An excerpt from the book Blood Relations, by Eric Konigsberg, about his great-uncle Harold, a convicted

Hervey Cleckley in his book, The Mask of Sanity, describes the psychopath as a certain type of cruel manipulator whose harmful actions are accompanied by an absence of delusion.  The psychopath, he wrote, "does not hear voices.  In theory, he can foresee the consequences of injudicious or antisocial acts."  A psychopath is a person who knows full well the difference between right and wrong and yet, without compunction, chooses to do wrong.  Checkley cited the protagonist of The Incredible Charlie Carewe, a novel by Mary Astor, as a quintessential psychopath.  "Charlie is a genius in reverse with dangerous charm.  Sisters lie for him, parents defend him, friends obey him.  While calmly and casually, Charlie Carewe literally gets away with murder."

George Bush has calmly, casually and gleefully murdered a million innocent Iraqis.  So far, he's gotten away with it.

Robert Hare got first hand experience with psychopaths while working at a prison near Vancouver.  Hare describes one inmate as having a winning personality, and he used it to test the limits of what Hare would do on his behalf.  He lied endlessly, lazily, about everything, and it disturbed him not a whit whenever something in his file contradicted one of his lies.

Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, says of the psychopath, "Typically the way a person like this maintains an inflated view of the self is by devaluing other people, taking advantage of them.  If you look at the trail of a psychopath, you will see it littered with wounded, angry people."

Yes, better than 70% of the people in the United States alone, not counting more than 20 million people in Iraq and an untold number in the rest of the world are wounded and angry.

George Bush uses a derogatory nickname for just about everyone around him.  Turdblossom.  He also uses the diminutive to belittle.  Brownie for a grown man.

Hare developed a system of identification for psychopaths that includes various personality and character traits:

Glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callous/lack of empathy, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, parasitic lifestyle, lack of realistic, long-term goals, irresponsibility, criminal versatility.

I don't have to list examples of Bush's actions and behavior for you to match them up with the above list, but let's take one, failure to accept responsibility for own actions.  When Bush was asked if he had ever made any mistakes, he replied that he couldn't think of any.  That's just one.  Another is parasitic lifestyle.  Bush has lived off of relatives, friends and the government all of his life.  He now lives in government provided housing and receives government provided funds to live on.  Perfect examples.  The rest fit just as well.

Some more character traits of the psychopath that fit George Bush perfectly:

Uses defense mechanism of projection, blaming others for own faults, impervious to anxiety, depression, unremorseful, lack of self insight, no self humor, can't stand to be the butt of jokes, uses neologisms, makes up strange new words, lack of probity, courtesy, doesn't tolerate society's niceties or obligations, does not learn from mistakes, tends to think in concrete black or white terms.

That last one is the same as Bush's "You're either with us or you're against us."  Another perfect example.

From the inordinately high number of Republicans who exhibit some or all of these psychopathic traits, such as Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Rove, Addington, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearle and Feith, to name just a few, and those such as Cunningham, Abramoff and others who are in  prison for their psychopathic acts, we would have to think that either psychopaths naturally became Republicans or that Republicans, for some abnormal reason, admire and elevate psychopathic behavior as the highest ideal to be emulated.

Normal distribution would show the rate of psychopaths born to be evenly distributed among the population.  But, as we have seen, there is an abnormal nimber of psychopaths among Republicans.  There just can't be that many more psychopaths born to Republicans than to anyone else.  It has to be learned behavior by people brought up as Republicans.  Their immersion in Republican culture and society naturally warps their minds and leads them to think that psychopathy is normal, ordinary behavior.  They've been taught that way of thinking as the highest ideal and that it is the only way to deal with the world.

The proof for this is the fact that Republicans agree with and support the leading psychopath of the nation, George Bush.  We could deal with and accept this had they come by their psychopathy naturally.  But, this adoption of psychopathy as a lifestyle, from the learned behavior of the psychopathy of Republicanism unnaturally increases the number of psychopaths to unacceptable, unnatural levels.

Ed Martin is an unindicted curmudgeon. He is not a Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, deist, atheist, or a member of any -ism.

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