The Sociopathic Presidency

UPDATE: Bob Herbert Picks assembles some of Bush's greatest hits in today's column "A President Who Can Do No Right" (registration required):

"This guy is something. Remember his "Top Gun" moment aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln? And his famous taunt — "Bring 'em on" — to the insurgents in Iraq? His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence"

Incompetence, of course, but that is too generous by half, because many of Bush's follies were in the face of emphatic, dire warning of the consequences. It is not as if the Bush Administration suffers merely from a want of execution.

We had in Lincoln, the Depressive Presidency, in Kennedy the Compulsive Disorder Presidency, and in Nixon the Paranoid Presidency. Now with Bush, we are indeed fortunate to be living through (knock-on-wood) the first Sociopathic Presidency! Bush's behavior closely tracks the diagnostic models for anti-social personality disorder, in his cunning, lying, lack of empathy or remorse, his irritability and his impulsiveness. But never mind all that head-doctor mumbo-jumbo, gobbley-gook. You don't need a doctorate to know two-bit rednecked peckerwood guttertrash when you see it.

It is important to keep in mind that most of these displays of scaliness in Bush were open and notorious, peeking out of the most tightly scripted and stage-crafted image cocoon in the history of politics. So here are some of the highlights:

1) Bringing coat hanger ass-branding to Yale;

2) Bailing on Guard Service while his contemporaries were dying in Viet Nam -- couldn't even care enough for them (or for his Poppy's reputation) to show up, preferring coke, cough syrup and Bourbon to his dress-up "service";

3) Yucking it up about presiding over the Texas-style execution of Karla Faye Tucker;

4) Disinterest in his daughter's emergency appendectomy -- Bushie has such a lot of hard bark on him that he barely felt a thing -- didn't hurt a bit -- why, I understand Bushie didn't even need a local for it;

5) Too busy playing the Crawford Cowboy during the summer of 2001 to heed specific warnings of impending OBL use of airliners as weapons against Americans on US soil;

6) "Bring it On!" While our military hunkered down and endured IED's;

7) Blah, blah blah-ing his way through his stock "War on Terror" speech, while on the golf course! "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now, watch this drive."

8) Hilarious "Where are those darned WMDs?" comedy bit while the dead or maimed count climbed higher than a pinball machine about to tilt (still cracks me up!);

9) Presidential sanctioning of the torture and murder of naked Sunni cabdrivers (and as an added starter -- throwing the poor grunts doing his dirty work for him under the bus at the earliest opportunity);

10) Refusal to acknowledge the dead and maimed returning from Iraq while taking month-long vacations to allow "good crisp decision-making" , citing need to "get on with his life", while the "volunteer" army recycles endlessly back to Iraq;

11) Celebrating the drowning of New Orleans with icecream cake and crooning -- "Here's a little ditty and I hope you'll like, I call it "The Kat Five Blues" ";

12) On his recent visit to a military hospital, equating his drunken brushcutting scratches with amputees and disfigurements of war; and

13) Chiding the stricken Aerial Sharon for his bad diet and slovenly exercise regime.

Of course there are many more examples that support an observational diagnosis of the President, than can be wedged into a top dozen-or-so list, things people close to Bush see every day, like his inappropriate smirking and joking when confronted with tragedy, his inability to distinguish between America and himself (for the hundredth time, jerky, we love America, God, and our military – its you we have a problem with). And just pallin' around with the likes of that creep Cheney, and with DeLay is a bad sign.