Group Therapy Screaming Epithets at Bush

From NewsMax.com (Hat Tip: Rush Limbaugh).

Let me get this straight: Twenty people, all of whom voted for the losing candidate, come for therapy at the local (Boca Raton, FL) chapter of the American Health Association (sorry, no link--they don't show up on Google). And as soon as their group session begins, they start ranting and raving and screaming at the top of their lungs. And a number of "licensed mental health counselors" just let them rant and rave, and do little more than take down their stories for publication--with all names withheld, of course.

The rants and raves include all the hogwash we've heard ever since the election--about vote fraud, secession, emigration, and all the horrible things that Bush is allegedly doing to the country.

I've got a few things to say:

1. Those mental health counselors ought to lose their licenses. You don't let someone rant and rave, and not challenge them on their reckoning--their logic--on what they're in a rage about. That's not the way to get people to get over whatever is making crazy people out of them. And you definitely do not let people throw darts at someone in effigy, as the executive director of this so-called American Health Association said that he would have done, had an effigy of Bush been handy. Not only does this only make things worse for the person involved, but furthermore, any counselor who has a client coming to him threatening violence against another person has the duty to warn the proper authorities so that they can protect the intended target. In fact, Dr. Robert J. Gordon, you'll be lucky if the Secret Service doesn't run you in as an accessory to the planning of a terrorist attack against the President.
2. I've got news for all those temperamental Kerry voters: Now you know how some of us felt when Clinton won re-election back in 1996. The difference between you and us is that we don't wear our emotions on our sleeves--and however we feel about a President's qualifications, we didn't go around threatening to assassinate him. (Well, aside from Timothy McVeigh and his cohorts--and he got help from Saddam Hussein.)

This kind of rant and rave is the same that we heard from Alec Baldwin on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, when the Senate was taking up the Articles of Impeachment against President Clinton. Baldwin actually called on people to stone Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) to death (and not just him but his wife and children, too)--and then he got progressively more excited, and ended by yelling, "WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS COUNTRY? AAAAHHHH! [Deep breath] AAAAHHHH!" O'Brien then pulled out a medical breathing mask attached to a tiny oxygen cylinder--and how many talk-show sets have this kind of equipment on hand?--and proceeded to put Alec Baldwin on oxygen to calm him down.

That was staged, and so was this. And for anyone who calls himself a health professional to be party to such staging is beyond the pale. But this is what you get when you start watering down ethical principles. Hippocrates of Cos would not be pleased. "I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous...and...from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption"--it couldn't be any clearer.