The question keeps coming up--this time in the wake of the "Mission Accomplished" flap--why does Dubya lie the way he does? Not just so frequently, but so (often) artlessly and transparently, and about such trivial things? Is it arrogance, or is he a pathological liar?
Well, there's a pathology here, but it's not quite the one people may have in mind ...
We usually think of a "pathological liar" as someone who lies compulsively, almost motivelessly, for whom the mere activity of lying fulfills some deep psychic need. I don't know how many such people actually exist, but I'm reasonably sure Dubya isn't one of them.
It seems to me that where Dubya is pathological is in his inability to admit error. It's not something as simple as arrogance, and I think it's a trait that governs (far more than any Rovian strategy) the amazingly persistent Dear-Leaderish quality of this administration's propaganda. Hell, I can practically smell the flop sweat coming off the guy, never more than when he's trying to fight his way out of some seemingly minor "Mission Accomplished"-style moment of embarrassment.
The key to Dubya's psychology is that he knows he's inadequate; it's his most intimate experience of himself. He's spent his entire life fucking up and being bailed out by people who (he knows it) feel contemptuous of him. (In the first place--imagine what it must have been like growing up with that mother.) In place of his deep certainty of failure, he's erected a fantasy version of himself--cowboy, oilman, honcho--that starts to quiver every time he gets anywhere near another fuckup.
This is a very brittle psychology. To someone like this, all failures, all embarrassments are equal--there's no such thing as a trivial misstep; anything that goes awry threatens him with the thing he knows and knows he has to avoid. When he lies, it's because he feels he's about to be blamed for something--the lying answers a compulsion, born from his deep sense of blameworthiness and his terror of being found out, to blame somebody else.
I know the perils of this sort of long-distance psychologizing, but it's hard to avoid--this model answers so strongly to what I've seen in Bush's performance these last few years. (My God, do you remember how blankly terrified he looked giving his acceptance speech in Texas? That deer-in-the-headlights look was Dubya staring at his own certainty of failure.) Not to mention that it coincides perfectly with his religious outlook--the fundamentalist version of justification-by-faith is like nothing so much as the biggest get-out-of-jail-free card in the world, just give it all to Jesus and it all goes away, and you never have to admit anything to anybody.
To me, this guy looks like an absolute psychic swamp. He may be the least psychologically qualified to hold the Presidency since Nixon.