Screaming at the Mirror

Mirror mirror, on the wall. 
Who's the most hypocritical of them all? 
 
Remember the good old days when the progressive left refused to respond to a problem by projecting their own misconduct on others? Yeah, me neither. It’s been a time-honored tradition going back several decades. Looking through the archives, I actually covered this topic in a 2012 column in which I wrote: 

Throughout his remarkable career, Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly been asked a variation on the question of how he handles the slings and arrows from the liberal community and his answer always intrigued me.  He would, he said, remind himself that they were simply projecting their worst traits onto him, i.e., if they accused him of being an angry, bitter person, they were very likely describing themselves.  His response had about it a rhetorical symmetry that made it automatically appealing, …an eye for an eye, a psychosis for a psychosis, that sort of thing.  But lately I’ve been giving the response a closer look.

Why, for example, in the wake of the horrific Tuscon shootings in 2011, would President Obama implore us to, “pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that — that heals, not in a way that wounds,” and then stand by passively a few  months later while Jimmy Hoffa announces a “war on workers,” and exhorts his audience to, “…take these sons of b**ches out…” in reference to the Tea Party?  The obvious answer, of course, is that Barack Obama would sooner denounce his own pancreas than denounce a union boss.  But there is something else at work here.

What would that something else be? Why, for example, would Jane Fonda use the occasion of receiving the Life Achievement Award from the Screen Actor’s Guild to warn in thinly veiled tones of the coming onslaught against humanity by the Trump administration? Showing empathy, she said, “is not weak or woke,” adding that “woke just means you give a damn about other people.” You know, like when Joe Biden’s DOJ labeled parents who were concerned about sexually explicit material being given to young children in school as “Domestic Terrorists” or when Joe Biden’s FBI infiltrated various parishes around the country to protect against traditional Catholics.
 
 By chance, does anyone recall a bejeweled and sequined Ms. Fonda imploring the nation on the need to "give a damn" about 400,000 unaccompanied alien children (UAC) that Biden's DHS literally left to the tender mercies of human smugglers and sex traffickers? A Florida grand jury concluded in March 2023 that federal agents responsible for UACs were, in fact:

 ...facilitating the forced migration, sale, and abuse of foreign children, and some of our fellow Florida residents are (in some cases unwittingly) funding and incentivizing it primarily for economic reasons. These entities encourage UAC to undertake and/or be subject to a harrowing trek to our border, ultimately abandoning significant numbers of those who survive the journey to an uncertain fate with persons who are largely unvetted. This process exposes children to horrifying health conditions, constant criminal threat, labor and sex trafficking, robbery, rape, and other experiences not done justice by mere words.

 It seems that concerns of that order have mysteriously escaped the heartfelt pain and dread of Ms. Fonda, who now warns ominously of the coming hardships to be endured by "A whole lot of people [who] are going to be hurt by what's happening and what's coming our way." She continued, "We are going to need a big tent to resist what's coming at us." Who knew that pairing down a leviathan government that spends a colossal $6.9 trillion of your money annually and runs a $36.2 trillion debt, paying hundreds of thousands of unelected, faceless bureaucrats to issue millions of regulations covering nearly every aspect of your life while taxing you to death for it all would present such an existential threat? 

Then we have Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) on ABC's "This Week," expressing his increasing fear that President Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth are "attempting to politicize the military" by firing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General C.Q. Brown and Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti, among others “These men and women were superb professionals. They were committed to their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States," Reed said while neglecting to mention that when General Brown was Air Force Chief of Staff, he signed a rather infamous memo establishing "Diversity & Inclusion Goals" which broke down to a tenth of a percentage point the expected composition of the Air Force office corps by race and sex. 

A career in the Air Force taught me that when a four-star establishes a "goal" and says it is "aspirational," said "goal" is right up there with the "Thou Shalt" clause in the Ten Commandments and anyone who is "aspiring" for a promotion will immediately get with the program. When that same memo contains the phrase, "It is imperative," well, Stevie Wonder could see the intent. Never mind that the racial slicing and dicing of the officer corps revealed General Brown's assumption that the Air Force had 5,400 too many white officers, a problem which would ostensibly be rectified by racial "goals." 

Did this division of the troops by ethnicity and sex raise Sen. Reed's concern about the politicization of the military? When Critical Race Theory instruction at West Point included a slide that stated: “Do you think Affirmative Action creates an environment for ‘reverse discrimination?' Use CRT to support your answer,” did Sen. Reed's politicization radar sound an alert? Did the time required for troops to undergo "gender-affirming care" and the accompanying requirements for hormone therapy, etc, present a challenge to military readiness? Did the Biden administration or Senator Reed even ask the question?  

It helps to remember that with every malicious slander, every unfounded accusation, every vicious sneer directed at you, progressives are actually revealing themselves.  As I wrote over a decade ago: 

[W]hen the authors of this narrative accuse you of bitterly clinging to your faith and your God-given rights, it’s because they bitterly cling to their faith in omnipotent government. When they accuse you of racism, it’s because they are either unable or unwilling to break free of the chains of a twisted perspective in which everything is seen in a racial context. When they accuse you of being greedy for trying to provide for you and your family, it’s because they are the greedy ones, lusting after the property and liberty of others and the power they imagine will be theirs. When they accuse you of being a threat to society because you insist on having access to the weaponry required to protect yourself and your family, it’s because they view you as a threat to a utopia in which the government prefers to arm drug cartels over law-abiding citizens. When they accuse of you of trying to impose your morals on others, it’s because they desire to impose theirs on you whether through forcing you to subsidize the sex habits of others, or forcing you to purchase whatever product or service suits the egalitarian impulse of the moment.