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Understanding Why Democrats Reserve Judgment

When someone has become conditioned to circling the wagons it becomes a tic, simply something they do without thinking.

So whatever happens, whatever a Democrat is accused of, the first thing that happens is to believe it to be just more Republican scandal mongering.

Only then, once the auto-defense has already kicked in, is the Pavlovian Democrat able to assess the seriousness of the charges; however, they do not as a rule do so on purely intellectual terms.

Rather there is a strong emotional component where the badness of the supposed misdeed must be weighed.

If something is not too bad, which it to say it is not so utterly terrible to disabuse them all at once, they are not kicked out of auto-defense so even if something is illegal, and they cannot deny it, it still remains something that they can subsequently justify, their intellect having been hijacked to serve protecting Democrats from assertions of wrongdoing.

Think of the emotional component of this process as a flywheel. When a scandal comes along the progressive "locks up", or enters auto-defense mode, but at the same time the flywheel is spun ...if it is spun fast enough ... IOW the seriousness is profound ... then and only then will the system jump out of auto-defense and permit the progressive to actually care or be scandalized.

Naturally how this proverbial flywheel is not free wheeling, but is damped and the damper, which resist spinning it is related to what the progressive can "get over" or has "gotten over" in the past.

And as THIS point we arrive at something I observed about the Clintons and Obama some year back: they have apparently been managing outrage with outrage, scandal with scandal.

Step back and consider how the above described progressive is different from a conservative.

The progressive 1) locks up in auto-protect mode reflexively and also 2) is holding our proverbial flywheel so that it does not spin freely. His thinking mechanism has been conditioned to resist believing and resist caring.

Your proverbial conservative, OTOH, has been conditioned differently, if they've been conditioned at all. At a minimum whatever their tendency may be to resist believing bad things about people in general their proverbial flywheel is free spinning. It often does not matter if the one accused is conservative or progressive, Republican or Democrat, Christian or not ... conservatives resistance to the idea that someone has done wrong is often independent of who they claim to be.

Which is to say: conservatives are not as a trend/rule biased against believing scandals situationally they way progressives in America tend to be.

... BUT, and this we must admit, some conservatives are prone to be spinning their proverbial flywheel "by hand" all the time.

Moreover, the perception that conservatives actually seem eager to believe scandals, and the more we "eat our own" the stronger that perception is, actually plays a role in how tightly progressives grip/restrain their own proverbial flywheel.

IMPORTANT: it really does seem to be the case that conservatives are conditioned to mainly care about wrongdoing in high places while progressives are conditioned to care about wrongdoers as well (they care about wrongdoing AND at least some of those accused of it).

Conservatives want as little wrong doing as possible while progressives want to ensure things don't go too far and that people, especially if not mainly people they care about being fellow travelers with them, are not wronged by mob justice or whatever.

This last may help explain why progressives will talk about "due process" as if the Constitution demanded it apply to the realm of public opinion and politics, with the predictable byproduct being that if there is no actual criminal conviction of a progressive involved in scandal they often build backwards from that to subsequently opine that no conviction is because it wasn't wrong to do or didn't happen in the first place.

I really don't think any system of thinking about how conservatives and progressives approach scandal differently will make sense unless you take this into account.

ASIDE: Now to this point we've been working on the idea that there's just one proverbial flywheel interacting with our gateway mechanism that governs if we believe bad things about people. Situationally a person can both resist charges of wrongdoing by some and expect it from others. This is a personal thing, unique to individuals and aside from mentioning it here, just for good form, it neither builds on or detracts from what I've been saying so far as I've been trying to address how conservatives and progressives in general deal with scandal or wrongdoing in high places.

So back to the idea of controlling scandal with scandal.

Recall how often things have leaked out about the Obama Administration, a steady stream of offenses and usurpations that has kept conservatives in a state of tizzy for so long? Not to mention allegation or outright wrongdoing and abuses of power by Democrats in general.

Suppose for a moment this was intentional.

Absurd you say? No one would want people to be perpetually upset with them? Well, no, they wouldn't because what would they have to gain ... unless they actually had something to gain!

Not to belabor the point but when you consider all I've already written can you not see that they would actually have something to gain?

A progressive is gripping their proverbial flywheel that helps govern how much they care and the more tightly they grip it the less likely they are to ever start caring. Just as a matter of human nature, how men can accommodate and excuse, when a progressive "gets over" something bad it makes it easier to likewise get over anything as bad, and maybe a bit worse. Over time then a progressive may go from caring about wrongdoing by Democrats, if the wrongdoing is actually serious, to being insensitive to any and all assertions of Democrats doing wrong.

People, you see, are not like proverbial front in frying pans ... frogs are too stupid to intellectualize their predicament and as a result they will jump out of the pan BEFORE they are broiled alive.

People can make excuses, they that construct teetering towers of supposition and justification or making excuses, and as a result we can stay right where we are until we are not just proverbially fried alive but even where we sometimes are actually injured or killed.

So getting over something only "so bad" today makes it easy to get over something a bit worse tomorrow, and a bit worse tomorrow, and a bit worse, and so on.

Ever since the day of Hillary's brilliant "vast right-wing conspiracy" blow off I would contend that there has been an awareness among Democrats that the only thing that matters to them about a scandal is if their supporters can get over it and continue being their supporters.

From there to observing how Republicans, or at least those who will never be their supporters, caring about their wrongdoing actually makes it easier for progressives to keep their wagons circled is a mere observation away.

Just a moment of clarity.

And from there to the point that realizing they can actually manipulate their base to ensure that they never turn against them no matter what they do ... is just them being crooks and corrupt.

All of these this had time to fester during W's Administration and I will maintain that they have been a feature of the Obama Administration since day one, and of DNC politics in general ever since this point was reached.

Ultimately then we conservatives are "deplorable" because we can still care about anything that might keep Democrats out of office. We are not their supporters and that's what matters.

But there's more: these manipulations that I will maintain have been intentional also still affect us. Republicans have always, Reagan's rule to not attack Republicans notwithstanding, been willing to "eat our own".

And actually that's not necessarily a bad thing. Being upset with all that Obama and Hillary have done does not mean we aren't upset when Republicans actually do wrong, not the way that many Democrats are still upset about Watergate but can't seem to care about Pay for Play.

But it seems these days that some Republicans, especially those who are not conservatives, are spinning their flywheel based on if someone is in or out, if they are the proper-we or some barely-we category.

This is especially the case as Republicans value getting along with Democrats so that they "go along to get along".

This doesn't necessarily mean they don't care about Democrat wrongdoing and scandals but that they can get to a point that they care MORE that Republicans are the right sort of people as they define them.

People are people are people ... and they are all over the place. To understand that is a form of political wisdom.

To defend your own no matter what is clearly wrong even though it is pretty much how Democrats do business these days.

The reverse: to tear each other apart because some might be afraid to even be around bad people may seem pious ... but it is not wise.

Even the still mortal blood bought saints are STILL described as "sheep" and anyone who has ever seen the north end of a south bound sheep can understand why that matters. The Republican part IS NOT the perfected saints in Heaven by even the remotest measure and we shoot ourselves in the feet when and if we start to act as if we should be. We can still care about wrongdoing and be scandalized by abuses of power without being in the habit of eating our own just because they are not a Saint.

Or, put another way, there's a difference between being willing to turn on those who do wrong in office and turning on each other because those folks aren't our sort of people. Contrary to where DNC rhetoric tries to lead us, and where it DOES lead its supporters, you don't have to be a bigot (or whathaveyou) to vote for the same guy a some bigot happens to vote for.

We are not "deplorables" even if there are bad people somewhere in the crowd ... and it's time we started acting like it and tell these DNC types with their heads shoved up their cans so far they are blind to Democrats doing not just bad things but criminal things to "shove off!"