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PRESS RELEASE


LaRouche says Psychological Profile of Dick Cheney ‘Extremely plausible’

July 12, 2007 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).

July 12 (LPAC)—On July 11 and 12, Truthout published a two-part series of articles entitled "Dick Cheney's Psychology," written by John P. Briggs, M.D., a retired psychotherapist, and JP Briggs II, Ph.D., a professor at Western Connecticut State University, specializing in the creative process. Lyndon LaRouche commented that the expert view presented in the articles is extremely plausible and coincides with his own judgment and that of others regarding Cheney's state of mind. LaRouche stated that the analysis is important in understanding both the President and the zombie controlling him. LaRouche believes that people will have no objection to the authors' characterization of Lynne Cheney's control over her Charlie McCarthy-like husband. LaRouche stressed that the authors are correct that the controller in the relationship is not Dick Cheney, but his wife, and we know who owns his wife. As LaRouche put it, if I had a wife like that, or a wife like that controlled me, I'd be ashamed of myself. Lynne Cheney should be returned to the manufacturer for reasons of factory moral defects.

The profile that the authors present, based on interviews with Cheney's high school girl friend, his roommates at Yale, written accounts, and other sources, is that ever since Lynne Anne Vincent (Lynne Cheney) stole him from his high school girl friend, with whom she had been friends since first grade, Dick Cheney was totally dependent on Lynne. It is Lynne who gets him into Yale. It is her ambition which dominates him, against which he impotently rebels by flunking out of Yale, drinking, getting arrested for drunk driving a couple of times, and working as a mere lineman. As the author's write, "he can't find the engine of his own. Lynne has the engine." Only when Lynne gives him "the final ultimatum—succeed in the world or we're through—by his own account," does everything change.

As the authors write, he overcomes "his passivity by letting activity and purpose flow into him from an outside force. With Lynne's fierce wind now filling his phlegmatic sails, he finds he can move." From that point on, Cheney's entire career is defined by his application of "the template of his dependent relationship with Lynne to relationships with political patrons." He is the "master go-fer." He is a "flunky," an "all-purpose servant to the powerful boss—whether it's Rumsfeld, Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, George Bush Sr., the bigwigs at Halliburton or George W. Bush—slavishly loyal and willing to do anything asked. He first becomes useful, then indispensable."

All of Cheney's pathologies are an expression of his conflicted ambivalence: "Do I exist as a separate and solitary identity or is my identity entirely dependent on attachment to a stronger person?" From this arises Cheney's fixation on authority, secrecy, anxiety, anger and aggression, lying, deception, amoral behavior, impusiveness, attempts to escape his subordinate condition.

As to the relationship between Cheney and Bush, the authors maintain that Bush is "an effective emotional bully" and that Cheney "has engineered with the president a variation of the relationship he made with Lynne." Cheney inhabits an operational world. "Of course, the devil is in the details; since that is precisely where Dick Cheney resides, he seems the devil. At a subtler dimension, Cheney has fashioned his vassal relationship with Bush into a tightly co-dependent one." "In Cheney's case, his underlying passivity, his dependency solution and his authoritarian longings lead to a web of secretive actions, jury-rigged rationales and clever strategems." "Bush's father sought a regent and instead found a man who would make his son's dysfunctions worse."

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