OPINION:
In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, former President Barack Obama said, “I’m worried about the Republican Party. … I’d love a loyal opposition. I’d love a Republican Party that is conservative in some ways, that didn’t agree with me on a whole bunch of stuff but believed in [the] rule of law, judicial independence and empirical evidence and science. … There has been a Republican Party like that in the past, and I want to see that return.”
Thus, Mr. Obama once again proved to be the master of what Sigmund Freud called “psychological projection.”
Projection is the art of attributing your own negative qualities, thoughts and actions to others. In layman’s terms, it is the skill of the pot calling the kettle black, the tactic of accusing someone else of what you yourself are guilty of doing.
Projection is akin to looking out the window when you should be looking in the mirror. It is a manipulative tactic of blaming other people for your own sins. At its core, projection is the quintessential poster child of the self-serving lie.
Let’s take the former president’s above statement and dissect it point by point.
Mr. Obama suggests that it is Republicans who presently stand against the rule of law and that the Democrats represent the opposite. Is this true? Any honest reading of the news proves it is not.
Who can deny that it is the Democrats who have encouraged massive illegal immigration with all its compounding effects of welfare fraud, gang violence and general anarchy? Who can pretend that it is not the Democrats who have flooded the streets of Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles with illicit drugs, vagrancy and homeless encampments?
Who can deny that it is the Democrats who have fomented civil unrest and violence in our nation’s cities from coast to coast?
Does our former president honestly think we do not see the obvious: that it is he and other Democrats who have tacitly encouraged the burning and looting of businesses in Kenosha, Wisconsin, St. Louis and the District of Columbia? That it is his party that has campaigned to defund the police and stop paying for law enforcement in the very cities that his “useful idiots” are literally burning to the ground?
Yet Mr. Obama sits smugly commiserating with Mr. Colbert about the Republicans, who are supposedly at fault for the anarchy that the Democrats themselves inflame. This is Gaslighting 101.
Next, we have Mr. Obama’s claim that he wants an opposition party that believes in judicial independence. Really? If an independent judiciary is what you want, then why is your party now openly calling for upending the Supreme Court from its current configuration and replacing it with a packed court that will do your political bidding?
If judicial independence is your ideal, then why are you trying to throw the judicial branch of the American government into constitutional chaos simply because you do not like the rulings of the somewhat “conservative” opposition that you say you want and respect?
Does Mr. Obama think we do not see that he is guilty of advocating for the very judicial impropriety that he pretends to condemn? Some might call this throwing stones while sitting in a glass house. Some might call it a big lie. Some might call it textbook projection.
Then we have Mr. Obama’s pedantic preaching that he and his party are the ones who believe in science while Republicans don’t. Is there any truth to this?
Last I knew, it is the Democrats who keep telling us that they do not know what a woman is, and it is the Democrats who keep saying that boys are girls and girls are boys. Unless I missed the memo, it is the Democrats who keep saying that babies are not human beings and that executing them at their most innocent stage in life is somehow a moral good.
Mr. Obama keeps prattling on about “following the science” when he and his party show us time and again that they do not even believe in biology, genetics, the basics of physiology, or the ontological dignity of what it means to be human.
There was a time when Mr. Obama and many within his political party told us they were Christians and governed accordingly. If he and any of the rest of them still make such claims, then maybe they would do well to go back and read the book that their faith elevates above all others. Maybe they should start with these words from the Apostle Paul: “In passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.” (Romans 2:1)
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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