Egos Run -A-Muck

From Paul Shlichta at The American Thinker:
The highest concentration of mega-egos is in the literary world, especially in journalism. Columnists, after all, are paid to be omniscient, or at least to seem so. And the mega-egos among them really believe in their infallibility and bestow their most casual opinions as if they had just received them from God on Mount Sinai. Consider Michael Moore, whose total confidence in his own rightness makes him contemptuously oblivious to any facts that refute him. Another is Maureen Dowd. At her best, she can write well and be shrewdly perceptive. But more often than not, she sinks to the level of the aforementioned village sot's female counterpart-the back-fence gossip, of limited intelligence but unlimited self-confidence, who knows the "truth" about everyone in town and declares it in a loud triumphant bray.

One would think that mega-egos would abound in politics; however, they are rarely in the front ranks. I think this is because (thank God) the public can eventually see through most mega-egos so that they usually attain only a limited cult following. Therefore, mega-egotism is often a third party phenomenon. Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are gorgeous examples-and oops, I almost forgot Lyndon LaRouche. However, as Roosevelt proved, there is no presidential glass ceiling for mega-egos.

Congress is virtually a game preserve for mega-egos, or rather an incubator for producing them. After all, when you are required to pass judgment on a wide variety of legislative topics and to repeatedly pose before your constituency as an expert on all of them, it's forgivable if you begin to believe in your own omniscience. I'm not talking about Nancy, who seems to verge on derangement, but rather about amiable jackasses like Joe Biden.

Finally, what about Joe's new boss, the POTUS? His inflated self-image has induced me and others to classify him as a narcissist. But is he instead a Rooseveltian mega-ego?

I don't think it matters. In either case, the self-idolizing overconfidence leads to a reckless irresponsibility that resembles a toddler in control of a bulldozer. (Think of Roosevelt's confidence that he could 'handle' Stalin.) The hunger for praise entails a vulnerability to manipulation by associates or even adversaries. The two pathologies differ only in determining which buttons a manipulator has to push.

In either case, you'd better buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride.