Saturday, April 29, 2006

Prove it to Yourself - Bush is a Psychopath

A couple weeks ago I was poking around Wikipedia, when I came across the entry for the tool that is used by psychologists to determine if a patient is a psychopath. When I started thinking about some of the recent revelations that George W was a chronic bedwetter until he was at least 10, and that he set fires and abused animals until he was a teenager, along with the long-known facts that he was for many years an alchoholic, I decided to put him to the test.

Here’s how to do it. Below is the list of 20 traits exhibited by psychopaths. Remember that it’s a continuum, and even “normal” people may possibly exhibit a couple of these traits.

Score 0 if the trait is absent, 1 if it is possibly or partially present and 2 if it is present. The item scores are summed to yield a total score ranging from 0 to 40 which is then considered to reflect the degree to which they resemble the prototypical psychopath. A score higher than 30 supports a diagnosis of psychopathy. Forensic studies of prison populations have reported average scores of around 22 on PCL-R; control “normal” populations show an average score of around 5.

Factor 1: Aggressive narcissism Glibness/superficial charm Grandiose sense of self-worth Pathological lying Conning/manipulative Lack of remorse or guilt Shallow affect Callous/lack of empathy Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Factor 2: Socially deviant lifestyle Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom Parasitic lifestyle Poor behavioral controls Early behavioral problems Lack of realistic, long-term goals Impulsivity Irresponsibility Juvenile delinquency Revocation of conditional release

Traits not associated with any factor Promiscuous sexual behavior Many short-term marital relationships Criminal versatility

Factor 1 is a slam-dunk - every single one of these is a 2. In spades.
Factor 2 is nearly as bad. I would say a 2 in everything but the first and last items, and those are probably a 1 and a 0.
Can’t really speak for any of the third column, but just the first 2 columns add up to 31.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?