Rhymes With Right

March 16, 2007

Liberals Use Of Stalinist Tactic Â– Political Opponents Are Mentally Ill

Michelle Cottle tries to argue that Vice President Cheney has been left insane by his cardiac disease in her article in the new New Republic. She fails to make her case Â– and her argument has been demolished by conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who has the advantage of being a trained psychiatrist with excellent credentials in the field. His response is priceless, and well-worth the read.

(a) Using a four-letter word in an exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy. Good God, by that standard, I should long ago have been committed and the entire borough of Brooklyn quarantined.
(b) "Shoot a man in the face and not bother to call your boss 'til the next day?" Another way of putting that is this: After a hunting accident, Cheney tried to get things in order before going public. Not the best decision, as I wrote at the time, but perfectly understandable. And if that is deranged, what do you say about a young Teddy Kennedy being far less forthcoming about something far more serious -- how he came to leave a dead woman at the bottom of a pond? I am passing no judgment. I am simply pointing out how surpassingly stupid it is to attribute such behavior to mental illness.
(c) Longtime associate Brent Scowcroft quoted as saying, "Dick Cheney I don't know anymore." Well. After Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney adopted a view about fighting jihadism, America's new existential enemy, that differed radically from the "realist" foreign policy approach that he had shared a decade earlier with Scowcroft. That's a psychiatric symptom? By that standard, Saul of Tarsus, Arthur Vandenberg, Irving Kristol, Ronald Reagan -- to pick at random from a thousand such cases of men undergoing a profound change of worldview -- are psychiatric cases. Indeed, by that standard, Andrew Sullivan is stark raving mad. (Okay, perhaps not the best of counterexamples.)

Krauthammer then goes back and points to other attempts by American liberals to smear conservatives as insane Â– when their real Â“pathologyÂ” was deviation from liberalism. And Krauthammer, based upon his actual professional training, is able to identify in Cottle a mental illness that seems all too common on the Left Â– Bush Derangement Syndrome, a condition marked by a pathological hatred of President Bush and members of his administration, coupled with a desire to destroy the elected government of the United States by any means necessary.

Posted by: Greg at 09:24 AM | Comments (154) | Add Comment
Post contains 421 words, total size 3 kb.

You must be forgetting the myriad campaigns waged by right-wing commentators to discredit and humiliate individuals by labeling them insane, crazy, etc. You surely must recall the concerted, organized talking point barrage directed at Al Gore a couple years back after some speeches he gave.

And when the right does it, Greg, it's not just some random person nobody gives a darn about. Who the heck knows or cares who Michelle Cotter is, let alone reads her work? When the Gore assault was launched, it was on radio, television, and in print -- folks like Rush, Hannity, and Coulter who reach millions upon millions of readers, listeners, and viewers daily.

Posted by: dan at Sat Mar 17 09:30:06 2007 (aPL79)

I can't find the hilarious-but-sad Daily Show montage of all the right-wingers calling Gore mentally ill, but there are a couple of examples here--- John Podhoretz and David Frum were among the many columnists who wrote seriously about Gore's insanity:

http://www.spinsanity.org/post.html?2004_05_30_archive.html

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