Daily Kos Week In Review: Conservatives On The Couch

May 12th, 2012 8:38 AM

Sigmund Freud's reputation isn't what it used to be, but his thinking still influences behavior such as the left's tendency to psychoanalyze the right. This past week, one Kossack speculated that the forced-haircut incident suggests Mitt Romney may have a serious personality disorder, and another informally diagnosed conservatives as "completely off their rockers" and "f---ing nuts."     

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

mel4444: Romney may be sociopathic...
 
...Romney also claims that he doesn't remember...To forget something like an assault and battery on a classmate is something that one might expect, well, from a sociopath...
 
Hunter: ...and the GOP is crazy...

 
...I think...that the election of the first black president sent a good portion of [Republicans] completely off their rockers, perhaps for reasons not even they themselves can parse out. When you look around you, after an economic collapse caused by greed and fraud and imaginary paperwork, and after all the bullying pseudo-patriotism of the Bush years, and after seeing all the simple, easy-to-understand charts that show how certain wealthy interests have made off better and better over the last years and decades, while everyone else, the whole of the rest of the country, has been doing worse...if you can look around at all that and see a march to socialism in all of it, than you are simply not a rational person. There is something wrong with you. You, dear conservative, are fucking nuts...
 
David Satterlee: ...not to mention mean...

...[T]he Republican party is structured for divisiveness and conflict rather than constructive citizenship...
 
This conservative disposition tends toward “Leave me alone, I’ll take care of myself and you take care of yourself,” or simply “fuck you”...The moderate liberal center, however, tends toward “we’re all in this together.” Oddly, while this conservative position pointedly rejects the interests of others, the liberal position embraces and empathizes with the interests of others including, ironically, conservatives...

T C Gibian: ...and desperate

After years of stealth promotion of their agenda, the Republicans are going for broke -- why now, and why with such intensity?...
 
...The theory presents itself that the current Republican ferocity at "right wing social engineering" is not motivated by the assurance of victory, but by the fear of total loss. Perhaps they sense that their time is ending, that their power is falling away, and that they are doomed, like a hooked fish flapping its last on a boat deck. What we are witnessing from the Republicans may not be a victorious rush from the trenches to smash all opposition, but rather a fanatical banzai charge which will result in their inevitable defeat...
 
Dartagnan: Lugar, beaten by hatred and ignorance
 
...[Lugar] was defeated in large part by the same coalition of billionaires and their ersatz shadow groups that have, through their race-tinged propaganda and manipulation of social issues, captured what miserably passes for the "imagination" of the Republican base, a base so deluded with white-hot hatred that they are long past even a dim awareness of what they're voting for. It's a base that has no interest in helping the conditions of American citizens in their current economic straits, and ultimately no interest in governing. It's a blind, flailing juggernaut of pure hatred and ignorance, a lobotomized snake striking dumbly and without sense everything that it confronts...

Hunter: Here comes the Republican gay-bashing

...[E]very good Republican presidential campaign needs a threatening, omnipresent villain to mount furious battle against. These are typically brown people, or "welfare queens," or people who don't like war enough, or when the Republicans are really hard up it's "flag burners"...This year it looks like Teh Gays are going to stand in for that existential threat to all that we know and love, since not hating gays sufficiently is now declaring "War on Marriage." Well, it was going to be them or the Occupy folks, I guess. It's not conservatism unless you're trying to condemn or oppress someone...