HOW COULD SHE GO THERE!? Hillary, Political Psychopath

WHEN YOU SAY THE WORD "sociopath"most people think of serial killers. But although many serial killers are sociopaths, there are far more sociopaths leading ordinary lives. Chances are you know a sociopath. I say "ordinary lives," but what they do is far from ordinary. Sociopaths are people without a conscience. They don't have the normal empathy the rest of us take for granted. They don't feel affection. They don't care about others. But most of them are good observers, and they have learned how to mimic those feelings remarkably well.

WHAT DO THEY WANT?
... This is an interesting question. The answer is chilling: They want to win... whatever the game is decided to be. If they are in business, it is becoming rich. If it is sibling rivalry, it is defeating the sibling. If it is a contest, the goal is to dominate. If a sociopath is the envious sort, winning would be making the other lose, or fail, or be frustrated, or embarrassed.

A sociopath's goal is to win. And he is willing to do anything at all to win.

Adam Khan in "Common Everyday Sociopaths"

Because it was there. Merely another card in the strategic deck, a song in the repertoire for when the audience starts poking at the aspic.

HRC's remaining die-hards reply, "What-me-realize?" MSM spin. At our girl again.

She said(Friday, May 23) to the editorial board of the Sioux Falls, SD, Argus Leader:

My husband did not wrap up the nomination...somewhere in the middle of
June, right? And, likewise, Bobby Kennedy didn't secure the nomination in
California until then.

It still would have been a subject for speculation as to why she didn't reference other, less tragic contests to show that a team can upset another just before the buzzer, the turtle can suprisingly beat the hare. But note. She juxtaposes one example with another that is not situationally(and this is underscored linguistically) parallel to it.

In fact, because she leads with the first example, we would expect the second to be of like kind. And in watching the video, we see how deftly, how easily, in tone and manner, she segues from the first example to the next.

This is lawyering at its best. This is not a slip of the tongue, but a practiced and smooth glide as it sticks itself out at the PUBLIC--having darted out for a few dry-runs two other times. This time is no rehearsal. Later? Got that covered too.

The lawyer and the politician, at this level of the game, are masters of ambiguity, skillfully planting a hedging-bets clause to blame the sucker who signed the contact for misreading it. If that fails, "I misspoke," "I'm only human," or "So what?"

Back to what she said(rather than HOW she said it) in terms of what she meant.

Literal translation: "I could still win. Bill didn't win until the middle of June. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June. "

In other words: "I could still win because I could clinch this in June or Obama could be assassinated in June."

Ironically, in that she intentionally gave both examples an off-hand delivery, because she meant to slip the idea in there and later say it was all a slip, HOW she said it is exactly what creeps us out. Like a perp trying to out psyche a polygraph, she issued both examples in the same matter-of-fact, low key, unemotive, unblinking manner. She didn't miss a beat.

If she's going to say such a thing, how can she not betray a nano-second of emotion, a wince, a pained rise or drop in pitch, a sharp intake of breath?

Crisply and deliberately, she moves from an example of victory to a NATIONAL TRAGEDY, one engraved in the collective American psyche as profoundly and achingly as any other wound since the nation began. Indeed, RFK's assassination in l968 is such a resonant reference because history has come full circle. Who among us has not thunk it? Who among us, no matter our age, has not had the sense of impending horror as we watch history being made anew at the same time it is repeating?

No one would do that in her right mind. No one would think she could get away with using our deepest sorrow as a calculated strategy. Does she think we are that stupid?

Bu-but surely she KNOWS, she must REALIZE how people would view what she said, even if not intentional, that people would recoil in horror, she'd be seen as poison, she'd doom any chance at being vice-president even....

She thought we wouldn't catch her out. She figured if we did she'd finesse as usual. She could not possibly connect up to us. She could not READ us. Thus, she did not think we could read her.

Herve Cleckley, who first explored what used to be viewed as a "moral defect" in the framework of psychology, in his pathblazing text, The Mask of Sanity, features a frontpiece quote to the effect that the wax rose is more beautiful, more perfect than the real thing. But the downfall of the sociopath, whether one born that way, or created by circumstances--perhaps by the nature of the game she must play--is this incapacity to estimate the true depth and implication of the psychological gestalt, that weave of memory, emotion, personal and collective experience, as it composes the inner reservoir of other people.

Martha Stout Ph.d in her highly readable best-seller " The Sociopath Next Door", takes Dr. Robert D. Hare's seminal research( author of Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us) and relocates prison-based studies to a larger venue. Her emphasis on "garden variety," non-violent and often high-functioning sociopaths is very much in keeping with Dr. Hare and Cleckley's intent: to warn those most at risk of being victimized by sociopaths in their own midst. They knew what we need to.

Classic sociopaths ,and those somewhere on the continuum from mild to severe, are not found mostly in prison or even in psychiatrists' offices. And contrary to the opinions of many mental health professionals who have not studied character disorders intensively, and who have no background in forensic psychology, sociopaths can ascend the highest social, economic, and political ladders.

In fact, outside of prisons, we are likely to find our sociopaths in just such stratospheres. Charm, ambition, intelligence, and a gift to gain the authentic trust and confidence of others--these are the hallmarks of the over-achieving sociopath(sometimes overachieves by virtue of a parasitical relationship with one in power).

Almost invariably they do.
Although Hare and other experts allude to the quirky and erratic nature of their balance between successful social mask and the impulsive and irrational character behind it, Stout takes on their seemingly inexplicable contradictions as we often encounter them--from next door, to the boardroom, to the
oval office.

What she says in essence is that not only do sociopaths view themselves as smarter--and as others including Hare have pointed out, through repetition and finessing become accomplished liars(also are grandiose enough to GO FOR IT and have a high enough emotional and neurological threshold to JUST DO IT) but they also really do not realize, do not understand, do not know down to their inner core, what others, in the most real way, FEEL. For they can not FEEL the same way.

The emotions and ethics, pathos and ethos, as they drive people to die for one another and their country, as they form that country's most palpable and vulnerable and yet eternally-beating and fighting HEART, are appeals to make to a jury, pawns to move in a game of politics; these core emotions and ethics can be PLAYED to, even mimicked, but not EXPERIENCED. This fact constitutes the main difference between the sociopath and the rest of us.

Martha Stout reminds us that sociopaths do not have dependable sensors, in that sort of primordial and intuitive way mothers do,for the deepest emotional self of others(or nations) and, other people's ability to read THEM. Here, I do not claim that HRC is a bad mother or does not have the ability to empathize with her friends, to sense her husband's concerns. A case can be made that the political game, played for the highest stakes under the most extreme and public conditions, desensitizes its participants, rewards them for behavior that in any other setting all would agree is sick, duplicitous. And, in the vise of ambition, having but seconds to overturn the game, could not the most sensitive woman find her powers of empathy, even her own ethical sense squeezed out of her?

HRC has been in the crucible of politics and the cross hairs of media for decades. But now, even by "Politics as Usual" standards, she seems to manifest a moral defect, a lack of empathetic understanding, that is verging on pathological, as the historian Douglas Brinkley suggested in a very sympathetic way. I believe she's been operating in a sociopathic way politically for many years, and that now, mirroring socipatholgy as it is expressed outside the political game, her mask of sanity is slipping.

When this happens, the classic sociopath has excuses at the ready. We accept the faintest of apologies and blame its being so tepid on the conditions that called for it--lack of sleep, lapse in memory, stress. We accept the apology for to do otherwise is to have to think the worst. We accept because the apology refocuses us on our own faults and on the poor, poor stressed out, sleepless, amnesiac whom we have forced to apologize in this humiliating way.

WHOA! Martha Stout's admonition is apropos at this juncture:

course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband
and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June in 1992 and 1968, and I
was referencing those to make the point that we have had nominating primary
contests that go into June. That's historic fact. The Kennedys have been much

on my mind in the last days because of Senator Kennedy, and I regret that if
my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire
nation and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I

George K. Simon calls the emotional manipulation sociopaths wield so expertly "covert aggression"(Psychopaths in Sheep's Clothing). Adapting his notion, and quoting from Fiona McColl's "Eight Ways to Spot Emotional Manipulation," the website "Psychopathy" in its discussion of Simon's book advises as follows:

I'll spare my readers Cleckley, Hare, and Stout's( et al) consideration of "the lightly taken debt, the shrugged off loan"( Hare)--and as Cleckly says "Not all(Ital mine) checks given by psychopaths" bounce. Rather, effective sociopaths, prodded to good conduct by the prize they seek, will have long runs of responsible behavior:

But you are right dear reader. This is no laughing matter. Wherever you stand on HRC, love her or hate her, we have been shaken by the elephant no one wanted to talk about trumpeting in our ears, and we are particularly sensitive because of the serious illness of a senator some of us love and almost all of us respect.

Regardless of how HRC's unfortunate reference impacts her electability, next is the May 31 meeting of the rules comittee to decide the fate of MI and FL. My own opinion is that, to give justice to the voters, delegates must be seated in some way. But if the issue of Clinton's prior stance on the rules comes up, I would point to,and will close with, Dr, Hare's admonition:

"They do not honor formal or implied commitments to people, organizations, or principles... their good intentions are written on the wind."

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DISCLAIMER: The diarist does not claim or intend to offer a professional diagnosis on which treatment must be predicated. She certainly does not purport to apply a lay person's analysis, or even that assumed in the professional literature cited, to Ms. Clinton's PERSONAL life and behaviors. She means anything in this diary to apply only to Clinton's actions in the political arena. The diarist writes much in the vein of other students and academics' application of "psycho-history" and "psycho-biography" to historical and current events, peoples, social and political movements.

TERMINOLOGY: Because in the early use of the term "psychopath," the general public and the media construed the term to mean a person with some form of psychosis, practitioners and researchers in this particular field of study and its settings, tend to use the word "sociopath." They can, and are, used interchangeably.

Sociopathology, in its current incarnation, predominantly influenced by Robert Hare's pioneering studies and research, and his development of highly reliable diagnostic tools, is the study of a psychiatric disorder that can be seen to include some of the features that DSM-IV lists under "anti-social personality." Many mental health practitioners do refer to this label for socipathy. In terms of the field of characterolgical disorders, narcissism is subsumed.

Proponents of character disorder theory, criminal profiling, and sociopatholgical theory and practice see these taxonomies as far as real-life applications as overlapping and their various traits as existing on a continuum.

THE DIARIST: Is a college English instructor whose graduate and undergraduate work included courses such as "literature and psychoanalysis" and so she easily assumes the role of amateur psychologist. Has been a candidate in two graduate psychology programs, one in Forensic Psychology, but finished neither. Did complete the requirements for a two year degree in "The Administration of Justice" and has been an intern in juvenile probation. She will always answer to "Dr. Voberry" with alacrity and great joy.

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Thanks.

Here is what she could have, but did not say: My husband did not wrap up the nomination...somewhere in the middle of June, right? And, likewise, Bobby Kennedy didnâ€™t secure the nomination in California until then.

The anti-McCain drive-bys from the partisan media shills have been stepped up, because either A) they wanna downplay Hillary's assassination gaffe, or B) they realized they've played that for all it was worth, and need something in any case that doesn't focus on either of their party's candidates.

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Sun May 25, 2008 at 03:40:57 PM PDT