying the United Nations, refusing U. S. participation in a world
court to try war crimes, turning thumbs down on a global warming
pact, and making policy decisions that adversely affect the poor and
downtrodden of the planet.

Bush primed the terrorist bomb as surely as if he had assembled it
himself.

The conclusion that he did it deliberately to provoke violence that
would enable him to go to war is nearly inescapable.

That he wanted war to insure that he could serve two terms in the
presidency is another inescapable conclusion. It could not have been
lost on Bush that almost all lasting public policy has been achieved
by presidents of long tenure, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Harry S. Truman, Dwight David Eisenhower, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and
Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Two terms would give him the time to set in motion a chain of events
that would cement conservative policy so solidly in place that it
would be shatter resistant, if not immune to change by succeeding
administrations. "Reforming" most social programs in a way that would
curtail their access by ordinary citizens, and appointing federal
judges and Supreme Court justices agreeable to the process would be
not just a worthy goal, but an achievable one.

Making war to hold on to political power is not a new idea. English
statesman and writer Edmund Burke accused George III and his prime
minister Lord North of using force against the American colonies to
render critics impotent, and strengthen their hand in other ventures
of empire. "Let them but once get us into a war, and then their power
is safe, and an act of oblivion passed for all their misconduct,"
said Burke in his Letter to the Sheriffs of Nottingham. FDR, LBJ, and
Nixon were all accused of making war to extend their terms and
agendas.

Ultra hawk Dick Cheney may be the Bush administration's biggest "war
makes power" advocate, a trait exhibited early in his government
career and honed in successive White House assignments. The bellicose
vice president, as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford, first
teamed up with Donald Rumsfeld to convince Ford that "the way to turn
himself into a real president was to stir up crises in international
relations while lurching to the right in domestic politics," writes
T. D. Allman in "The Curse of Dick Cheney," Rolling Stone online,
August 25, 2004.

War is always a fait accompli. Bush knew that getting the U. S. into
a Middle East conflict was an irreversible act and said as much to
conservative Britons in a speech at Whitehall Palace, November 19,
2003, when he cast the war as a contract with the Iraqi people that
could not be broken without going back on "our word." Outside the
palace, 100,000 Londoners called for his head.

The Hitler Connection

Bush is seen all over the world as the second coming of Hitler. Type
in "bush hitler" in your search engine address line, punch "go," and
you will get about 565,000 "hits," nearly twice as many as runners-up
Saddam Hussein and Bill Clinton, tied at 288,000 each.

Much of this is little more than simple name calling by people who
don't like Bush, but others see a real Bush-Hitler connection.

Perhaps the clearest likeness between the two men lies in their use
of emotionally induced hypnosis to plant in the mass consciousness an
image of themselves as protectors of their subjects from threats to
national survival both inside and outside the fatherland.

His image as protector may have helped Bush siphon off some of John
Kerry's lead with women voters.

In a June, 2003 article written for The Nation about Bush's "mastery
of emotional language, especially negatively charged emotional
language," clinical psychologist Dr. Renana Brooks observed
that "Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his
listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from
hypnosis and advertising to instill the image of a dark and evil
world around us."

Dr. Justin A. Frank, professor of psychiatry at George Washington
University Medical Center, in Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of
the President, published this year, finds Bush so seriously impaired
mentally that he should be removed from office, not a reassuring
diagnosis for someone with his finger on the button. One reviewer of
the book identified Frank as a "Democrat." Another called his work
a "provocative blend of psychological case-study and partisan
polemic."

To study the Bush-Hitler connection outside the hot partisan air of
presidential election politics, go to either of two books from an
earlier period: Hypnotism, the ne plus ultra of Hitler hypnosis
books, by George H. Estabrooks, first published in 1943, and The
Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon, first published in 1897.

Both writers show how leaders like Bush and Hitler get public support
by spreading emotional contagion or, simply, fear.

Bush's subliminal messages to justify religious war
against "evildoers" are right out of Madison Avenue. Writing in The
New Yorker of July 12 & 19, 2004, David Greenberg tells how Bush
speechwriter Michael Gerson, "himself an evangelical, laces the
President's addresses with seemingly innocuous terms that the devout
recognize as laden with meaning: `whirlwind,' `work of
mercy,' `safely home,' `wonderworking power.'"

Hypnosis goes deep, to the core of one's being, which is why it has
found wide acceptance in treating disorders such as over-eating and
smoking. By getting where the addiction lies hypnosis can suppress
the addiction and replace it with positive behavior. In its
effectiveness, hypnosis has been compared to prayer, to which it is
clinically nearly identical.

War and Peace

Perhaps the biggest challenge Bush has given the public is asking
them to think of his war making as, actually, peace making. Bush has
been almost studious in application of the hypnotic word "peace" to
sugarcoat his designs for war.

"Peace" has become his slogan.

"How many people in the confusion of a defeat or crisis have been
reassured by one word? Peace. Independence. Reconstruction. Without
taking a closer look, they adopt the leader in whose name this ideal
has been proposed. It is the ideal that unites them and leads them
into the venture. If necessary, technicians will be responsible for
conducting it from the inside so long as the figurehead maintains his
prestige." Jean Dauven, The Powers of Hypnosis George W. Bush misses
no chance to reaffirm his dedication to peace and to denounce those
who he says threaten peace.

Saying that his proposal to attack Iraq should be seen as an act of
peace, he mounted the pulpit of the United Nations, September 17,
2002 to bully the international body with his peace message: "The
United Nations must act. It's time to determine whether or not
they'll be a force for good and peace or an ineffective debating
society."

When Hitler preemptively invaded countries he invoked the Almighty
and said he was doing it to keep the peace.

Bush stood before Congress and the press, sent an emissary to the
Orwellian sounding United States Institute of Peace, went on the
radio, and appeared at factories and military bases, hawking his
peace message while putting U. S. forces in place to invade Iraq.

Radio Hypnosis

With his regular Saturday radio addresses, Bush works heroically on
turning Americans into automatons of subservience to his goals.

Radio is the most hypnotic of the media as, in the words of Jean
Dauven, "It is through the spoken word that the hypnotist exercises
his power." The audio nature of broadcast fosters an illusion of
privacy that allows the hypnotist to flatter the listener that he/she
is being addressed exclusively, enhancing the listener's
suggestibility.

Bush's thin nasal whine is not a good radio voice, and he reads like
a school boy underlining every word with his forefinger. But his
messages are so loaded with fear, greed, mawkish patriotism, and
invocations of the Almighty that they are effective hypnosis
nonetheless.

Deference Hypnosis

As Bush races to the wire in the 2004 presidential election race, he
is being borne by the press on wings of approbation.

Almost to a man, the big city dailies backed the invasion of Iraq.
The New York Times and the Washington Post issued mea culpas, too
late.

As an even bigger favor, the press granted Bush immunity from debate
throughout the campaign year, just as it did in the 2000 election –
giving him a virtual free pass to the White House. It was a gift
wrapped in arrogance and negligence with overtones of complicity,
even conspiracy, but however it is defined, one of journalism's
biggest all time failures.

Even as it kept Kerry's candidacy under wraps, the press had the bare
faced audacity to complain, "The American people still don't know
much about Kerry," and "He needs to clearly define himself to
voters."

By studiously ignoring John Kerry's call for monthly debates all year
long, by shutting off the one avenue Kerry had to a level playing
field in his contest with the opportunistic incumbent, the press
handed Bush the presidency on a plate. If Bush loses the election, it
won't be because the press had anything to do with it but if he wins
he owes them a steak dinner.

What is at work here is deference hypnosis, meaning respect for an
individual because of his superior position. Deference hypnosis
bestows a stature that doesn't have to be earned and may not be
deserved. The press has shown susceptibility to deference hypnosis by
bowing to Bush both as rookie presidential candidate and as
president.

Le Bon said of deference hypnosis, "The mere fact that an individual
occupies a certain position, possesses a certain fortune, or bears
certain titles, endows him with prestige, however slight his own
personal worth."

Le Bon could have been talking about George W. Bush. With his
incumbency, his famous family, his professional sports credentials,
former ownership of the Texas Rangers baseball team, his ties to the
Saudi royal family and Big Oil, Bush is a walking case of deference
hypnosis.

Repetition Hypnosis

With the pressure to debate removed from his schedule, Bush was free
to take the George and Laura Show on the road, preaching unchallenged
his gospel of peace through war, freedom from government regulation
and taxes, and privatization of Social Security and Medicare.

Before audiences of small business owners and farmers August 18, in
St. Paul, Minnesota, and Hudson and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, in two
of the "battleground" states that he narrowly lost in 2000, Bush was
at his shirtsleeved best, hoarsely beseeching the crowd in all the
old familiar ways: "Listen, I'm going to give you some reasons to put
me back in, but perhaps the most important one is so that Laura is
the First Lady for four more years.......we must engage these enemies
around the world so we do not have to face them here at home....We
have a difference of opinion as to how to handle this issue in
Iraq.....There are enemies who hate us, and they're still
plotting....we must take threats seriously before they fully
materialize.....So I had a choice to make: either to forget the
lessons of September the 11th and trust a madman who is a sworn enemy
of America, or take action necessary to defend this country....Even
though we did not find the stockpiles that we expected to find, I
want you to remember that Saddam Hussein had the capability of making
weapons, and he could have passed that capability on to our
enemies....I'm really proud of our military. We've got a fantastic
military.....We want more people to own things....We stand for
institutions like marriage and family which are the foundations of
our society....I'm running for four more years to continue to rally
the armies of compassion all across America.....On September the
14th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers....Workers in
hard hats were yelling at me, `Whatever it takes....do not let me
down.'....It was a powerful day.....Thanks for coming. God bless...."

Bush is nothing, if not consistent. Repeating the fear themes from
9/11 and the run up to the Iraq War is a technique of repetition
hypnosis that carried over into the Republican Nominating Convention
in New York with Rudy Giuliani's 9/11 nostalgia and Zell Miller's
hysterical rant, and still dominates Bush campaign rhetoric.

"The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the
power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This
power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in
the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in
which the motives of our actions are forged," said Le Bon.

As of September 26, the fear hypnosis was working in the "swing
state" of Missouri. A voter survey in Clay County by the Guardian
Unlimited newspaper concluded, "America's heartland is afraid."

No one will ever accuse George W. Bush of stealing FDR's line, "The
only thing we have to fear is fear itself."