Is Obama a psychopath? -- WND, Gina Loudon

[bsteadman]

Is Obama a psychopath?

Exclusive: Gina Loudon urges a closer look at the president's decisions

WND
Gina Loudon
4/6/2014

Excerpt:

It is safe to say that most politicians these days could be diagnosed with a range of mental conditions, and many would likely be labeled sociopaths or psychopaths.

The terms psychopath and sociopath are often used interchangeably, even by mental health professionals. The symptoms are somewhat consistent between the two: lack of conscience, no moral compass, manipulative, low range of emotions, interpersonally insensitive. The psychopath is deadly. He is well spoken, charismatic, fearless, controlling, socially potent, a habitual liar, calm to a disturbing degree in the face of chaos and cold hearted. He is a master at blaming others.

David Freeman, in an Huffington Post science piece, quotes clinical psychologist Dr. Stout, who points out that though the psychopath may not feel “higher emotions” like love and guilt, they may not have actual consciences, but they study those of us who do – and “simply pretend.”

Psychologists say early signs of psychopathy include compulsive lying, blaming others for any failures or shortcomings and often torture of animals for curiosity sake. Psychopaths tend to do things to study consequences, without concern for long-term impact. I know, it sounds like most politicians today. And it probably is, not to mention any names.

As Mr. Freeman points out in his article, psychopaths make a great first impression. He points to other characteristics, too. He points to the initial popularity of Pol Pot, Hitler, Ceausescu and others, but the golden boy image quickly fades to one of a ruthless, inhumane manipulator with very dark intentions.

No one can make a mental diagnosis from afar, and I am certainly not qualified to make that diagnosis. But it is interesting to consider some characteristics when combined with actions of President Obama since he took office. He certainly had the initial charisma and likability. He had the perfect-looking family with the perfect-looking face at the perfect time for America to fall for him. No matter what his opponents pointed to, no one questioned him for fear of being labeled racists.

Psychopaths often act audaciously, without regard for those affected. They get away with actions that others in their positions haven’t, because of their ability to remain calm even when committing atrocities, and their ability to manipulate whole groups of people.

Obama has taken more luxury vacations than any other president, and he has done so as the American economy was in collapse for his policies. He has taken his entire family and spent tens of millions of dollars in exotic, luxe locations like Hawaii, Vail, Europe and Africa. His predecessors made Americans increasingly familiar with places like Camp David and Martha’s Vineyard or their own vacation homes such as the Bushes’ Kennebunkport, the Kennedys’ Cape Cod, the Reagans’ Rancho Del Cielo in California or George W’s exotic locale, Crawford, Texas. Other presidents were exceptionally sensitive to the state of the American people, foregoing vacations when the American people were mourning or hurting economically – not the Obamas. When the economy was at its worst, gas prices were at record highs, and Americans were going without vacations and other needs, Obama extended his wife and daughters’ vacation in Spain.

But luxe vacations are just the beginning. Obama has golfed more than any other president. On days when America has been under attack, on days when military heroes have died, on days when the nation is mourning – still Obama finds time for a game of hoops with a hip-hop star or a round of golf with a key contributor. His advisers had to pull him off the golf course to talk him into taking out Osama bin Laden.

When conservatives decry this point, the statist media scoff. Tone deafness and personal excesses are only relevant when Republicans are accused. Remember the ridicule over the fake issue over Bush 41′s apparent introduction to the grocery store scanner? Such media protection emboldens.

Nothing has changed.

After the second round of murders of government-guaranteed defenseless Fort Hood soldiers last week, Obama mustered a tear or two for cameras before slipping out the back door to head to a $32,000-per-plate party for himself.

This pattern of inauthenticity would be very difficult, even debilitating for someone with an intact conscience, in my opinion.

But audacity is a manifestation of psychopathy, and Obama is a master of audacity. He has exacted more items into law by the capricious act of executive order than any other president in such a short period of time. Traditionally, this is only done in very rare instances, because presidents know that the American people will not stand for that sort of tyranny. In Obama’s case, it is explained away, if mentioned by media at all, with whinings of “the other party’s obstructionist acts” or “someone else forced the president to act so cavalierly.”

That brings us to another habit of the psychopath – blaming others. First, Obama and his cronies blamed President Bush for just about everything. They blame the tea party for any bad press, the Koch brothers for any mishaps and Congress for Obama’s tyrannical executive orders and the removal of the filibuster as a means of defense against Obama’s imperial appointments.

The truly skilled psychopath can make his own biases look like they are the shortcoming of his opponent. When the New Black Panther thugs with clubs were intimidating voters during the 2008 election, those who voiced concern were called racist and alarmist for even bringing up the issue. Once elected, Obama had his attorney general, Eric Holder not only drop all charges but actually drop convictions! President Obama accuses others of racial bias, when it is he who is one of the worst.

One of the psychopath’s favorite tactics is the pity party. In a recent interview with New Yorker Magazine, the president continued to complain about those who hate him for his race. The psychopath will use those who call them out for their actions to gain sympathy and President Obama is adept at using anyone who criticizes him to get the public to feel sorry for him. As mentioned earlier, he is able to blame his tyrannical abuse of the executive order power on those terrible obstructionist Republicans who hate him because he is black.

Another common trait of the psychopath is a mysterious and shady past. We know very little about President Obama’s formative years and little about his college years. Records are sealed or withheld, and requests for them are dismissed as ridiculous requests from paranoid detractors.

The psychopath is great at connecting personally with people and convinces everyone that he is just like them. President Obama is just a normal guy who likes movies, basketball, golf and likes to play video games. Experts call it mirroring.

Perhaps the most frightening symptom of the psychopath is to kill while keeping their own hands clean. Obama takes full credit for killing Osama bin Laden to the point of both stealing the glory from our Navy SEALs and at the same time betraying the existence of SEAL Team Six and exposing them to unwarranted assassination risk – risk that resulted in the worst catastrophic loss of life in the history of the SEALs. Did Obama take responsibility for that? He certainly spent far less time mourning their loss or taking responsibility for their deaths than he did taking credit for being tough dealing with terror.

While he did take credit for bin Laden, he has not taken any responsibility for deaths resulting from Fast and Furious, the gun-running operation that has put guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels that have most certainly cost American and other lives. He has not only never expressed any sense of responsibility for that, he has shown no remorse. And worse, he capitalizes on the situation by singing the praises of gun control.
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View the complete article at:

http://www.wnd.com/2014/04/is-obama-a-psychopath/

[bsteadman1]

Psychopaths: how can you spot one?

We think of psychopaths as killers, alien, outside society. But, says the scientist who has spent his life studying them, you could have one for a colleague, a friend – or a spouse

The Telegraph
Tom Chivers
4/6/2014

Excerpt:

There are a few things we take for granted in social interactions with people. We presume that we see the world in roughly the same way, that we all know certain basic facts, that words mean the same things to you as they do to me. And we assume that we have pretty similar ideas of right and wrong.

But for a small – but not that small – subset of the population, things are very different. These people lack remorse and empathy and feel emotion only shallowly. In extreme cases, they might not care whether you live or die. These people are called psychopaths. Some of them are violent criminals, murderers. But by no means all.

Professor Robert Hare is a criminal psychologist, and the creator of the PCL-R, a psychological assessment used to determine whether someone is a psychopath. For decades, he has studied people with psychopathy, and worked with them, in prisons and elsewhere. “It stuns me, as much as it did when I started 40 years ago, that it is possible to have people who are so emotionally disconnected that they can function as if other people are objects to be manipulated and destroyed without any concern,” he says.

Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy, and it’s not so many decades since psychological disorders were seen as character failings. Slowly we are learning to think of mental illnesses as illnesses, like kidney disease or liver failure, and developmental disorders, such as autism, in a similar way. Psychopathy challenges this view. “A high-scoring psychopath views the world in a very different way,” says Hare. “It’s like colour-blind people trying to understand the colour red, but in this case ‘red’ is other people’s emotions.”

At heart, Hare’s test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each given a score of 0 (if it doesn’t apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if it fully applies). The list in full is: glibness and superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, callousness and lack of empathy, unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions, a tendency to boredom, a parasitic lifestyle, a lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of behavioural control, behavioural problems in early life, juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, a history of “revocation of conditional release” (ie broken parole), multiple marriages, and promiscuous sexual behaviour. A pure, prototypical psychopath would score 40. A score of 30 or more qualifies for a diagnosis of psychopathy. Hare says: “A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, once said: ‘Bob, when I meet someone who scores 35 or 36, I know these people really are different.’ The ones we consider to be alien are the ones at the upper end.”

But is psychopathy a disorder – or a different way of being? Anyone reading the list above will spot a few criteria familiar from people they know. On average, someone with no criminal convictions scores 5. “It’s dimensional,” says Hare. “There are people who are part-way up the scale, high enough to warrant an assessment for psychopathy, but not high enough up to cause problems. Often they’re our friends, they’re fun to be around. They might take advantage of us now and then, but usually it’s subtle and they’re able to talk their way around it.” Like autism, a condition which we think of as a spectrum, “psycho*pathy”, the diagnosis, bleeds into normalcy.

We think of psychopaths as killers, criminals, outside society. People such as Joanna Dennehy, a 31-year-old British woman who killed three men in 2013 and who the year before had been diagnosed with a psychopathic personality disorder, or Ted Bundy, the American serial killer who is believed to have murdered at least 30 people and who said of himself: “I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet. I just liked to kill.” But many psychopathic traits aren’t necessarily disadvantages – and might, in certain circumstances, be an advantage. For their co-authored book, “Snakes in suits: When Psychopaths go to work”, Hare and another researcher, Paul Babiak, looked at 203 corporate professionals and found about four per cent scored sufficiently highly on the PCL-R to be evaluated for psychopathy. Hare says that this wasn’t a proper random sample (claims that “10 per cent of financial executives” are psychopaths are certainly false) but it’s easy to see how a lack of moral scruples and indifference to other people’s suffering could be beneficial if you want to get ahead in business.

“There are two kinds of empathy,” says James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California and author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. “Cognitive empathy is the ability to know what other people are feeling, and emotional empathy is the kind where you feel what they’re feeling.” Autistic people can be very empathetic – they feel other people’s pain – but are less able to recognise the cues we read easily, the smiles and frowns that tell us what someone is thinking. Psychopaths are often the opposite: they know what you’re feeling, but don’t feel it themselves. “This all gives certain psychopaths a great advantage, because they can understand what you’re thinking, it’s just that they don’t care, so they can use you against yourself.” (Chillingly, psychopaths are particularly adept at detecting vulnerability. A 2008 study that asked participants to remember virtual characters found that those who scored highly for psychopathy had a near perfect recognition for sad, unsuccessful females, but impaired memory for other characters.)
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View the complete article at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/b...-spot-one.html