How Obama’s Election Drove the GOP Insane

It is not hard to find hard-core criticism floating through the air like pollen regarding our nation’s first African American president. Some of which is deserved, most of which is not and is simply, colloquially speaking, hating. The overwhelming corpus of which comes from Republicans on the far and middle right.

This is more than obvious — so obvious, in fact, that many on the right have manifested behaviors reflective of the tenets espoused by Freud when he discussed defense mechanisms.

From extreme projection (in which a person lacks consciousness of their own thoughts and ascribes those unconscious thoughts to others), to denial (refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening), everything this segment of the political spectrum says is targeted towards Obama. Now some would say it is politics as usual, but I disagree with that assertion.

Recently, right-wing radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham stated that first lady Michelle Obama's Whitehouse garden was a "left-wing plot."

Glenn Beck, in a similar vein, speaking about the outfit the first lady wore to her visit to the Gulf, described it as an "outrage."

It is difficult to empirically understand such comments since they have nothing to do with the real political issues at hand. It can simply be reduced to behavioral neuroses that are rooted in America's steep tradition of racial vilification, which traditionally manifests in personal attacks and demonization.

The reality is that the GOP is out of ideas, and rather than thinking about solving the nation's problems, would rather stoke over-the-top paranoia, which if history is any indication, often results in violence. Just ask anyone who had dogs released on them, water from a fire hose sprayed on them, or anyone with a family member hung from a tree or dragged from a truck.

Insanity is a serious and debilitating condition that disrupts one's capacity to function within the legal limits of society, which results in both a deranged mind and (too) many times, a tragic outcome.