BuzzFlash Recommendation

Last year we featured a book by a psychiatrist who put Bush on the couch, so to speak, but "The Wimp Factor" goes one step further: it psychoanalyzes the entire right wing extremist mind set. And after reading this book by psychoanalyst Stephen J. Ducat, all we can say is "Oy Veh!"

Ducat appears to connect so many subterranean psychological motivations that you realize, by the end, you finally have a map of the psychiatric terrain of the right wing mind. And, above all, it's driven by what Ducat labels an "anxious masculinity." Even Ann Coulter, who Ducat believes represents the "dominatrix of right wing rectitude," exemplifies the cult of the phallus, "the mythic, permanently erect archetypal monolith of masculine omnipotence that signifies untrammeled growth, invulnerability, and freedom from all dependency." Call her a female with an artificial implant of the penile variety.

Normally, approaching politics from a Freudian perspective can lead to elusive abstractions. But in the case of Ducat's book, you end up feeling just the opposite. It's as if a light bulb goes off in your head and you think, "now I get it."

Suddenly, you understand the virulent hate of the right wing toward Hillary Clinton, the attempts to slur Kerry as "French" (feminine), the sock-stuffed crotch of Bush when he "landed" aboard the aircraft carrier, and "America's Aspiring Ayatollahs."