Paranoia Strikes Deep in Obama's America
By Robin of Berkeley
I usually don't go anywhere near my leftist hubby's reading material. While he subscribes to Mother Jones and Newsweek, I buy National Review. His emails are from moveon.org; mine from Newt Gingrich.
However, after being home for three days with a bad cold, I was desperate to read something new. So I reluctantly picked up one of his Harpers.
I was pleasantly surprised that the magazine carried an article, The Mendacity of Hope, critiquing Obama's first year. The author, Roger D. Hodge, even confronts Obama on the hypocrisy of eliminating water boarding yet supporting torture in the form of overseas renditions.
But Hodge still maintains that Obama is heads above Bush, McCain, and Palin. And he goes into attack mode with this sentence about Obama:
"Nor is it surprising that the broken remnants of the old White Supremacy coalition hate and fear the man. . ."
Now, this got me thinking: who exactly comprises this White Supremacy coalition? Even though I've immersed myself in conservatism for the last two years, I haven't seen hide nor hair of it.
So I dug deeper: Is Sen. Strom Thurmond up to his old tricks? (No, he's dead.) Is Sen. Robert Byrd reviving the old Ku Klux Klan? (Impossible; Byrd is a saintly Democrat.)
Is the Republican Party at the forefront of this white conspiracy? (Couldn't be; it's headed by a black man, Michael Steele.)
There's a word for people like Hodge who believe something that just isn't so: paranoid. And from where I sit, liberals are getting more paranoid by the minute.
To get technical for a moment, there are several kinds of paranoia. The most extreme form is a schizophrenic with bizarre delusions and hallucinations.
Another type is a paranoid personality. They're not psychotic, but they are suspicious, hypersensitive grudge holders who are quick to anger and slow to forgive.
Lastly, there's delusional disorder: a person has fixed beliefs that are not bizarre. In other words, the events could be happening, like a cheating spouse, but they are not.
To illustrate, if you know an edgy, mistrustful guy named Dave who has a persecution complex, that's a paranoid personality. But if Dave says that aliens are torturing him, he may be a schizophrenic.
Now, if Dave is a decent enough guy, but turns into a rabid beast upon hearing the words "tea party" or "Sarah Palin," he's got a fixed delusion.
One of the greatest threats we're facing is this: there are a lot of paranoid/delusional people running the show. Pelosi tars health care opponents as Nazis. Charles Schumer calls average Americans "tea baggers." Obama insinuates that a white police sergeant is a stupid racist. With each vicious utterance, Democrats foster a paranoid atmosphere.
Branding opponents as Nazis and racists is disgraceful, beyond the pale. It's also a dangerous practice since mass hysteria can prove deadly.
In 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, for instance, hysterical, deluded villagers burned "witches." Or take a more recent example: American tourists have been beaten and killed in Guatemala after rumors spread that foreigners were stealing babies and selling their organs.
Whether it's Salem or Guatemala or Germany circa l930, stoking paranoia is like pouring gasoline on a fire. The Left-infested Democrats know this; they're throwing around the R word (racist) because an agitated, divided, and paranoid citizenry is as pliable as putty.
But the problem goes deeper than simply politics. There are many at the helm who believe the hate they're spewing. Because the Left is by its very nature a paranoid movement. What binds people together is a collective rage against certain groups of people.
Little Barry grew up imbibing the progressive, paranoid Kool-Aid of his Communist leaning family. The grown-up Barack now lives in a black and white world, inhabited by good guys (the left) and bad (any and all opposition).
In Obama's brain, his father's womanizing and boozing wasn't due to low moral standards; white supremacy was to blame. His grandmother was "a typical white person," not someone who had personal failings.
Obama married Michelle, a woman who sees everything through the lens of race. Rather than feeling honored to attend Princeton, she regarded the place as a hotbed of racism. Some of her speeches, pre-First Lady, reek of loathing for America.
Obama chose as his pastor the delusional Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who accused the government of creating the AIDS virus. And Obama best buds? Terrorists such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Shady men behind the curtain -- Soros, the strange Czars; the creepy bosses at Media Matters, Tides Foundation, and Acorn.
The mainstream media promulgates the hysteria. A recent cover of the Atlantic bellows that Christians caused the 2008 stock market crash. Newsweek implicates every white baby as a potential racist. And Harpers hallucinates some sort of White Supremacy coalition.
It's no wonder, then, that average liberals have become deluded, given that they're fed lies over and over. The MSM portrays Obama as a really nice, brainy guy, simply doing his best.
Liberals identify with him; they root for him. Deprived of the truth about why conservatives actually fear and dislike Obama, liberals scream, "Racists!"
Curiously, racism has now been elevated to the greatest evil known to humankind. (While racism is abhorrent, aren't there any other actions that should be widely condemned, like looting the economy, "wilding" conservative women, and "queering" youth?) Thus, when liberals spot an evildoer, they, like our Salem forefathers, respond with blind rage.
Ironically, Obama promised a colorblind, post-racial era. But has there ever been an administration so obsessed with race -- and so paranoid?
This government makes Richard Nixon look as trusting as Mary Poppins. While Tricky Dick had his enemies list, it didn't comprise most of the American people.
So what's the solution? Is there a way to snap liberals out of their mass delusion?
I'm afraid not. Delusions are notoriously resistant to treatment without the full arsenal of psychiatric drugs.
The next best thing: Vote, attend tea parties, and stay connected and informed. Elect as many conservatives as possible.
And, one more thing: watch your back. Because, as the unmarried women of Salem learned hundreds of years ago, paranoia stoked by the powerful can be a dangerous thing.
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