Projection!

I have been thinking about this for sometime now. Why is it that these Repubs always seem to be revealed as doing that which they rail about as being morally abhorant?

Nathaniel Frank asks the question:

In the latest sign of rank hypocrisy among social conservatives, the president of the 30-million member National Association of Evangelicals has resigned amidst accusations that he had a relationship with a male prostitute. Ted Haggard, who is married with five children, is a frequent adviser to the White House, and a staunch advocate of banning marriage rights for gays and lesbians.

The news, of course, comes just a month after Florida GOP Congressman, Mark Foley, who had pushed legislation to protect youth from "exploitation by adults using the internet," was revealed to be an internet sexual predator. And it adds to the sense among weary voters that their leaders, especially if they happen to be Republicans, cannot be trusted to do the right thing. Indeed, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee acknowledged he had been aware of Foley's inappropriate emails for months, but took no steps to protect the children who were in harm's way. Instead, he spearheaded a series of TV ads attacking a Democratic challenger for, yes, being soft on child molesters.

What are we to make of a reigning conservative regime that lists the following inglorious claims to fame: Strom Thurmond, a notoriously racist senator who turned out to have a black lover; a Republican indictment of President Clinton's sexual license headed up by a team of philanderers; a Congress full of divorces passing an anti-gay law known as the "Defense of Marriage Act"?

In the pundit corner, we recently saw three giants of conservative moralizing unmasked as incapable of restraining their own vices: William Bennett turned out to be addicted to gambling, Rush Limbaugh to drugs. Meanwhile, Ralph Reed, the hand-picked youthful leader of the religious right, was quietly helping the corrupt lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, enable everything that religious conservatives oppose: casinos on Indian reservations and compelled abortions and sex slavery in the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory.

And this is not even to mention the Catholic Church's strident indictment of sexual freedom as it shuffled its own cadre of child-molesting priests from parish to parish.

The cover-ups and power grabs, of course, are simply raw politics. But the pattern here may reveal something more striking than the obvious reality that those in power will sacrifice almost anything to stay there. The Republican Party appears to be chock full of people who make a life of preaching against the very vices they can't shake. Why?

Well, I think it is projection. You know, “the tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes present in oneself, or to regard external reality as embodying such feelings, thoughts, etc., in some way.” Not to mention, under psychoanalysis, “such an ascription relieving the ego of a sense of guilt or other intolerable feeling.”

Now I say that because that is facially what is happening. Foley with his legislation against cyberspace predators is what: a cyberspace predator. Haggard is anti-gay and what is he: gay, and a drug user to boot.

I have also looked at the Bush Administrations constant accusations that Democrats and anyone who disagrees with their policies as supporting the Terrorists and I have wondered if this isn’t also projection.

After all Osama was opposed to Saddam, the Infidel, and what did Bush do, he took out the Infidel that Osama hated. This made the supposed Enemy Number One of the U.S.A., who was actually responsible for September 11, 2001, a very happy camper. Then of course Bush let him go at Tora Bora.

So, when Bush levies the “You’re with us or against us” rhetoric against those who reject his policies as being with the Terrorists, I have to think that he is just projecting on us his “tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes present in oneself, or to regard external reality as embodying such feelings, thoughts, etc., in some way.”

Because after all, “Why is Osama still out there?” And why are we in Iraq creating more terrorists and doing what Osama wanted us to do?

The question is why does this administration appear to support the terrorist’s goals and not the goals of the U.S.A.?

One word: Projection! How else do you explain it?

Because it is as Keith says, "All about keeping Power."

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