"Yet, the most apt depiction of the President and his minions is that ...

... they are bullies.

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A lot has been written about this presidency: It’s penchant for secrecy and near-paranoid distrust of the media. It’s anti-intellectualism and blind faith in neo-conservatism. It’s sycophantic pandering to the power elite. It’s nihilist pursuit of power. Yet, the most apt depiction of the President and his minions is that they are bullies. Overly aggressive men who seek to enhance their position by systematically abusing those who have less power.

A Psychology Today article summarized the voluminous research on bullies. Usually they are hotheads who believe that aggression is the best way to resolve conflicts. Often they perceive provocation where it does not actually exist. They start fights. They have a strong need to dominate and typically pick on those perceived as weaker. Longitudinal studies indicate that while bullies may start out with normal intelligence levels, their aggressive behavior ultimately impairs their intellectual functions. One psychologist observed that bullies “are experts at using short-term payoffs. They’re not very good at long-range things that are in their best interest.” Another simply declared, “They are losers.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because many of these same observations have been made about the Bush Administration. They are domineering and perceive provocation where it does not exist. They emphasize short-term payoffs. The Administration attacked Iraq without provocation and then declared victory when they had no plan for the occupation.

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From Bullies in the White House Pulpit by Bob Burnett on November 28, 2005

Link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/bullies-in-the-white-hous_b_11326.html

For some time, I have been suggesting that the aim of Republican strategy has been a Republican Party that permanently runs the United States and a United States that permanently runs the world. The two aims have been driven by a common purpose: to steadily and irreversibly increase and consolidate power in Republican hands, leading in the direction of a one-party state at home and a global American empire abroad. The most critical question has been whether American democracy, severely eroded but still breathing, would bring down the Republican machine, or whether the Republican machine -- call it the budding one-party global empire -- would bring down American democracy. This week, it looks as if democracy, after years of decline, has gained the upper hand.

The choice was and remains: empire or republic? Just a few years ago, the "sole superpower," the new Rome, master of the "unipolar" world, seemed to many to be bestriding the world. Some, like columnist Charles Krauthammer, were reveling in the triumph of "the American hegemon." "History has given you an empire, if you will keep it" he said, traducing Benjamin Franklin, who had said at the Constitutional Convention that the United States was a republic if you can keep it.

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As happened in the Vietnam era, the war came home. The administration's disrespect for law led to law-breaking. Somehow, the law enforcement system in and around the Justice Department has retained enough independence to serve as a check on abuses of executive power. Indictments have been brought, and others are likely to follow. The mechanisms whereby the foreign debacle has led to the domestic setbacks for the Administration are complex but the broad outlines are already clear: The failed empire, in the shape of its failed war, has driven down the President's support to the point at which others, cowed until now, feel free to attack him. The institutions of government and the economy, drawn like iron filings into the magnetic field of power, failed at first to check the administration. But the public, represented by opinion polls, has stepped in, and the institutions are following. Not since the Soviet Union fell fourteen years ago have we witnessed a greater reversal of fortune.

Unmaking the conglomeration of unaccountable power built up around the Republican Party in recent years will hardly be the work of a week, and the outcome is anything but certain. But if the effort succeeds, historians may one day write that the fake American empire was the Achilles heel of the real one-party state.

Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.

Link:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=39141