[Fantasywriter]

Fyi, x. Obama’s silence in the face of ever escalating worldwide persecution of Christians in another form of malignancy. On his watch the abuse, torture, imprisonment, rape (particularly of children), murder & overall persecution of Christians has shot through the roof. Outwardly Obama ignores it. Inwardly he likes it, or he would most certainly at least *say* something about it. Of course, only actually DOING something about it would indicate real concern. You won’t get that from this Malignant Narcissist. He prefers to privately cheer the Christians’ tormentors on.

Obama’s mean streak is a mile wide and a mile deep. To see it, all you have to do is take off your moral equivalency glasses.

[x]

You are letting words trip you up here. Just as people can be "narcissistic" without being textbook "narcissists," and one could talk about someone's neediness being "pathological" without an actual and literal psychopathology being involved, so someone can be "malignant" or malign or malevolent (and a narcissist, too) without being a "malignant narcissist." The phrase has a specific meaning that goes beyond mere nastiness.

Politicians (and lawyers and high-flying executives) can be very nasty people. They are also involved in fields where "normal" behavior is quite rough and competitive, even devious. And behaviors that one applauds in one's own leaders are often seen as malicious, spiteful, even pathological. I'm hesitant about turning everything into a matter of psychopathology.

If it was wrong for the therapeutic profession to start "psychoanalyzing" Barry Goldwater from afar, do 50 years and a change of party make it right? Also, does slapping a label on a politician, say Nixon or Johnson, or Carter or Clinton, really tell you any more than we already know about them? Or does the label leave us knowing and saying less than we already do?

I think you're right about Obama's childhood wounds and neediness and right about his creating an alternate reality for himself. I have to wonder about some of your examples, though. Observers may see more pettiness and desire to humiliate in powerful people than is actually there. I'm pretty sure that Obama has enough ways to get back at people and make his power felt that he doesn't need to intentionally mispronounce the word "corpsman."

My main point in posting, though, was just to say that narcissism doesn't mean psychopathy or sociopathy. People see "narcissist" and think "Hitler" or somebody who's going to start dropping bombs on them. Narcissistic weakness or brittleness can have very bad effects. You don't want a narcissistic leader, and maybe you can't say that often enough. But the fact that narcissism in a leader doesn't mean Hitler is also something that bears repeating.