Quickies: Concerning The “Goldwater Rule”

     Most Americans wouldn’t remember this contretemps. It passed too quickly to be imprinted indelibly on the national memory. All the same, it was an atrocious episode, in which one major party attempted to use a pseudo-medical diagnosis to disqualify the other major party’s candidate for the presidency. The American Psychiatric Association, to its credit, immediately acted to quell such infamies in future political campaigns.

     For a long time, the Left was miffed about the Goldwater Rule. It appears that they’ve decided to do an end-run around it:

     #UNFIT is a film featuring a bunch of therapists who have never interviewed or diagnosed Trump:

     “Medical doctors and mental health professionals go on camera, on the record, for the record – it’s an eye-opening discussion, analysis, and science-based examination of the behavior, psyche, condition, and stability of President Donald Trump.”

     Note the “science-based” thing, once again. Not only is psychiatry not a science, but the Goldwater Rule, which was instituted to protect the field against exactly this sort of abuse, forbids this sort of flummery, in spirit if not in letter.

     But the behavior of “mental health professionals” has long made normal people suspect that only the mentally ill go into that field. Their conceit about the health and stability of someone they’ve never even met – someone incomparably more accomplished than all of them put together – is evidence to that effect. Corrosive envy can unbalance anyone.

     Self-styled “professionals” are like that. Throw a sop to their vanity and they’ll do practically anything you ask. After all, you’re playing to their major weakness: their opinion of themselves as superior to others who lack their credentials. The less objective substance their self-regard has, the more likely they are to respond like a seal barking and clapping for being thrown a fish.

     As far as I know, no disciplinary measures have been applied to the “professionals” involved in this scrofulous film. Perhaps popular denunciation will suffice, though we’ll need to wait and see.