Let me dwell on just a tiny portion of the sad, sad, ridiculous farce that is psychological participation in CIA interrogation and torture programs.

I wonder how in heaven's name one determines that psychological damage is transitory or not, given that symptoms of post traumatic stress can lie fallow for months or even years? What psychologist with even a passing knowledge of DSM-IV criteria would watch someone go through waterboarding and report to his or her supervisor, "it's alright, no big deal, he was terrified for his life for a minute or two there, but he's clearly gotten over it entirely."

Also, does anyone think that the CIA is employing psychologists with even passing familiarity with the religious and cultural contexts from which these prisoners come? Because anyone who's had a basic course in Multicultural Competency knows that you can't evaluate someone's psychological state (and hence the psychological damage being done to that person) reliably if you don't understand anything about the way that person's culture expresses emotions and acts out social relationships.

Does anyone with the slightest bit of psychological insight into human nature think for a second that psychologists ostensibly employed to improve non-coercive interrogation techniques would not, if asked by their well-paying and powerful employers, find it tempting to cross the line into advising about more sinister practices? I can just hear it now: "Hypothetically (wink wink), Dr. So-and-so, what if we ..."

Oh, and take it from me, we can't actually tell when people are lying. Not all the time and not reliably, at least. Everyone who's successfully lied to your therapist, raise your hand.

Am now typing with one finger ...

Someone has noticed that Camp Counselors and their adult Woodsman incarnations are secret sadists. Take it from me, I was once one myself.

But it's Bush rather than Rove who strikes me more as the annoying Woodsman type. He tries to "get down" with us "ordinary Americans" by, you know, moving brush around from time to time and talking like an idiot. He tries to do as little work as possible when he thinks no one is watching. He has the smug attitude that says both "look how cool and unpretentious I'm pretending to be, don't you like me? Huh? Huh?" as well as "I am way smarter than you." He seems to have ripped his persona right out of the movie Meatballs. Some of his speeches too, I'd bet.

Rove just doesn't care enough about what people think of him to seem much like the overeager Woodsman. No, Rove is more like a different outdoorsy character. You know the guy - at camp he was the kid whose parents donated money for the new equestrian pavilion and hence feels he runs the place (and practically does). He runs the blackmarket candy bar trade and blackmails his distributors to crush his competition. He manages to win every race on land or water, but somehow, in a way that you can never quite figure out, it never seems like he actually won any of it through his own efforts.

On adult canoe trips, he's the one who has managed to purchase all of the most convenient accoutrements that miraculously solve those pesky bowel movement problems and many other harrowing challenges of outdoor life. He's very happy to tell you all about them. And no, he is not willing to share. Because having you watch him enjoy his squeaky clean and comfortable trip while you suffer in filthy gaseous misery is exactly the reason why he comes on these trips in the first place.

... be willing to be psychoanalyzed yourself.

Is it perhaps possible that you merely imagine that his coughing increases before deadlines because you are in fact stressed yourself? Is it possible that the level of stress you are feeling in your current job is so intense and unbearable for you that you have projected all of these negative feelings onto the unfortunate health condition of your coworker so you do not have to face what is really bothering you? Is it possible that his cough, constantly reminding you of illness and hence death, aggravates you because it reminds you of your own unavoidable demise and hence the ultimate futility of all your labors?

Ridiculous, you say? Outrageous perhaps? Totally unfounded conclusions based on very little evidence?

Good point. But these musings are no more ridiculous than is diagnosing your coworker with a "neurotic cough" based on its apparent persistence and the timing of its severity.

"Neurosis" is an utterly vague catch-all that can describe nearly every mental condition that is not neatly contained and manageably productive in a Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism type of why. That is why we no longer make diagnoses of "neurosis" in the medical world.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, we also increasingly recognize that "psycho-somatic" is a redundancy. It is natural that non-brain ailments would be effected by brain-states (such as stress), and visa versa, since the "psyche" and the "soma" are located in (gasp!) the same body. Psyche is soma is psyche. So maybe his cough increases at stressful times because stress makes him feel even more physically miserable than he already feels. Or maybe his stress at work makes him more vulnerable to a host of physical ailments that result in coughing. And maybe that still doesn't make it any of your business.