The shared delusions of Republicans and Democrats
David Strom for hot air.com
Well, here goes. I plan to offend everybody, so I might as well dive in.
The other day I was reading yet another defense of Joe Biden, not long after reading a piece praising Donald Trump, and I wanted to scream. Everything I read made my head spin.
In principle I can understand why partisans of either politician might be inclined to support them, or even feel very loyal to them. I can understand this somewhat more for Trump than for Biden, not because I have any special admiration for Trump, but rather for the simple reason that Trump is still sentient while Biden appears to suffering from incipient dementia and failing health.
Trump inspires loyalty because he has the right enemies, and given how desperately many Republicans want to bitch slap (metaphorically) the elite who hate Trump so much, there is a natural tendency to rally around the guy. Add to that the additional fact that the Biden Administration is abusing its power and the passions get aroused.
Biden as a person doesn’t inspire much passion, but no president in decades has pushed through as much Leftist legislation as Biden, and he actually does (metaphorically) bitch slap the Republicans–to the point of working to put Trump in jail. Biden may not be lovable, but he is reliably Leftist and that apparently is enough. He makes Obama’s presidency look moderate.
AuntiE says: Biden is functioning as Obama’s third term in office.
All right, whatever. If your fondest desire is to express your political Id, I can see the attraction of both to their partisans.
But looking at the two politicians purely from the perspective of their basic humanity and decency, I recoil at how many people have decided to be blind to and insistently deny their manifest flaws as human beings and as Chief Executives of the United States.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but both are bad people. And not just bad people personally, but bad people in a way that makes America worse.
Biden is a profoundly stupid and venal man who has an unerring ability to make the wrong choices, say the wrong thing, and get America into trouble. He is perhaps the only person stupid enough to vote against the first Iraq war, which turned out as well as it could have, and then vote for the second Iraq war, which turned out as badly as it could have. His precipitate decision to exit Afghanistan with no plan was a disaster, and his subsequent insistence that it went well shows he learned nothing.
In fact, his whole political career shows he has always been incapable of learning, and that he doesn’t care. He is in it for the money and power.
As Barack Obama warned, never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.
His venality has always been in the background, but over the past few years he has sacrificed the integrity of the justice system in order to cover up and justify his influence peddling scheme, and of course as a tool to go after his political enemies all the way from Trump to random parents at school board meetings. He funnels money into his family’s coffers and uses government powers to cover that up.
Yet despite all this being obviously true, his defenders keep on insisting that there is nothing to see here. Joe is an amazing president, a terrific father who loves his children so much that he showers with his daughter and sells out the country for his son, and is a genius at foreign policy. There is zero evidence (except all the obvious evidence) that he has done anything wrong, and Republicans are just jealous of his success.
WTF? Is there no depth of depravity you won’t defend and hold up for admiration?
AuntiE says: No, there is no depth they will not go to to defend him as they are equally depraved and venal.
Right-wingers have a similar problem with not just Trump but other anti-establishment figures like Andrew Tate. Both are execrable human beings, yet they are both treated by some as persecuted paragons of virtue. The Trump/Jesus memes make me want to puke.
I grant that Trump is being persecuted, and that we all should be outraged at how he and others in his orbit have been treated.
But that doesn’t mean that he is a good guy. It just means he is hated by the right people and they are abusing their power. Absolutely agreed. Trump didn’t try to overthrow the government, but his behavior since January 2021 has been disgusting. He should have pushed reform to prevent shenanigans, not grievance for political gain.
AuntiE says: Absolutely true. If he had focused more on how jurisdictions changed voting policies without following mandatory requirements, he would have looked less like a whiner.
Trump is still a bad guy himself. Not bad in the way the Left portrays him. He isn’t a fascist bent on seizing power or anything so politically grand.
He is, instead, a narcissist with uncontrolled appetites, a mean streak a mile wide and a mile deep, and is willing to sacrifice his political allies in order to “win” at any cost.
While his enemies will sacrifice any norm and even break the law to get him, you have to admit he makes it easy. He attacks Republicans at least as harshly–and these days far more commonly–than he attacks Democrats. And he will tell lies about his fellow Republicans at the drop of a hat.
He treats people badly, can’t hire people worth a damn, will listen to terrible advice from people like Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, and praises Gavin Newsom, Charlie Crist, and Stacey Abrams.
AuntiE says: He proved how poor his hiring decisions can be when his first hire was Rence Pribus and followed that abysmal choice with Christopher Wray and General Milley.
Yet a large chunk of Republicans will defend him to the death and swallow his lies about Governors Kemp, DeSantis, and Glenn Youngkin without blinking. If these guys are RINOs and Lindsey Graham isn’t, what world are you living in? His campaign spent a week or two implying that DeSantis was a drag queen because he wore cowboy boots (high heels!).
The Trumpophiles have been annoying me forever, and did so even when I discovered that Trump was actually a pretty good president despite his flaws as a person. The unwavering support of even his worst behaviors reminded me of Clinton’s defenders who debased themselves on a daily basis.
The sudden embrace of Andrew Tate is utterly mystifying to me. Whether he is guilty as charged or not, he is an awful human being. If he didn’t defraud and rape women (I have no idea), he proudly declared his sexual abuse of them for profit. Anybody who would defend the things he regularly bragged of…I just don’t understand. He has made a fortune turning women into porn stars. How is this admirable?
So what if he is hated by all the “right” people? That doesn’t make him defensible. His who shtick is bragging about treating women like dirt. Can’t we all agree that this is, in fact, despicable behavior?
I am definitely not on team Tate.
Yet there he is on Tucker Carlson bloviating about manhood as if he is a good man. He is as sincere as Joe Biden is when he declares his policies are good for the economy, or Jennifer Granholm is when she assures us that our gas stoves are safe from government. These are lies and bad faith. Andrew Tate says a lot of things that are true about the decline of masculinity–and then embraces an equally perverse view of masculinity as exploiting the weak.
Yuck.
We shouldn’t judge people simply based upon who dislikes them. This is surrendering your moral autonomy to the people whom you should trust least in moral judgments. There are times when everybody should be able to agree, or at least when your judgment overlaps with that of your most hated political opponents.
Our allegiance should be to the good, the true, and the beautiful, even if and when that means we agree with people we dislike.
More and more partisans seem to have lost the ability to do that. We dislike the other “side” so much that we will sacrifice our values just to “own” them. We look for the good in those whom the other side hates.
We shouldn’t.
The important question is should we, possibly, focus less on the Presidential election and focus more on retaking, with a Brodigagian majority, the Congress. Just more of my odd thinking.