Support mental health or I'll kill you!
New Yorker magazine seems to have this deep psychological need for President Donald Trump to be officially called crazy by psychiatrists. That need is so urgent that their August 23 article by Jeannie Suk Gersen on this subject almost exactly echoes their May 22 story by Jane Mayer on the same topic. Both articles urgently plead for the end to the "Goldwater Rule" that wisely prohibits psychiatrists from calling public figures nuts if they hadn't personally examined them. Here is Gersen on the couch relaying her shrink fantasy in Will Trump Be the Death of the Goldwater Rule?:
The principle known as the “Goldwater rule” prohibits psychiatrists from giving professional opinions about public figures without personally conducting an examination, as Jane Mayer wrote in this magazine in May. After losing the 1964 Presidential election, Senator Barry Goldwater successfully sued Fact magazine for defamation after it published a special issue in which psychiatrists declared him “severely paranoid” and “unfit” for the Presidency. For a public figure to prevail in a defamation suit, he must demonstrate that the defendant acted with “actual malice”; a key piece of evidence in the Goldwater case was Fact’s disregard of a letter from the American Psychiatric Association warning that any survey of psychiatrists who hadn’t clinically examined Goldwater was invalid.
...The left-leaning psychiatric community was shamed by the Fact episode for having confused political objection and medical judgment, and came under pressure from the American Medical Association, whose members had largely supported Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson. The A.P.A. adopted the Goldwater rule in 1973; Dr. Alan Stone, my colleague at Harvard Law School, was at the time the only member of the A.P.A.’s board to oppose the rule, as a denial of free speech “and of every psychiatrist's God-given right to make a fool of himself or herself.”
And as we have chronicled many, many times here at Newsbusters, every left-leaning journalist's God-given right to make a fool of himself or herself due to confusing personal political objection with fact:
The upshot is the attempted removal of more than thirty-seven thousand A.P.A. members from a key public conversation, during a moment when their knowledge and authority might aid the public in responsibly assessing the President.
Please allow the nation's left-leaning shrinks to call the President crazy! Please! Pretty please! Here's more:
A congressional bill introduced in April proposes establishing a commission to oversee “Presidential capacity,” laying down a path that the Twenty-fifth Amendment allows for involuntary removal of a President. Section 4 of that Amendment provides that a congressionally appointed body can determine that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Psychiatrists’ participation in this constitutional process will depend on their appetite for professional opprobrium.
Ah, now we see a bit of method to the New Yorker's madness. By eliminating the Goldwater Rule, psychiatrists can publicly call President Trump nuts so he could be more easily 25th Amendmented out of office. BTW, should we just be brutally honest and call that congressional bill the "Trump Nuts Out!" bill:
After Trump’s “fire and fury” remarks about North Korea, earlier this month, Dr. Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale Medical School, sent her second letter about Trump to all members of Congress, warning that his “severe emotional impediments” pose “a grave threat to international security.”
Um, I hate to break it to Dr. Lee but Kim Jong-un blinked thus easing the threat to international security. However, if she wants an example of nuts, if Dr. Lee has a brother named Robert, he would be forbidden from broadcasting UVA football games by ESPN:
Her book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” forthcoming in October, collects essays by more than a dozen mental-health experts and makes the case that the Trump Presidency is an emergency that not only allows but may even require psychiatrists to depart from the Goldwater rule.
Says the good doctor from deep inside the Mass Hysteria Bubble: "The Goldwater rule was an overreaction to psychiatrists wielding their professional badge to do politics."
But today, the psychiatrists are so enlightened that they would never use their professional badge to do politics again. Naw! Impossible. How could anybody get such a craaaazy idea?
