In Jerusalem

I am certain, however, that those responsible for the murder of millions of Germans will never be brought to justice.

-Adolph Eichmann, in the notes for his memoirs

American liberals, when making the case for George W. Bush's deficient character, used to point to one especially grotesque episode where he mocked a woman about to be executed and laughed at her plight. This was supposed to represent a sort of vicious insouciance and brazen cruelty. Even if he believed the woman deserved to die, the polite response would have been to lament the regrettable necessity of the act, the sometimes unkind exigencies of justice. That he instead derided her and laughed at her and treated the legal killing of a human being with frat-house humor was seen, rightly, as evidence of a major missing slice of humanity, a sort of exuberantly violent and inhuman automation where a soul ought to reside.

If his psycopathic committment to killing people hadn't already convinced you that Barack Obama shared this particular quality of being a vacant, blood-driven monster whose outward appearance as one of our own kind is no more than an act of ingeious fakery, then you may wish to consider his response to the torture of Bradley Manning, which he treats with the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate's expense report. Yeah, he assured me everything was copasetic. It's all good.

Here is a fine opportunity to engage in a little free and painless magnanimity, to make vague noises about according decent treatment even to one's enemies, to blather a bit about America's committment to the humane treatment of all God's precious children, to give the poor kid some boxer shorts and a couple of books to read, and to throw that paltry bone to his supporters in the Democratic faction, who would immediately beatify him as better-than-Cheney, and he passed on it. He said, no, we're going to go right on torturing this person, who has not been convicted of any crime, lest he commit suicide before we are able to consign him for the rest of his life to the tortures we are already visiting upon him. Here, then, is a man who considers torturing a kid barely past his youth for an alleged crime whose principal result to-date has been an acute case of The Embarrassments, more important, more pressing, and more necessary than the public maintenance of his own image as a moderate reformer and as a conciliator. I find that interesting indeed.

What this episode reveals is that the most salient aspect of Barack Obama's character is that he is an asshole of the worst order. He does not delight in cruelty like his predecessor, but is grossly indifferent to it. The Ts have all been crossed. Proper procedures followed? Yes. Fine. Let's move on. I have been assured.