Still more on Hillary: her laugh

Hillary Clinton -- that great feminist -- once, as a young lawyer, got a child rapist off the hook. Here is a clip of her boasting about how she did so. Note her laughter when she talks about how her client passed a polygraph, and how that forever destroyed her faith in polygraphs. (Meaning, she knew her client was guilty.)

And here is an article in the Daily Mail about the woman who was raped -- at age 12 -- by the 41-year-old drifter whom Hillary defended. Hillary evidently smeared the 12-year-old by questioning her credibility, and by suggesting that she sought out older men. 

Some have questioned how could Hillary have defended a child rapist, as if that in itself is an unethical act. To be fair, a lawyer's job is to provide the best representation possible to whomever their client may happen to be. Hillary was in private practice at the time, so theoretically could have turned down this case. But young lawyers in a large firm are expected to work on whichever case is assigned to them, at least if they want to keep their jobs.

The code of ethics that Hillary did violate was the legal one, by talking about the case afterward and indicating her client's guilt (by saying his having passed the polygraph forever destroyed her faith in them). There's a reason you don't hear criminal defense lawyers saying afterward that they knew their client was guilty, but they got them off anyway. It violates the client confidentiality rules.

Did you ever hear Johnny Cochrane quoted as saying, after the OJ trial, "Yeah, I knew the Juice had killed Nicole, but did you see the snow job I pulled at that trial? That stupid bitch Marcia Clark didn't know what hit her. I got the brother off and everybody knew he was guilty" -- and then laughing about it? No, you didn't, because, as sleazy as Cochrane was, at least he observed the legal code of ethics, unlike the even sleazier Hillary.

What was even more telling than Hillary's indiscretion -- from a psychological point of view -- is the way she laughed about the case. What exactly was funny about having gotten that rapist off?

Here is a clip of Hillary boasting and laughing about having killed Muammar Gaddafi. She says, "We came, we saw, he died," and then laughs.

Now, Gaddafi was unquestionably a horrible guy. He was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, among other things, and probably deserved to die. But Hillary's joke, a slight twist on the "Veni, vidi, vici" boast, was, truth be told, not all that funny.

So what was all the laughing about?

I wrote back in 2010 about how one of the surest signs of narcissism is to laugh at one's own jokes. this tends to go beyond an innocent "I crack myself up" laughter at a funny joke one is repeating. It's more, "Laugh with me in exultation about the way I pulled off this great coup!" Narcissistic laughs tend to have an aggressive, staccato quality to them. Just like Hillary's.

But as I outlined four days ago, Hillary is a sociopath, a far scarier diagnosis than mere garden variety narcissism. And what's really telling about Hillary's laughter is that only a sociopath finds other's misfortunes funny. 

Schadenfreude is universal: we all feel a certain satisfaction in seeing someone we hate get hurt, even if we don't admit it. We may even enjoy a quiet inner smile. But actually finding it laugh out loud funny is altogether different. Only a sociopath would laugh when he sees someone he doesn't even know crash his bicycle into a wall, or take a bad fall. Stitches have him in stitches, so to speak. It's a distinct sociopathic tell.

Someone ought to ask Hillary what she found so funny about those incidents.