Dr. Keith Ablow
BS, Brown University
When Brown University dies and goes to heaven, and stands before St. Peter to account for its sins and misdeeds, it’s going to have some explaining to do about Dr. Keith Ablow.
Ablow graduated magna cum laude from Brown in 1983 and followed up with an MD from Johns Hopkins Med School in 1987. Impressive! He then went on to write for numerous publications, to coauthor a book with noted sobbing-conspiracy-maniac Glenn Beck, to host his own television talk show, and to attain a lucrative career as the official psychiatric spokesperson for such penetrating, not-at-all-intellectually-disgraceful shows on Fox News as Fox & Friends, The 5, and The O’Reilly Factor.
In so doing, he:
• Asserted that the Korean-language song “Gangnam Style” was “without intelligible words,” and thus “without reality, feeling, and meaning,” and that, therefore, watching it “is like taking a drug.”
• Suggested—speaking from a perch “deep inside the president’s psyche”—that President Obama, during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, “may” want us to suffer an Ebola onslaught, too. “How can you protect a country you don’t like?” Ablow pondered.
• Declared—in an interview with Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Channel—that President Obama had “severed himself from all core emotions.” His use of the word “core” says “I am a scientist and this is scientific fact.” No wonder Obama’s public displays of sadness (at funerals), irritation (with Republicans), and pride (in his family) look so severed.
But Ablow has done more than offer televised saloon-drunk ravings as psychiatric insight. He’s written them, too. Who else could have given us, in “Men Should Be Allowed to Veto Abortions”:*
I believe that in those cases in which a man can make a credible claim that he is the father of a developing child in utero, in which he could be a proper custodian of that child, and in which he is willing to take full custody of that child upon its delivery, that the pregnant woman involved should not have the option to abort and should be civilly liable, and possibly criminally liable, for psychological suffering and wrongful death should she proceed to do so.
If, after the child is born, the father decides to bag the whole full-custody deal and skip out, who would be responsible for the baby’s care? Should the mother be prosecuted for manslaughter if she miscarries and the poor, psychologically suffering father is rendered distraught? Dr. Ablow doesn’t tell us.
Then again, in Ablow’s world men typically get a little more slack than women. Certainly Newt Gingrich does. Behold what the psychiatrist wrote about Gingrich’s serial infidelities and serial marriages:
You can take any moral position you like about men and women who cheat while married, but there simply is no correlation, whatsoever—from a psychological perspective—between whether they can remain true to their wedding vows and whether they can remain true to the Oath of Office.
Some people—let’s call them “women”—might find this statement to be of dubious validity. Ablow explains:
… here’s what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude—psychologically—from Mr. Gingrich’s behavior during his three marriages:
1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.
2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.
3) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.
Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.
Ablow has deep thoughts about the Holocaust, too. He wrote—perhaps employing crackpot-doctor professional courtesy—that Dr. Ben Carson was right when Carson said that “if guns had not been confiscated from Jews then Hitler would have had more trouble orchestrating the Holocaust.” Ablow, feigning intellectual honesty, goes on:
Granted, I was not there. Granted, hindsight is 20/20. But it turns out it was a bad idea for any Jew to have turned over a gun. It was a bad idea for any Jew to have boarded a train.
What’s his point? Ablow wants to pander to gun nuts:
The wisest answer to a government that insists its citizens disarm is, “Over my dead body.” It would seem to be the end of any discussion and the beginning of active, heroic resistance. Because it is very hard to imagine that disempowering citizens by having them render themselves defenseless can lead to anything good. It is very likely a sign that the culture has fallen ill and that an epidemic of enslavement of one kind or another is on the horizon.
There is, of course, more, including Ablow’s claim that the change in California legal statutes substituting the word “spouse” for “husband” and “wife” means that people will be allowed to marry their dogs.
Could the success of Keith Ablow be a sign that the culture has fallen ill? Perhaps. Regardless, let’s just end with what Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, said*—from a psychological perspective—about Fox News’s hack-shrink for hire:
It is shameful and unfortunate that he is given a platform by Fox News or any other media organization. Basically he is a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise.