Fox News psychiatrist Keith Ablow has outdone himself with his crazy talk. This time he purported to psychoanalyze President Obama’s Ebola stance and our country’s “Stockholm Syndrome” that led us to elect a president “who has names very similar to two of our archenemies.”
It’s bad enough when Fox pundit Bill O’Reilly blows the racial dog whistle of accusing President Obama of not protecting Americans because he is more partial to Africa. But when Ablow – a member of Fox’s “Medical A-Team” – does it, the dog whistle gets a patina of medical validity, no matter how off-the-wall or undeserved. In fact, Ablow’s rant was so nutty, I doubt O’Reilly would tolerate even a minute of it.
But Fox News Radio host John Gibson (a guy with a race-baiting history of his own) gave Ablow about 12 minutes of friendly air time to elaborate on a recent column in which he “psychoanalyzed” Obama as wanting Americans to suffer with Ebola.
Ablow admits he has never examined Obama but has only “looked at him from afar.” But that doesn't stop Ablow from seeing deeply into Obama’s soul. Or so he would have us believe. In this case, Obama’s soul is dark indeed (no pun intended), according to Ablow, as he “explained” why President Obama opposes a “sensible” travel ban on people coming from West Africa:
In my view, in his mind, if only unconsciously, he’s thinking, "Really? We’re going to prevent folks suffering with illnesses from coming across the border, flying into our airports, when we have visited a plague of colonialism that has devastated much of the world on the world? What is the fairness in that?" I believe Barack Obama is thinking.
…Let me speak as though I’m deep inside the president’s psyche. “You miserable people have destroyed so much in the world in terms of good things and now you’re going to build a wall? Really? To insulate yourself from things that are devastating other nations – when your gains are ill-gotten? And the very fact that you can build a wall – you’re using wealth that you never should have had to build it.”
Later, Ablow “revealed” that our country is just as sick, if not sicker, than Obama, for having elected him. Our only hope, apparently, is in being rid of him:
The cure is 2016, perhaps, where people finally say, "Look, here’s what happened. They knocked down our buildings on 9/11. It was horrible. It was horrible. It was unspeakable." In the aftermath of that, we got something like national Stockholm Syndrome, which is what people get when they’re taken hostage on planes. And for a time, they start expressing the feelings of the people who took them hostage because they don’t want to die.
And I think that we became psychologically mired in a form of national Stockholm Syndrome. We said to ourselves, and the world, “Look at this guy. We’re going to elect this guy president. Why would you attack us? We’re not even voting for somebody who likes us. This guy, who has names very similar to two of our archenemies, Osama, well, Obama. And Hussein. Hussein. …Surely you won’t attack us now because we’ve got a shield here of a guy who, as the leader of our country, says we’re bad. So leave us alone. We get the message.”
And how did host Gibson react? He told Ablow, “This is fabulous.”
Listen to the entire jaw-dropping segment below, from the October 14th John Gibson Show, via Media Matters.
