I thought that was an excellent piece, Chester.

Thank you, sir.

Granted he is certainly a tyrant, but do we know he's not crazy? They're not mutually exclusive and both affect our responses.

From the little I have read about him personally, he seems crazy. He acts crazy. (By which I mean, more or less, out of touch with reality in a diagnosable way.) He's not Dionysius of Syracuse, or even Hafez Assad.

Maybe he is not "crazy" in the sense of thinking he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Then again, serial killers are not "crazy" either. Nor was Hitler "crazy". Perhaps homocidal is a better description, but it hardly seems reassuring. This is the one irreducible fact: he has presided without a single care over the mass starvation and suffering of North Korea's people, who flee to China (!) by the thousands in search of a better life. I understand what your getting at, that to call him insane may actually understate the danger, but no one except the Jimmy Carter wing (boy did Moynihan sum him up) is downplaying the problem.

My best layman's take would be that he's got several known neuroses, starting with narcissism and paranoia. [BTW, what do we call a neurosis these days; didn't the DSM poohbahs eliminate that word, too?]

Anyway, whatever we call them, they are much better starting pts re formulating the best approach for dealing with the man than calling him crazy.

Uh oh...I'm one of the worst offenders. There's "nutjob" Chavez; "Dear Leader" Kim (wait a minute, he likes that); "Mad Jad" in Iran, and so on.

I'm aware of the considerations you mention in the TCS piece...but I find it difficult to treat such a pretentious pack of bad guys with less than the degree of levity, leavened by a healthy dose of contempt, that they so richly deserve.