Every day, we are swamped with news about social, political and climatic turbulence, but there is one point that doesn’t seem to get much attention. What follows is ironic and somewhat amusing, but deeply aggravating in the long term.
The Republican right wing has adopted the habit of accusing their enemies of what they themselves are guilty of. An ongoing example is election integrity. The people who complain about corrupt elections are the very people who attempt to corrupt our elections. At the local level, Marc Dahl and Sami Graham have done so, with no admonishment from Mayor Dave Bronson; and the examples at the national level are abundant, most obviously in Arizona and Georgia. People who complain about a “stolen election” are themselves the real thieves. Is this some sort of a psychological quirk to justify bad behavior, or is it a rational calculation?
A more recent example is the clamor from Trump supporters in the House of Representatives to impeach President Joe Biden. Here are people who avidly support an attempted international blackmailer — squeezing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — an insurrectionist and a likely criminal, but who want to claim that Biden is the real villain. They are willing to invert the real world to somehow make it fit their “reality.” They want to protect the criminal and persecute the innocent. By some magical connection, Biden must be punished for nothing and Donald Trump excused for everything.
It is easy to write off the desire to impeach Biden as just vicious political revenge. Or does a commitment to conspiracy theories and ideologies result in a self-induced blindness — not just blind to the real world, but blind to one’s own behavior?
— Clarence Crawford
Anchorage
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