Christopher Hitchens once said, "Calling Henry Kissinger a war criminal is not an epithet; it's a job description." Lots of people (including me) have been calling George W. Bush a war criminal for years. However, calling Bush a war criminal is not an epithet; it's a symptom.
Remember when Bush vigorously declared:
This government does not torture people.
We knew that was a lie, but we thought The Decider® was really saying "This government does not torture people, but I ain't ruling out contractors, heh heh heh."
Hiding behind "plausible deniability" doesn't distinguish Bush from Kissinger. However, Bush's recent behavior does. Kissinger never publicly bragged about breaking the law. That bizarre and self-defeating behavior only makes sense as a symptom of antisocial personality disorder.
In other words, the difference between the two war criminals is this: Kissinger is a ruthless bastard. Bush is a sociopath.
Antisocial personality disorder is well-documented. Commonly listed symptoms include:
■ Disregard for right and wrong
■ Persistent lying or deceit
■ Using charm or wit to manipulate others
■ Recurring difficulties with the law
■ Repeatedly violating the rights of others
■ Child abuse or neglect
■ Intimidation of others
■ Aggressive or violent behavior
■ Lack of remorse about harming others
■ Impulsive behavior
■ Agitation
■ Poor or abusive relationships
■ Irresponsible work behavior
If that sounds like a checklist for common violent criminals, that's because it is. Simply put, sociopaths are "intraspecific predators" who can do what they want without any anxiety or remorse about how their actions impact other people. That is why sociopaths make excellent drug dealers or arms dealers. It is also why they can be successful pimps, politicians, or preachers.
Their supreme confidence makes them very attractive to people with low self-esteem. It is also what makes them such a threat. Sociopaths don't have to be criminals. In fact, many of them never have a brush with the law. Some characterize the ones in prison as "unsuccessful" sociopaths.
It would be easy to get sloppy with the term and apply it to anyone who is egocentric, a jerk, or simply selfish. However, Cleckley, the man who described this particular pathology identified an important behavior that distinguishes sociopaths from merely selfish or supremely confident people.
Cleckley's seminal hypothesis concerning the psychopath is that he suffers from a very real mental illness indeed: He does bizarre and self-destructive things because consequences that would fill the ordinary man with shame, self-loathing, and embarrassment simply do not affect the psychopath at all. What to others would be a disaster is to him merely a fleeting inconvenience. [emphasis added]
That is the key distinction. As Cleckley noted in his classic text, The Mask of Sanity,
Let us remember that his typical behavior defeats what appear to be his own aims... If the psychopath's life is devoid of ... primary or serious goals and values, and of intense and meaningful satisfactions, it may be possible for the observer to better understand the patient who, for the trivial excitement of stealing a dollar (or a candy bar), the small gain of forging a $20.00 check, or halfhearted intercourse with an unappealing partner, sacrifices his job, the respect of his friends, or perhaps his marriage.
Reasonable people might disagree about what is "bizarre and self-destructive behavior." However, I think everyone agrees that would be a good way of describing the actions of someone who repeatedly bragged about committing war crimes -- after successfully avoiding prosecution and no one was asking him to comment.
Despite anything Kissinger ever did, he never did anything that could be considered "bizarre and self-destructive." For example, he never bragged about breaking the law. He sure as hell never went on TV and pugnaciously dared the interviewer to bring that point up so he could trumpet his excesses to the world. The icing on the cake? What did Bush say when Lauer challenged him on the point?
I'd do it again.
It is impossible to imagine a more striking example of a sociopath dropping his "Mask of Sanity" than this book tour and that interview. Who in their right mind brags about committing war crimes?
If you ever wondered what "lack of remorse" looks like, now you know. How many times has Bush said, "Knowing what I know now, I'd do it again"? He has said it repeatedly when challenged on the invasion of Iraq. Odd, when you consider that knowing what WE know NOW, there was no threat of WMD to justify the invasion. Yet, somehow that doesn't phase him one bit. Such a glaring lack of self-reflection is completely consistent with antisocial personality disorder.
The real crime here is these warning signs were present and painfully obvious for all to see long before Bush lied us into war. One early warning sign of particular relevance is called precocious sadism, characterized by the torturing and killing of animals as a child.
In the case of many violent criminals, animals were the first victims of this behaviour. Young Jeffrey Dahmer liked to nail live bullfrogs to trees, and cut open goldfish/stray cats and dogs to see how their innards worked.
You might dismiss Bush's well-documented torturing and killing of animals as a child as "boys being boys." But true to this pathology, the abusiveness and sadism did not stop at animals. Bush was also responsible for branding people as part of a forbidden fraternity hazing practice he oversaw.
The charges against Delta Kappa Epsilon were made last Friday in a Yale Daily News article that accused campus fraternities of carrying on "sadistic and obscene" initiation procedures.
The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that Delta Kappa Epsilon applied a "hot branding iron" to the small of the back of its 40 new members in ceremonies two weeks ago. A photograph showing a scab in the shape of the Greek letter Delta, approximately half an inch waid, appeared in the article.
A former president of Delta [said] that branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is "only a cigarette burn."
It is particularly ironic that Limbaugh and other apologists first characterized the atrocities at Abu Gharib as no worse than fraternity "hazings":
This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?
As much as Limbaugh wanted his listeners to believe Abu Gharib was strictly a low-level isolated incident, we know that is not true. The men who engineered the program were authorized to do there what they had been doing in Guantanamo Bay. The authority for that went to the White House. We now know it went to the Oval Office. Right to the guy who was responsible for this sort of behavior during his years in college.
This sort of devil-may-care attitude about the rules is nothing new for Bush. Again, there were other signs of it in his youth.
This photo and the attached caption actually ran in the Yale yearbook. Gary Trudeau, who knew Bush while he was at Yale draws a picture that is disturbing because of its consistency.
"Even then he had clearly awesome social skills," Trudeau said. "He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable ... He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation."
When you recall all his snide putdowns as president, you realize that he was just continuing the same behavior. This was the president who mocked a blind reporter the same way he mocked international law. This is the alcoholic that was marketed as better suited to be president in 2000, because "he was the kind of guy more people wanted to sit down and drink beer with." Zogby reprised this ploy during the Kerry campaign, so this was no accident. This was the commander in chief who took a characteristically mean shot at Senator Webb, knowing his son had been in imminent danger. This was the guy who met family members of service men and "honored" them a self-aggrandizing token, then half-seriously warned them "Don't go sell it on eBay." This was a guy who went on vacation while his daughter was in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. When asked about it, his response can only be characterized as bizarre:
My daughter’s great," he told reporters, joking that if she cannot join the rest of the family in Florida, "she can clean out her room."
All that pales to what has to be one of the most tasteless jokes ever told by a sitting president, "those weapons of mass destruction have to be somewhere." That's saying a lot when you remember Bush had set the bar for outrageous commentary pretty high with his mockery of death-row inmate, Karla Faye Tucker in an (in)famous interview with Tucker Carlson.
I could go, with dozens of more examples. But I think the point has been made and the pattern is undeniable. Listing more examples of this behavior are more likely to numb the sensibilities than anything else. But that is not where this should end. Calling Bush a sociopath is meaningless if we let it stop at that.
The question needs to be asked:
If a man openly brags about committing a vicious criminal act, and then seeks to profit on their notoriety, should we let that stand? If your name is David Berkowitz (AKA "Son of Sam") the answer is a resounding "NO." Does the same apply if your name is George Bush?
This also raises a challenge for the current sitting president.
Bush's behavior is now a problem for the current administration because no one else has the jurisdiction to prosecute this criminal. It's one thing to say "we need to look forward not backward" when talking about stuff that was in the news years ago. But what happens when it is in the news today? Bush's current bragging of criminal activities raises an embarrassing question that cannot be ignored. If an American citizen brazenly breaks the law is this administration going to turn a blind eye to it, even if it means he has now put American troops in harms way? Are some Americans simply above the law?
The supremely confident sociopath is betting the Obama administration doesn't have what it takes to call him on this. If history serves as a guide, he is right. That means one thing. He is going to do more damage.