Quote of the week
A few months ago, author William Gumede described Zuma as someone with a narcissistic personality disorder — a set of traits defined by Austrian psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut as “including an exaggerated sense of superiority, a lack of self-awareness about the impact of their behaviour and having a disdain for others, who they devalue to validate their own grandiosity”. These people lack empathy, have a distorted sense of reality and are incapable of seeing anything from anyone else’s perspective. Narcissists like Zuma, Gumede argues, can’t accept responsibility and don’t care if they take down entire countries with them. The events at Nkandla, sadly for Zuma, only reinforced that perspective.
Financial Mail
All over America, GOP-led legislatures are pushing to impeachstate judges. Lawmakers in Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have moved in on the judicial branch, the most infamous of these crusades being the effort in Iowa to oust those state supreme court judges who voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Evidently that is still a “high crime or misdemeanor” to some. It’s one thing for politicians to seek out impeachment proceedings that are sui generis. But now legislators are including specific impeachment language in the text of their statutes. In Arizona, New Hampshire and Virginia, rump Republican lawmakers this year introduced bills making it an impeachable offense for judges to make rulings on FOIA requests or to merely cite international law. There’s a legal term-of-art for such efforts: it’s called “bat-shit crazy.” – Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic
