By definition, projection is revealing of what lurks in a person's heart and mind. Arianna Huffington projected tonight, and what she revealed wasn't pretty. So much so, that even her liberal host hastened to diassociate herself from the HuffPo editor. Huffington, grossly misquoting Grover Norquist's famous line about doing away with government, added an infanticidal twist.
Huffington was a guest on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show. The two shed crocodile tears about the diminished state of the Republican party. It was in suggesting that, of all things, she and Maddow should head up a Marshall Plan to save the GOP that Huffington engaged in that ugly bit of projection.
RACHEL MADDOW: When you think about the survival of the two-party system, and you think about the risks, even to people who don't consider themselves allied with the Republican party at all, the risks of the Republican party really being in the wilderness for a very long time, are you suggesting that there ought to be sort of a political Marshall Plan for the Republican party, that a defeated country is dangerous, and inhumane, and a defeated party is dangerous too?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes, and I think that you and I should co-chair it, because we are women, and we are therefore more compassionate than men. We should co-chair the salvalging of the Republican party, a Marshall Plan, on the grounds that we do need a two-party system. Otherwise we are going to leave it in the hands of Sarah Palin, who is waiting for God to open the door, or in the hands of Grover Norquist, who is the spiritual guru of the leave-us-alone coalition. Remember, that is the central philosophy of the Republican party. Grover Norquist also famously said we must drown government like a baby. So these people basically have no credibility anymore and yet they continue to be the ideological roots of the Republican party.
That was too much for Maddow, who clearly wanted to distance herself from Huffington.
MADDOW: He said he wanted to get government down to the size where he could drown it in the bathtub. Which made you imagine a baby. It made me imagine some sort of rogue squirrel that you trapped in the attic. That means that we're very different people.
Maddow rightly understood that being a very different person from Arianna Huffington is a very good thing.
