From Josh Marshall:
Beyond the legal particulars, the president’s attitude seems to be that the law just doesn’t apply to him — and that’s not surprising since we see so many other instances of that perspective in practice.
Peel back all the individual arguments from Al Gonzales and the president and whomever else they put forward, the underlying idea is not so much that the president is above the law as that he is the law. He embodies it, you might say, even embodies the state itself. And thus what he does can’t be illegal. What he does is simply the state cogitating and defending itself.
This is a vision that simply incompatible with any idea of separation of powers because in this view the president’s prerogative always trumps the other two branches. And that makes it a grave danger to our constitutional system itself.
In my last post about Tom Delay’s Christianism, I was grappling with the idea that maybe he isn’t a hypocrite, that he really believes his own b.s. Then what accounts for that? And don’t we see the same kind of bizarre remorseless religiosity in George Bush?
Isn’t what we’re talking about here a form of infantilism? Aren’t we talking about the narcissistic child who thinks the entire world a mirror of his will and as there for the sole purpose to serve him and his whims. And isn’t the first instinct of such a rage-filled child to overturn the table because he didn’t win the board game or because he can’t make the puzzle piece fit?
For the extreme narcissist, there is only his will which defines what is lawful and what is not. Doesn’t it make sense, then, that Bush would react to Wilson in the petulant, stupid way he appears to have done? And wouldn’t it also make sense that he would see himself as having done nothing wrong, because in his mind what he does is by definition the law?
And isn’t it precisely this kind of anti-social narcissism that is at the heart of the GOP agenda? The GOP faithful think of themselves as self-reliant individualists, but in fact the Christianist Libertarianism they profess is just a cover for their infantile self-absorption and their refusal to have any limits set upon the pursuit of their infantile needs. Is there any other way to account for their inability to see the world for what it is rather than seeing it as how they will it to be? How fitting then, that their leader should exemplify these characteristics with such prodigality.
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