Obama's "malignant narcissism" is on full display

The hardest thing in psychiatry is to keep an open mind while sitting with a patient, who might be trying to provoke and manipulate the doctor, day after day, month after month. We want to understand troubled people, but people are complex. Psychiatric diagnoses are just reasonable guesses. Most human beings are much too mixed, much too complicated, and much too interesting to reduce to just a checklist.

Obama is the exception. Lots of people talk like narcissists -- when teenagers get grandiose, or when they start to lie to and manipulate their parents, it might be just a phase they're going through.

Lots of people preen and strut on life's stage without losing their sense of proportion. But I think Obama just turned all his grandiose talk into irrevocable action. I don't think we've had this extreme and radical a president ever before in American history. Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR took radical actions, but only at a time of huge national crises. We don't have a national crisis today. Obama is our national crisis.

Obama is going for the "nuclear option" to force very bad and very toxic medicine down our throats. He is willing to sacrifice his congressional majorities to get the biggest, most budget-busting entitlement ever imagined into the permanent fabric of American national life. The main beneficiaries of Obamacare will be Obama's ego and the Permanent Left. This is his chance to be FDR, and he can't control his need for that glorified image. He is therefore crossing the Rubicon -- making an irreversible decision that will define his presidency forever, win or lose. This is not just another grandiose gesture. Obama now stands revealed for what he is.