Peak Derangement

Every time I think we may have reached peak Trump Derangement Syndrome, the TDS crowd outdoes itself. The aftermath of the Helsinki Summit just gets more weird and hyperbolic by the day. It's as if the TDS crowd just learned that the Russkies (among many bad actors) use cyber-attacks against us. These political cyber-attacks are a concern,* no doubt, but if you were to listen to the TDS crowd, they and Donald Trump's reaction to them are a harbinger of armageddon.

David Harsanyi comments:

This week The Washington Post published an op-ed headlined: “It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust.” As with similar examples of this genre, it’s a sickening display of moral relativism that belittles the suffering and murder of millions in the service of some short-sighted and crass partisan fearmongering.

This week Politico published an opinion piece headlined: “Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor,” which demeaned the sacrifice of American soldiers by likening a military attack on American soil that brought us into the bloodiest war mankind has ever experienced to email phishing.

On MSNBC, where illiterate histrionic analogies litter coverage every day, a contributor compared Donald Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht, just to be safe.

Social media is teeming with similar hyperbole — “treason,” “traitor,” etc . — and not just from anonymous trolls. It’s difficult to accept anyone with a working brain actually believes this rhetoric, and they certainly don’t act like it. But if well-heeled pundits keep telling everyone The Fourth Reich is imminent before retiring to their townhouses in Capitol Hill every night, some people might actually start believing them. And if email phishing and hacking is truly comparable to Pearl Harbor or Kristallnacht or the Holocaust there’s really no reason why those accepting these analogies shouldn’t also support military reprisals abroad and coups at home.

This stuff brings back memories of a phrase that we often used in my youth as we wandered through the dingy streets of our lower middle class neighborhood in a hardscrabble city in Southern Connecticut. When we saw something that was off-the-rails or utterly outrageous, the general comment was, "This is some crazy sh#t!"

Indeed. The response of the DTS crowd keeps getting more unhinged, more shrill, and as Harsanyi notes, more dangerous. Their deranged drumbeat (albeit cynical political and moral posturing) might be taken literally by many on the hard Left and possibly by a few on the hard Right. If in actual fact, Donald Trump is complicit in a twisted combination of "Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht", the crazies may very well think that he must be stopped by any means necessary including extreme violence. That could spin out of control.

Yet the very same crowd of insipid moral posers who make statements about "treason" while at the same time arguing that the "fourth reich" is nigh, continue to live their lives as normal in their posh locales on the coasts. They party, they posture, and they hyperventilate. There's only one problem. Those same people didn't suggest that Pearl Harbor had occurred when in 2015-2016 Russian cyber attacks came to light and the past president did exactly nothing about them. They were silent.

Their silence then and their unhinged histrionics now lead to only one conclusion—"This is some crazy sh#t!"

FOOTNOTE:
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* It's indicative of the #Resistance and #NeverTrump distain for the electorate that they believe that an email hack and social media trolling were primary influences in the presidential election. After all, in their view voters are too stupid to look at a broader range of information sources. There is absolutely no evidence that Russian cyber-attacks, however nefarious, had any substantial influence on the vote. It's also indicative of the #Resistance and #NeverTrump crowd that they never seem to mention the real threats posed by Russians (and other bad actors). The real threats are cyber-warfare attacks on our electric grid, other core infrastructure, our communication technologies, and the healthcare system—you know, the things that actually matter in our everyday lives. I guess the TDS crowd is either too stupid or too deranged to see the forest for the trees. Besides, SJW "activists" are bored by stuff like infrastructure—doesn't have the emotional impact of say, the "holocaust."

UPDATE:
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In all of the hysteria surrounding the Helsinki Summit, there's the implication that if only Hillary Clinton had been elected, she and the Democrats would have handled Putin and the Russians with strength and focus.

Really?

The editors of the conservative New York Sun comment:

It is hard to imagine that the Democrats would have been less the appeaser of Russia than Mr. Trump is. Secretary Clinton failed at her own Russian reset. The Democrats shrank from arms sales to Ukraine. Crimea was lost on their watch. Arms sales to Ukraine were finally approved only under Mr. Trump. It was the Democrats who, in the Kerry-Lavrov “framework,” waved the Russ into Syria. It was on the Democrats’ watch that Russia attempted to subvert our election.

Inconvenient truths that simply don't fit the TDS narrative.