Perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment of the whole sordid Trump/Russia affair was the one where the actual Attorney General of the United States actually said, out loud, in public, and in front of people, that the President of the United States had only tried to obstruct justice because, and that such conduct is excusable because, his feelings were hurt. He couldn’t do his job because the Democrats and the liberals and the Media™ were just being so meanie-meanie-halloweenie even though he never did anything wrong.
A snowflake as pure as the driven snow, indeed.
When I taught high-school English, I spent an inordinate amount of time, effort and energy cracking down on cheating and plagiarism, for which I had zero tolerance. Yet all I ever heard from other adults was that I should just ignore it and let it go; “It’s just what kids do,” they’d tell me. But the worst moment of all was when the principal of a school where I taught briefly, where academic dishonesty was especially rampant and problematic, put it to me this way, in these exact words: “You must have made the work too hard, so they had to cheat.”
I see a lot of this principal — a pathologically dishonest, corrupt, demented creature who made administrative decisions based on gossip and valued personal loyalty over everything else — in our President, and Barr’s excuse-making on the Drumpfenführer’s behalf sadly echoes the craven enabling of adolescent perfidy that I endured all those years ago. But this has become a recurring motif in American politics now, one that I’ve written about repeatedly as both a double standard and an insane premise: Our politics, our elections, our government, even our system of justice now, are all being driven in large part by one thing: the hurt feelings of Republicans and their cohort.
Barr, yesterday, is Exhibit A.
Exhibit B is the Cake Jesus case, a/k/a Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. I spent an inordinate amount of time writing about this case both before and after it was decided, so I’ll sum it up here: The Supreme Court of the United States excused a Denver-area baker’s refusal to produce a wedding cake for a same-sex couple in violation of the state’s anti-discrimination statute; not because he didn’t break the law (he did), and not because he had a legal or constitutional right to refuse service on the basis of his “religious” “beliefs” (he did not), but because one of the commissioners on the administrative board that decided his case hurt his feelings.
What basically happened was that the couple brought an administrative proceeding under the operative state civil-rights statute against the baker, who therein asserted his religious beliefs as a defense. As that is not a viable defense to a statutory violation, and he did break the law, he lost. However, one of the commissioners in rendering the decision essentially called it “despicable” to invoke religious beliefs as a defense to unlawful conduct, noting that religion has historically been invoked as an excuse or justification for violating the civil rights of others. These remarks, according to the SCOTUS, exhibited an improper bias against the baker’s religion requiring that the commission’s determination be set aside, i.e., that the baker’s violation of the law be excused.
Exhibit C, since at least three examples are needed to establish a pattern, is the Brett Kavanaugh pity party confirmation hearing, which I’ve also written about before:
Yesterday’s hearings, particularly Kavanaugh’s opening statement and Lindsey Graham’s grotesque, hypocritical, spittle-flecked tirade, made me cringe more than once. All I could think of throughout was that I was watching and listening to a gang of rich, powerful, white Christian men — the purveyors of an ideology and agenda that, by design, harms far more people than it helps — going about in pity for themselves. I’ve been listening to this for a decade now, these delusions of persecution, the constant whining and complaining and shouting and mewling that every criticism is an “attack,” every disagreement is “biased,” every unflattering word is a “smear,” and all of it is unjustified, sparking indignation and outrage (and not even an ounce of self-reflection).
There will never again come a day when Republicans and conservatives are not being picked on and victimized and persecuted for no reason at all by the nefarious forces of The Left and The Media and The Deep State and everyone else who refuses to recognize and honor them for their singular White Christian awesomeness. Not only do they have nothing else left to run on, they have told us that that’s what they’re running on. They’ve told us (and many others have told us) that that’s how they won in 2016, and that’s how they plan to continue winning.
And so it was; whatever Brett Kavanaugh did (or didn’t do) way back in 1983 (or any other time, for that matter), he should be confirmed anyway to a lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court, with the potential to decide the fate of millions, because those mean, nasty Democrats (and, let’s not forget, the Media™) hurt his feelings.
When Grand Nagus Drumpf unexpectedly won the presidency in 2016, and in response to the immediate analysis thereof, I called it the Jan Brady election, a massive collective national primal cry of Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!! Since then we keep hearing that he will likely win again in 2020, not because he’s terribly popular, successful, or even competent — but because the Democrats and the liberals and the Media™ are just so darned mean to him, and to other Republicans; they were mean to Brett Kavanaugh, they’re mean to people like Cake Jesus, and everyone’s sick of “political correctness” and MeToo and Black Lives Matter and “woke” men and “being told” to “check their privilege” because it’s all just so darned annoying.
I don’t doubt that Republican partisans will continue to vote Republican based on that, or to “own the libs” but I have a hard time believing that anyone else will vote Republican (or for Trump) purely out of pity for Trump’s, Kavanaugh’s, Cake Jesus’s, or anyone else in the Republican cohort’s hurt feelings. It’s one thing for Republicans and the conservative media to actually ask (or tell) voters to do that, and announce to the world that that’s what they expect to happen, but no one else should be buying it.
But the point I want to make today is less about running for office and winning elections by ginning up, demanding or expecting pity for hurt feelings stemming from the other side being mean, annoying and/or obnoxious, and more about excusing misconduct on that basis. That’s what Judge Kavanaugh, Cake Jesus and the Drumpfenführer all have in common, along with powerful ideological allies — the Senate, the SCOTUS, and the Attorney General, respectively — to enable them and elevate their hurt feelings over the rule of law.
Delusions of persecution are nothing new in politics, Republican politics in particular. But if William Barr really did just announce to the nation that a [Republican] President can obstruct justice if his feelings are hurt — just as the SCOTUS announced to the nation that a [conservative] “religious” merchant can get away with breaking the law if his feelings were hurt, and the Senate announced to the nation that a marginally-qualified [conservative] judge should be elevated to the highest court in the land because his feelings were hurt — then we have a much bigger problem.