If The Diagnosis Fits... - by Gene Lyons

[DonViejo]

Full article posted with the permission of the author. -- Don

June 29, 2018 4:00 am

Sociopaths live as permanent imposters. They function largely by imitating the behavior of others. Amoral and utterly lacking in normal emotional bonds, such individuals know right from wrong; they just don’t give a damn. Their world divides into user and used; morality consists of fear of getting caught. And whatever happens, somebody else is always to blame.

The formal term is “narcissistic personality disorder,” defined by the Mayo Clinic as “a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of extreme confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”

Sound like anybody in the news?

How such individuals often self-destruct is by venturing out past the boundaries of imitable behavior. My book “Widow’s Web” describes the bizarre antics of an Arkansas woman who murdered her husband in his bed, concocting a series of wild alibis involving hit men out of Chicago that detectives never credited for a minute. But they also never found a murder weapon. Friends and family didn’t know what to think.

That is, until four months after her husband’s death, when the widow threw a champagne party celebrating her non-indictment and called in the press. See, just as the relentless skepticism of homicide cops was new to her, she’d no idea how to play the challenging role of victim’s wife. Photos of her gleefully popping champagne with her new boyfriend on the front page of the statewide newspaper stunned relatives and friends who’d been previously unable to imagine her guilt.

Then they got scared, fearing they could be next. Indeed, Mary Lee Orsini was only getting started.

More from the Mayo Clinic: Sociopaths typically “have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration.” They “believe they are superior” and “belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior.” They characteristically “behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious,” and “react with rage or contempt and try to belittle (critics) to make themselves appear superior.”

Mostly that’s because such individuals harbor “secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation.”

“Moral imbeciles” was the 19th-century term. Penitentiaries are full of them, as is any institution where conscienceless kissing up, kicking down and shameless prevarication pay off. Alas, there’s no known treatment. Sociopaths are best understood as one of nature’s bewildering little tricks, like ticks and water moccasins.

The classic study is Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 book, “The Mask of Sanity.” But it’s when the mask slips that things can get strange.

My God, she had a champagne party and invited Channel 4?!

Who knew, for example, that millions of Americans would react with shame and horror to the policy of tearing brown-skinned urchins “invading” the United States from their mothers’ arms? Not Donald J. Trump, for whom such children are equivalent to vermin “infesting” the country, like cockroaches, or rats.

My God, he kidnapped 2,500 children and held them hostage?!

Utterly lacking in normal human compassion, Trump had no way of anticipating how his barbarous policy would look to ordinary citizens. His clumsy efforts to lie his way out of the political trap his cruelty and incompetence created only made things worse.

Anyway, it looks as if a line may have been crossed. Never one for understatement, Esquire’s political blogger Charles P. Pierce writes: “You can feel the difference in the air. The members of the governing party, uneasy about the prospects for this year’s midterms anyway, are fairly trembling at the moment, seeing in their mind’s eyes a hundred 30-second spots of weeping toddlers behind chain-link walls …

“The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus, and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. … The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.”

George F. Will, The Washington Post’s longtime Republican columnist, has had it, urging readers to support Democrats in November to protect the Constitution from Trump: “… to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.”

GOP campaign consultant Steve Schmidt has formally renounced the Republican Party, no longer the party of Lincoln, but the party of Trump.

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker laments that kidnapping children “should be appalling to anyone with a heartbeat, but guess what? It isn’t.”

She notes that while 58 percent of Republicans endorse Trump’s actions, two-thirds of Americans do not.

You do the arithmetic. The overall GOP share of the electorate is noticeably diminished. Other polls show that upward of 75 percent of Americans actually favor immigration, correctly seeing it as essential to the nation, as it has been throughout our history.

Trump’s mask is definitely slipping.

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http://www.nationalmemo.com/if-the-diagnosis-fits/

[CrispyQ]

1. After reading some FB posts this morning, I believe there is no line for the trumpers.

They will support him to the bitter end. Maybe if they end up in line at a soup kitchen they might change their minds. Nope. Scratch that. It will be someone else's fault.

[Caliman73]

2. You are correct unfortunately.

I would even venture to say that while "Trumpers" fits as a current descriptor, it is not completely accurate. There is ONE thing that will make them turn away, it is if Trump stops supporting the horrific White Supremacy based policies that he currently supports. Trump's supporters are behind him because he is a bully and a demagogue who supports policies that they want. They are scared and want a leader who will tell them that he will protect them from "those people".

They live in such an insulated world that Trump could do something that negatively affects them in a significant way, and they will only hear that it was as a result of "those people"

I was having this discussion with my wife a couple of days ago. If the only media I consumed told me that he Angels was the best baseball team in Major League Baseball and constantly told me that when they lost, it was because the other team cheated, or some foul up with some external force, eventually I would believe it. I am already inclined to like the Angels and I am constantly getting reinforced in ways that deepen my allegiance to the team. Any real fact that threatens my view is dismissed or minimized in a way that allows me to continue to operate in my belief system. Add to that a steady campaign that calls any other media entity "fake" or "the enemy" and the bubble can be complete.

Fox News and other right wing media have successfully isolated people in that cycle. They have successfully convinced people that they provide the correct information and that EVERY OTHER outlet is not trust worthy. I have a relative who posts from right wing sites and Fox and when he is debunked by facts, the standard response is, "I just post things that I find interesting" and when confronted about posting lies they just say that they will continue posting the articles.

[CrispyQ]

3. The dems are paying the price for ignoring hate radio for 40 years.

It's played on our universities, too. Get 'em while they're young. That Jones/Moore race shouldn't have even been close. My rwnj cousins post from whacko sites, too. I visited one today & one the front page the site has a petition because Youtube had discontinued some of their videos. Yeah, cuz they're full of lies, probably. It was bad enough that some of the vids are allowed. It is basically white men, fearful of losing their place at the top of the hierarchy.

[dalton99a]

4. They're ok with the soup kitchen

as long as the colored folks are way behind them in the queue