Gaslighting

Let's reconsider Barack Obama's outrageous comment about the many significant scandals that have plagued his administration over the past year. It his latest content-free "pivot" speech on the economy, he lamented his opposition's relentless focus on wrong-doing:

But with this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop. (Applause.) This needs to stop.

Yeah, unethical and illegal behavior does tend to force folks to take their eye off the ball. And certainly, when an administration is corrupt in many of it undertakings, it's only natural that they and their leader would want it all to "stop."

But there's more to this. Obama, many democrats, and his legion of media lapdogs are engaged in a coordinated effort to delegitimize any effort to investigate the many cases of breathtakingly poor judgement or outright wrongdoing that have been laid at this administration's doorstep.

As a consequence of Barack Obama's use of the phrase "phony scandals," Bryan Preston writes:

Obama declared that the IRS targeting of his political critics no longer outrages him, just as the scandal crept up into the agency’s chief counsel’s office. It’s no longer an outrage, though we have not yet gotten to the bottom of it. It’s “phony,” as is Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the terrible rollout of Obamacare, the EPA’s war on coal and its secret collusion with activist groups in violation of the Clean Air Act. All of that is just so much phony distraction and posturing. The Obama administration spies on the media — phony scandal. No answers for the families of the dead of Benghazi — phony distraction. Not real. Body counts, leaving Americans behind to die — fake and fake. If the IRS scandal was real, well, the FBI would have interviewed the victims by now, wouldn’t it? It hasn’t, so the scandal is phony. You’re crazy for thinking that it’s real.

Barack Obama is gaslighting America. He is striving to make any focus on his real scandals appear nutty, out of bounds, insane, and illegitimate.

Wikipedia defines Gaslighting in the following way:

Gaslighting is a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity.[1] Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term "gaslighting" comes from the play Gas Light and its film adaptations. The term is now also used in clinical and research literature.

Indeed, Barack Obama and his supporters believe that if they act outraged enough, if they keep repeating the mantra that "there's no there, there," if they keep insisting that it's all political (which it is), but that their motivation occurs at a higher moral plane that is apolitical (which is absolutely NOT the case), we'll all just move on. As I've said before in this blog, Obama and his supporters might actually prevail. Gaslightling does a number of the victim (i.e., the majority of American citizens who want ethical leadership and apolitical government agencies), making a citizen "doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity."

Looking back on it, Obama and his supporters used gaslighting during the 2008 presidential campaign whenever odd relationships, questionable business dealings, curious personal associations, weak or suspect positions, made the Presidential candidate look bad. They expressed outrage, suggesting that it was all a GOP conspiracy, all ginned up out of the ether, all just nonsense. It wasn't, but that didn't matter—gaslighting worked. They're trying it again on a much bigger stage with more more significant consequences. We'll see what happens.

Update:

And this insightful comment from Peggy Noonan is right on target:

One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

This White House is careless with the reputation of government [e.g., the plunging reputation of the IRS or the NSA]. They are a campaigning organization, not a governing one.