The personality of George W. Bush can be summed up in one word: sociopath. For the good of the country, the US Constitution and our way of life, not to mention the good of the world, Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, must be impeached, convicted and removed from office as soon as possible. War crimes prosecutions should also be seriously considered.

This isn't political hyperbole. It's the literal truth. Read the defining characteristics of sociopathy, or as the psychiatrists call it antisocial personality disorder. Consider the following list of the defining features of antisocial personality disorder as taken from the DSM-IV via Wikipedia:

Now think about George W. Bush. As a child, he stuffed firecrackers into frogs. As a young adult, he had a severe and sustained alcohol problem, including at least one drunk driving conviction and several accidents. Other serious incidents did not result in arrest but are well documented by friends and family members, such as challenging his father to a fistfight while intoxicated. Bush claimed to give up alcohol only on his 40th birthday and exchanged it for another emotional crutch: right wing Christianity. He has openly admitted ordering large scale violations of the Foreign Intellligence Surveillance Act -- each one a felony -- and instead of being held to account, in early August 2007 he successfully pressured the US Congress into further de-fanging FISA!

Bush's invasion of Iraq is now generally agreed to have been one of the worst -- if not the worst -- foreign policy blunder in the history of the US. The war was founded entirely on deliberate lies about weapons of mass destruction and a nonexistent link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that nonetheless had a solid majority of the country believing that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. The Bush team decided to invade Iraq as almost their first act in taking office.

Bush seems strangely indifferent to the suffering in Iraq, either by Iraqi civilians or by US soldiers or contractors. Under no circumstances will Bush ever end the war voluntarily; to do so would require an open admission, to himself and to the world, that the invasion was a mistake in the first place, and the planning and executiom of the occupation was bungled. So now all his energies go into keeping the war going until the end of his term so that the next president can be blamed for "losing" it.

Bush blames anyone and everyone but himself for his problems. The CIA gave him bad intelligence. The Democrats in Congress are "soft on terror". If Congress balks at signing his blank checks, he and his enablers begin ominous talk about another 9/11 and pretty soon everybody falls into line. It's absolutely frightening. Could it be that the NSA has already collected large amounts of incriminating or embarassing or politically harmful information about members of Congress to use as blackmail? This is hardly new; J. Edgar Hoover practiced it regularly in his heyday of the 1960s and into the 1970s.

And through all this, Bush says he sleeps soundly, with no regrets at all.

And then we have Bush's little personal traits: his superficial charm, always with a sharp edge or a put-down to remind everyone that he's in charge; his "kidding" of the members of the press corps often assigning them humiliating nicknames; his personal impulsiveness, such as giving an unsolicited backrub to the German Chancellor; telling the Iraq insurgents to "bring it on!"; his dumbfounding incuriosity, e.g., not asking a single question during a briefing before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, or his surreal 7-minute blank expression after being told that a second aircraft had hit the World Trade Center on 9/11; his shallow emotions, such as his crocodile tears during a visit to a military hospital with Gulf War veterans who'd had arms and legs blown off, and worse.

There's simply no doubt about it. They just don't come any worse. He surpassed Richard M. Nixon for that honor long ago. Other American presidents have been variously incompetent, crass, warmongering, ignorant, corrupt, arrogant, vain, incurious, cynical, wasteful, clueless, inept, paranoid, irrational, criminal or just plain stupid, but George W. Bush is the only president to excel in all of those categories simultaneously. He has no positive accomplishments to his name. None! The man is quite simply a sociopath, without empathy or conscience, impulsive, shallow, manipulative and self-centered. He's done far more damage to this country and to the world -- in ruined and ended lives, in the destruction of property, in wasted money, in abolished freedoms, in human suffering, in undoing centuries of slow, painstaking progress, and yes, even to the national security of the United States -- than Osama bin Laden ever could have dreamed of doing. It will take decades to repair the damage this man has done, if it ever can be repaired. The only reason Bush looks as good as he does is the man who chose himself to be his vice president.

I am utterly astounded that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, at a minimum, were not immediately impeached, removed from office and prosecuted for war crimes when their lies became undeniable shortly after the invasion of Iraq. After all, we Americans deserve most of the credit for establishing the modern system of international law at the Nuremberg trials after World War II. It's only fair that we hold our leaders to the same standards of civilized behavior.

When I first ordered these bumper stickers, I hesitated for a while to put one on my car. I live in San Diego, a conservative, military city in a conservative region. ("Duke" Cunningham, now cooling his heels in Club Fed for 100 months for bribery, was my Congressman.) I feared having my car "keyed" in retaliation by some rabid Bushie, or swept away to Gitmo. But to my pleasant surprise, not only has this not happened (yet), but I frequently see smiles and up-pointed thumbs. Last week, a guy followed me into a store to ask me where I'd gotten this sticker. He was pleased as punch when I gave him one.

Last updated: 5 August 2007