Is it time to give Cheney & Bush the language to assuage their madness?

[HereSince1628]

Ok, I admit to not being trained in psychology and I maybe completely wrong, but...

It seems to me that Bush and Cheney are extreme conservative personalities and respond to perceived losses pathologically.

Set aside the issue of war for a moment, and consider that the Cheney-Bush administration is PATHOLOGICALLY AVERSE TO LOSS. Fear-of-loss drives their world-view as well as their individuated existential needs. The need to be free of judgment of having created losses drives their need to live outside/above the judgment of the law yet to collect information on everything and to explain nothing in an attempt to gain complete and utter control of the world and thus to manage their sense of threats of loss.

It is each of their personality's pathologically strong universal response to fear-of-loss that has led them into the fallacious reasoning used to justify continued US military participation in the conflict(s) in Iraq. Their reasoning is so irrational that it seems madness. Madness of a type that on a grand scale would encourage the use of lies to begin a war and that on a personal level would use the machinery of government to punish the spouse of someone who pointed out a 16 word mistake in a State of the Union speech. In other words, madness of a level that is reasonable for the world to fear.

The fear of loss as a cognitive motivator is well known. It is manifestly important to the "sunk cost fallacy" which is decried by economists as irrational and used by psychologists to help explain gambling addiction. Research in business psychology has shown that those who feel "responsible for the loss" are the ones most likely to manifest this behavior in executive decision making that follows losses. In this perverse reasoning another bet, doubling the odds is ALWAYS better than accepting the losses already accumulated. Cheney & Bush as "The Decider Guys" are nothing if not the ultimately responsible figures in our current tragedy. And they know it.

So...

Perhaps we must accept that the Cheney/Bush administration, conservative members of Congress, and their remaining ~25% of supporters are psychologically INCAPABLE of dealing with the concept of loss.

If that's true and if we keep talking about LOSS (lost war, lost the occupation, lost lives, lost treasure, lost national image, loss of personal prestige, etc) we are simply pounding on the button that triggers their pathological response. We need to do something else. Cheney & Bush really and truly need to be put into the political equivalent of a room with rubberized pastel colored walls and talked down from their hysteria.

To end the war we must provide to them a vocabulary, thus to enable them to use a rhetoric about what we know as their obvious failures, that doesn't provoke a nasty psychological feedback that amplifies the very behavior we are needing to squelch.

As perverse as it sounds one solution to ending US military involvement in Iraq's chaos is to quit talking about Cheney/Bush responsibility in losses of all types and give their besieged personalities a way out of their existential crisis. It took 11 years to come up with the notion of "Peace with Honor" that enabled the US to exit Vietnam. We seriously need some equivalent script.

The alternative is to continue to beat the drums about losses and compound the situation ultimately arriving at a time when we are forced to deal with them like rabid dogs, and to figuratively put the administration out of its misery through impeachment. Unfortunately, Pelosi and Reid have foreclosed that option.

Is now the time for all good linguists to come to the aid of their country?