Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Projection

Wow. Reading comments to posts over at the Volokh Conspiracy has really been enlightening since Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress have come into power. The level of projection on the part of conservatives posting there is absolutely amazing.

For instance, a good example is a claim made by one commenter that the left is all about ideological hiring because they can't compete on merit with job candidates from the right, but the right is all about hiring due to merit. Uh, yeah. That's why there are all those investigations going on about corrupt, illegal, ideologically-based hiring practices at the Bush Department of Justice where applicants were denied positions entirely based on their political views. Or how the personnel for the coalition transitional government in Iraq after the invasion were chosen not for their experience or skills but for the ideological leanings. (If you recall, applicants for positions doing things like restoring clean water to Baghdad were asked about how they felt about Roe v. Wade as a job qualification).

The comment was in response to a post about lawsuit being brought by an applicant to a law writing professorship at the University of Iowa. The applicant is claiming that she didn't get the position because of her political leanings -- she is a conservative and the interviewers were mostly liberals. The comments devolved, of course, into a whole screed about liberals controlling academia and keeping conservatives out and blah, blah, blah. As I have noted before, conservatives aren't well represented in academia for one simple reason: they don't become academics. If they want to be better represented in the halls of learning, more of them should become academics and fewer should sit around bitching about how liberals dominate academia. If difficult, crappy working conditions for poor pay and little prestige doesn't motivate conservatives, well, that's not the problem of the liberals who are willing to work under those conditions, now, is it? It isn't ideological discrimination that keeps conservatives out. It is self-selection.

But really. After the well-documented cronyism of the Bush regime, after Alberto Gonzales, the US Attorney firings, the attempt to put Harriet Myers on the Supreme Court, Mike Brown as head of FEMA, and other examples too numerous to count, conservatives actually have the nerve now to claim that the right is all about meritocracy and the left is about ideological purity? Methinks they doth protest too much! Lord!

There are lots of other examples of projection going on in the comments at Volokh, but you get the point. There really are these conservatives sitting around who think that Bush didn't really do anything wrong and even though liberals like myself can point out all the objectively-confirmed ways in which Bush fucked up and fucked us over, that it's really just "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and we really just hate him for no reason but to hate him. And this is how: they project and ignore reality. If those making these claims were to actually look at the facts, it would shatter their reality and they'd have to admit that conservatives have been the ones committing most of the sins they are decrying, not liberals, at least for the past eight years. So they close their eyes, forget about reality, and settle into their safe little cocoon not to come out until there's a new Republican President.

Jeesh.

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