Mepobramate was an anxiolytic (as are Valium and Xanax) - not an antidepressant. The first tricyclic antidepressants were not introduced for that purpose until later in the decade. Early in my career, I had several "little old ladies" in my practice who were dependent on Mepobramate, which by then had become one of the most expensive "common" generic drugs I've ever encountered.

Still, its classification does not affect its applicability to the story - one as frustrating for its recurrent pattern in American Politics as it is horrifying for its excess.

The republican party has been using paranoia, fear, and polarization to divide & conquer the country for decades. They try to scare the public so they can rob the taxpayers blind and try to make a power grab. Nixon & McCarthy were the leaders of the communist witch hunt of the 50s. Karl Rove was a young republican working for the Nixon administration during Watergate. Cheney & Rumsfeld also worked for Nixon during those years. Rove & Cheney were the leaders of the Bush scare tactics. 50 years and counting of republicans going "boo".

Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965), British Conservative (mostly) politician and historian. Prime minister, 1940-1945, 1951-1955. Tried to convince President Truman to drop atomic bombs on major Soviet cities after WWII. Voted Greatest Briton ever in a 2002 BBC poll. Described on the Churchill Centre Web site as "having made so many deposits in the bank of Religion" as a youth that he had been "confidently withdrawing from it ever since, never bothering to check the balance—there might indeed be an overdraft"—which could have meant a fine and suspension of check-writing privileges. Called himself an "optimistic agnostic" and "not a pillar of the Church but more of a flying buttress—I support it from the outside."

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."

Most of the hoopla over comic books was horror and gangster titles that could get quite grim, a murder case called The Brooklyn Thrill Killers, of 1954, led by a teenaged Jewish Nazi advocate named Jack Koslow, who with his younger friends used mail order whips to beat teenaged girls, beat and set fire to vagrants, and killed at least one. This led to Frederick Wertham's screed The Seduction of the Innocent.

But Wertham didn't leave it to horror and gangster comic books and pulp novels, but even said such things as Batman and Robin are gay, Wonder Woman and Paradise Island lesbians and Superman a Nazi, despite being created by Jewish teenagers Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster. Even Batman and Captain America had Jewish-American creaters, Robert Kahn became Bob Kane, and Jacob Kurtzberg became Jack Kirby. Even Dr. William Moulton Marston, who specialized in aberrant sexuality, and inventor of the lie-detector changed his name to write comic books and became Charles Moulton.

Freudians tend to over-generalized from their admittedly sick patients to the general public like Ernest Jones's On the Nightmare.

Eat the Rich!

Bruce Bartlett (1951- ), American conservative economist and commentator. Domestic policy adviser to President Reagan; treasury official under George H. W. Bush. Author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. His criticism of Bush got him fired in 2005 from the free-market think tank he'd been affiliated with since 1993.

October 2004: "Just in the past few months, I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy.... He understands them, because he's just like them. This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts, he truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. ... But you can't run the world on faith."

"You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt."--Barack Obama

Fear-mongers are not any less insane now - on either side of the aisle.
*

"Not much has changed in retrospect. Only the enemy."

this constant fear of an enemy keeps the industrial military complex intact and funded and keeps the wars for profits going.

ike warned us this was coming but no one listened.

even obama for whatever reasons will keep the industrial military complex intact and our wars with iraq and afghan.

does make one wonder who is in charge of the gov.

if the american people are nothing else most are imperialists and some even out and out war mongers.

americans would rather spend their taxes on these wars for profits and military jobs then health care.

this is the mark of a nation in steep decline and open to another hitler or stalin type wingnut to run gov.

cant happen here you say. a nation in decline will go very conservative. even a dictatorship. mc war and mc nut palin still got 46% of the votes.

but first a nation will ride the hope wagon.

McCarthy did such a spectacular flame-out at the end of his career, drinking himself to death, that practically no one but Ann Coulter thinks of him in positive terms any more. He set the cause of irresponsible demagoguery back decades, but God bless us, we've recovered.

"During the 1950s we were knee-deep in the Red Scare, the all-pervasive paranoia, the trigger-happy finger on the doomsday scenario.

It's no small wonder anti-depressants became popular around this time. It's also no small wonder people drank themselves into comas on an almost daily basis."

I was one of the "duck-and-cover" kids in the 1950's. We had drill in elementary school, and we all felt that The Bomb was going to be dropped on our heads any day. They scared the shit out of us constantly. And then they shipped my ass to the Mekong Delta.

As a result, nothing scares me anymore. 9-11 pissed me off more that scared, and anything these Republican fuckheads can spew reminds me I can still tell when someone's pissing on my boots and saying it's raining.