The Right wing pundits - Pointing fingers everywhere but at themselves

Total unawareness and refusal to accept responsibility or blame: the hallmarks of the Republican Party
The Right's Columned Crack-Up
By P.M. Carpenter

As a lay psychiatrist, I must confess that it is borderline sadistically fascinating to follow the coping mechanisms of the right's apologists. And, to mix political wackery with religion, I also say blessed are Fridays, for on this day the symptomatic musings of David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer — apologists extraordinaire — have taken to gracing the right's Bedlam with all but self-blame.

What to do, what to do, oh my, what to do; or, rather, what to say about Donald Trump? How can this festering boil on the assclownishness of modern Republicanism be explained (away)? Such is Messrs. Brooks and Krauthammer's charge. And, to mix political wackery and religion with the lowest order of the idiomatic, I further say they are fucking brilliant at it.

Brooks has decided that Trumpism is a singular phenomenon — singularly endowed, that is, by Trump. "The Republicans who coalesce around Trump are making a political error," he concedes, but they "deserve respect. They are left out of this economy … [they] are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams."

What Brooks fails to acknowledge is that millions more have suffered under the decades-long insanity of the cynical, "classless" Republicanism he helped to promote, and yet they reject Trump's cryptofascism. If the Trumpeteers deserves respect, then so did, and still do, the petite bourgeoisie that hailed Germany's sterner stuff. Ignorance is no excuse, and it damn sure isn't deserving of respect.

What is Brooks's game? He's still wishes to keep the ignorant, the prejudiced, the easily duped under Republicanism's wing, which is what got Republicanism into the nightmarish mess it is in.

And then there's Mr. Krauthammer, whose symptomatic unfoldings and neurasthenic unraveling are a bit more complex. Indeed, today's column is, however brilliantly written, worryingly incoherent.

The scourge of Trumpism, he scribbles, has something to do with "both sides" (and that's a quote). There is "an air of menace" in today's politics, he frets; "It's being fueled on … one side through organized anti-free-speech agitation using Bolshevik tactics; the other side by verbal encouragement and threats of varying degrees of subtlety." The first side is a kind of collective, of course — "a totalitarian left that specializes in the intimidation and silencing of political opponents," whose "pedigree goes back to early-20th-century fascism and communism."

The second "side," however, Krauthammer promptly reduces, as does Brooks, to a singularity. What is this "second, quite separate form of thuggery threatening the 2016 campaign"? It's not any collective right; it is, quite specifically, "a leading candidate who … is stoking anger and encouraging violence" (my emphasis).

So while the left broadly "constitut[es] a serious threat to a civilized politics" in Krauthammer's fevered, paranoic break with reality, on the right he sees little but lonesome Donald Trump. By rights of consistent application, in Krauthammer's formulation there should be no threatening, at-large "left" — only the executive director of Moveon.org, the rabble-rousing bastard. This "intellectual" courtesy, though, is left unextended by Charles Krauthammer.

So that just about does it for today's lay-psychiatric wrap-up. Before I depart, I shall add only that George Will is, somewhere, off sucking his thumb with pursed, puckered lips and digging up irrefutable evidence that Donald Trump is all Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era's fault.