The GOP’s Vorpal Blade of Cognitive Dissonance Goes Snicker-Snack!

Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:54 am

Each day we draw closer to Election Day, November 6, 2012, symptoms of right wing cognitive dissonance become more evident, reaching near-epidemic proportions. Having never recovered from the “fact” that Barack Obama should never have been elected in the first place, the near-certainty of his being re-elected has been too much for their tortured souls to bear.

But if Obama has been elected and re-elected, what is a self-righteous Republican extremist to do? Other than “joking” about killing him, of course. That’s always popular among the base.

It didn’t work to present him to the American people as an anti-colonialist Kenyan Muslim. It didn’t work to present him as a non-citizen and foreign usurper. The effort to remove him from the ballot fizzled out. Even voter suppression hasn’t proven equal to the task. What else is left?

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You can almost hear the gears creaking along their tortured path. If you can’t convince people to not vote for him; if you can’t force people to not vote for him; if you can’t physically restrain people from voting for him, there’s only one thing you can do:

Impeach him, of course!

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado takes a vorpal blade to reality in World Net Daily as he makes a tortured argument for impeaching President Obama for treason – over Benghazi, of all things.

Tancredo claims that, “The four American deaths in Benghazi are a direct result of decisions and actions by President Obama that undermine the national-security interests of the United States.”

He doesn’t mention the criminal defunding of embassy security by members of his own party in the House of Representatives. President Obama has already manned up (unlike President Bush) and taken responsibility for what happens on his watch.

It’s a shame Tancredo feels the need to act like a child. Puerile reasoning such as he demonstrates here clearly unqualified him for the highest office in the land – for which he ran in 2008. He didn’t even make it to governor of Colorado when he tried for that in the Tea Party’s Extremism 2010 Extravaganza. A conservative extremist had to work pretty hard to lose in 2010. But Tancredo managed to do it. Along with Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell.

Tancredo, who has the distinction of being one of 33 congressmen to vote against the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, writes that,

As we all know, Obama may be removed by a vote of the people Nov. 6. But if not, if the lapdog media succeed in hiding his malfeasance and incompetence well enough for Obama to win a narrow victory at the polls, then Congress may summon the courage to exercise its constitutional duty to impeach and remove him.

Wait a minute. President Bush is personal friends with the bin Laden family and allows a disastrous attack on the United States in 2001 planned by a member of that family, an attack we still have not completely recovered from; got us into two wars as a result, two wars we still have not paid for nor entirely extricated ourselves from, and he’s golden?

But four people get killed because Republicans in Congress cut funding for embassy security and Obama should be impeached?

No, that’s not just a vorpal blade Tancredo is wielding. I don’t think even Lewis Carroll could have imagined such a derangement of reality.

Tancredo claims that “Obama’s foreign-policy disasters have not been a major focus of the presidential race, and that is unfortunate.”

Maybe that’s because there haven’t been any foreign policy disasters to focus on. There have been many foreign policy victories, however.

The restoration of America’s international reputation after the disastrous Bush years stands out among them. Then there is the elimination of Osama bin Laden, who Bush was content to let run around killing people for eight years, along with most of al Qaeda’s top leadership; and oh, then there was the elimination of Libyan strongman Moammar Qaddafi.

There is a reason the rest of the world wants to see Obama re-elected. Not because of a disastrous foreign policy but because of a very successful foreign policy. Apparently, Tancredo sees failing to recklessly attack everyone in sight as some sort of failure. Go figure: Tancredo’s political career ended with Bush.

Yet Tancredo insists that “The grave national-security issues raised in the Benghazi fiasco cannot be easily or intelligently addressed in a 30-second television spot, but they are nonetheless critical to our future safety and well-being. Obama’s pro-Islamist policies are more than mere blips on the political radar screen.”

How killing Osama bin Laden is pro-Islamist is beyond me but then you all know about reality’s liberal bias.

If you’re wondering what he is implying, Tancredo is one of those who thinks Obama is in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood:

If radical Islam is a self-declared enemy of the United States, as can be easily demonstrated, Obama has certainly given them aid and comfort: Most Americans will think that welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House and appointing Muslim Brotherhood members to important posts does in fact constitute “aid and comfort.”

In other words, the usual Republican repudiation of our shared reality: “we say X is true despite all the evidence that Y is true, and because we say X is true, Obama must be guilty and therefore removed from office.”

You have to wonder how much foot-stomping goes on behind the scenes when these guys see the rest of us blithely ignoring their psychosis-driven fantasies. I mean, how dare we not share their delusions?

It brings to mind Glenn Beck’s repeated “Why aren’t they talking about this?” line. O Weepy, Weepy Glenn: it’s because it’s all in your own head, that’s why. The rest of us, as it happens, are sane.

Tancredo, like Beck, would have done better to keep his delusions to himself, but by making his appeal on the pages of WND he has at least found the right outlet for his mental illness:

Here is the brute fact of the matter. The attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist act. Obama’s foreign policies and decisions not only left the consulate vulnerable to attack but in fact invited the attack – and then he blamed an unknown American film for the attack and turned a blind eye on the al-Qaida allied terrorists who were responsible.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds more like a description of what happened to the WTC in 2001 than to the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi in 2012. Despite plenty of evidence that al Qaeda was planning an attack, Bush did nothing. Not four people died, but nearly 3,000. Obama has not turned a blind eye to al Qaeda for even one second of his presidency. it is not President Bush who killed bin Laden, but Obama. It is not Bush who eliminated al Qaeda’s top leadership, but Obama.

In other words, Tancredo’s “brute heart of the matter” is a fantasy.

But here is the most damning aspect Obama’s behavior. Obama is unwilling even today to name the enemy that has declared war on the United States and to deal forthrightly with that imminent threat. Our pro-Islamist president will not name Islamism, the Muslim Brotherhood and the government of Iran as enemies of the United States even though they have declared war on us and are engaged in numerous plots to bring death and destruction to the American homeland.

Why are we so reluctant to call this by its right name – treason?

The failure in Benghazi was more than a State Department failure to provide needed security for the embassy personnel in our Libyan outpost. That failure is bad enough, but it is only part of a larger betrayal. Additional security was denied to Benghazi consulate because doing so would have been an admission that eastern Libya was under the effective control of armed militias allied with al-Qaida. Making that admission would have undermined one of the pillars of Obama’s re-election.

Trancredo must avoid the news like it’s poison.  Who out there didn’t know eastern Libya is infested with armed militias? How does anyone remain willfully ignorant of such a well-known fact? But then, what Republican wants to become infected by reality?

And the State Department cannot provide what the House does not provide it – funding for improved security. If there was criminal behavior it was by Tancredo’s fellow conservatives in Congress. Let the witch-hunters there duly note these facts, unaplatable though they may be.

But just as Bush cannot possibly have allowed a terrorist attack on the U.S. on his watch, or have started a war in Iraq and another in Afghanistan, the House cannot possibly be responsible for the federal budget. The GOP has made a clean sweep in its war on reality, erasing not only what has happened in the past but erasing what is happening in the present as rapidly as it happens. Obama, the black man who slapped rich white folks in the face by becoming president, has to be to blame. Has to. He’s the only black guy on the block, after all.

Tancredo’s conclusion is this:

Thanks to a compliant media, the American people will not have those answers in time to make an informed choice on Tuesday. It will fall to the people’s representatives in Congress to find those answers. And when the full truth is known, Congress must consider removing Barack Obama for giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies – and that is treason against the United States.

Nothing like an appeal to McCarthyism to close an argument. It’s not like Republicans haven’t tried to fire up their fair share of witch hunts since 2010. What’s one more? Really, there is no substance to any of them. They are all, each and every one, a symptom of the cognitive dissonance that has driven the Republican narrative since 2008.

Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times this morning that “The election is a referendum on whether bigger government will be the new normal” but that is just anothr evasion of reality. What this election in fact is, is a referendum on whether or not fantasy, not reality, will be the new normal.

And bad as things have been, bad as things are now, it is difficult to imagine what things will be like for the faithful when Obama wins in 2012.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.