Conservative Projection Syndrome
Robert Monroe, a 50-year-old Shorewood health insurance executive, was charged Friday with 13 felonies related to his voting a dozen times in five elections between 2011 and 2012 using his own name as well as that of his son and his girlfriend’s son.
… Monroe was considered by investigators to be the most prolific multiple voter in memory. He was a supporter of Gov. Scott Walker and state Sen. Alberta Darling, both Republicans, and allegedly cast five ballots in the June 2012 election in which Walker survived a recall challenge.
According to the John Doe records, Monroe claimed to have a form of temporary amnesia and did not recall the election day events when confronted by investigators.
Amnesia. Right. Because forgetting that you cast your vote in one state five times causes you to vote in two other states. Under different names.
I’m pretty sure something else caused this, and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. There’s a phenomenon amongst conservatives to accuse liberals of a wrongdoing, claim it’s destroying the country—and then proceed to do that very thing yourself, to an extreme. Conservatives feel justified in doing this along a specific train of thought: Democrats did it, they got away with it, so why can’t I do it in spades?
We’ve seen this a lot of times before. Democrats used the filibuster—in what was truthfully a limited fashion—to stop Bush’s most extremist judicial nominations, which he repeatedly nominated for court seats. The Republican response? Claim that Democrats are abusing the filibuster, call that the worst crime in history, and then, once they lost power, use the filibuster to block every last thing in sight.
Republicans accused Democrats in 2006 of being so adamantly hostile to Bush that, if elected to power in Congress, they would hold endless investigations of Bush and would try to impeach him, all of this being a dire threat to America. Democrats won and did not investigate or impeach—but in 2010, when Republicans won the House, they began exactly that process, to extremes.
They claim that Democrats are on a campaign to “annihilate” the Republican Party, despite no evidence to support that—and then launch campaigns to destroy traditional Democratic power bases, such as unions and teachers, vilify liberal causes, deny any compromise for the purpose of destroying any chance of opposition success, and even attempt to destroy the very names for the other side—“liberal” becomes “The ‘L’ Word,” and “Democratic” becomes “democRAT.”
They claim that Democrats are reckless spenders responsible for the debt, and then go on a spending spree that takes a budget surplus and transforms it into a (second!) Republican-generated record-breaking national debt. They claim that Democrats are “takers,” a then acquire more government handouts for red states than the more-productive blue states are given. They claim that Democrats voted for Obama just because he is black, and then vault men like Michael Steele, Herman Cain, and Alan Keyes to high-profile roles in the shadow on Obama. They cry “class warfare!” and say it’s tearing the nation apart, and then seek to destroy the minimum wage and actually raise taxes for poor people even in light of a supposedly inviolable “no tax hike” pledge.
And then, on the issue of election fraud itself, Republicans claim Democrats steal elections, their claim based on nothing more than rumor and conspiracy theories… and then launch the grandest, most thinly-veiled nationwide campaign for election fraud imaginable.
The list goes on and on and on. This is what conservatives do.
So why did this Robert Monroe guy think it was perfectly fine for him to commit exactly the kind of voter fraud that conservatives claim, without any evidence whatsoever, is rampant amongst liberals? My guess is, this exact phenomenon: conservatives make up ludicrous false claims about liberals, believe their own fairy tales, and then feel perfectly justified to do exactly what they have railed against, only to more egregious extremes than they imagined liberals were doing.
We already have ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome); what we see here is another conservative malady—call it “CPS”: Conservative Projection Syndrome.
Not amnesia. I’m pretty sure it was multiple personality disorder.
you’ve got A and B reversed; they’re primarily evil, and then project this evil onto liberals.
that and they understand that our system is running on BS now, so adding to the corruption isn’t going to make it materially worse, at least for them.
Except for this guy, unless he can BS his way out of the felony charges.
That sometimes happens, but just as or even more often, I see Republicans not doing something very much, then accusing liberals of a thing–usually based on an actual action, but wildly exaggerated–and then going on to doing that thing on steroids. As if liberals doing a thing in moderation is justification for conservatives doing it to abusive excess.
Agreed. A couple of examples of these points come to mind here.
Cheney blamed Obama last week for “creating a vacuum” in Irag when he removed the US forces there. Hey, Cheney, what do you call removing Sadaam from power? That would be closer to “creating a tornado” than creating a vacuum.
The man has no shame…!
Also, we hear constantly from the Right that Obama lied about this or that (e.g. citing the anti-Islam video inciting the Benghazi attack). You can call it a “lie” if you consider an incorrect assumption to be a lie. But what realistically are the consequences of that “lie”? At worst, it would cause a lack of trust among constituents. On the other hand, the “lie” about WMDs in Iraq needlessly cost our nation 4500 American lives, nearly bankrupting us, while our economy went into a freefall. And yet it is considered a minor offence when compared to the “lie” about the video.
There is no sense of gradation, qualification or a fair comparison of these transgressions. Only the blind hatred and chanting of the words “Lie! Lie! Lie!”
How does one respond to those living in a bubble of ignorance? It’s almost pointless to try…
–kensensei