Well I never!

Everybody is guilty of treason, these days. John McCain for sure, if you read #MAGA Twitter. President Obama, too. I’m accused of it all the time. (My emails are a delight.) And now, according to a new news cycle, the Democrats, as designated by Trump.

From (induced gasp) CNN:

“They were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, ‘Treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not,” he said to laughter.

“Can we call that treason? Why not,” he added. He made the remarks during a speech at a manufacturing plant in Cincinnati, Ohio.

This, of course, is stupid. Stupid is as Trump does, after all. It’s wrong and bad and inappropriate even as a sort-of-kidding-but-not-really joke. And so of course, everyone is super mad about it.

But like Dan McLaughlin, formerly of RedState and currently of National Review (that TRAITOR!!), my memory extends back beyond a few months ago. So I notice when people and institutions and entire sides of the aisle suddenly suffer a bout of amnesia and are against things they used to be for, or condemn things they used to do. In fact, noticing that hypocrisy is one of the reasons I can’t stand most Trumpists, as they flip and flop as a matter of course. They are second place, though, to the liberals and Democrats, who never met a thing they love that they couldn’t be outraged about later.

For example, they used to love accusing people of treason and hating America, right up until they were “well I never”ing about it on Monday morning.

From treasonous Dan at NRO:

The idea that President Obama’s critics were unpatriotic, treasonous, terroristic, etc. for not wanting him to succeed was a perennial of liberal rhetoric from 2009-16. Over and over, conservatives and Republicans were accused of the very thing Trump is throwing around today: rooting against America out of a desire to see the president fail.

So true. He offers too many examples (click through to see), but I offer below just two.

March 2009:
On Tuesday, liberal talk radio host Stephanie Miller called Rush Limbaugh’s now well-publicized statement about wanting Barack Obama to fail “treasonous,” and wondered if he should be executed for saying such a thing. Miller made this rather provocative comment on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” and oddly nobody batted an eye or seemed at all put off by it.

June 2009, Paul Krugman on Republicans opposing a climate-change bill:
[A]s I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet…is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual? Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable…Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

Like I said, there are plenty more here. Yes, to include elected and even White House officials.

It should remind you, of course, about how Sarah Palin’s innocuous political map using mundane target clip art stupidly took the blame for the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords years ago. Or how talk radio, especially Glenn Beck, were blamed for other acts of violence over and over again. Yet no examination of nor “national conversation” about the rhetoric from the left toward Republicans and Donald Trump is ever undertaken or even suggested. That’s what this reminds me of.

Or the hypocrisy on accumulating debt. Or the flips and flops about whether people can benefit from extra money in their pockets. Or how you might brag about the stock market, and then brag that you never bragged about the stock market.

In any case, back to the treason. Everyone accuses everyone else of it all the time. See the replies to this tweet for some more inanity along those lines.

But even though all do it, selective outrage is both more blatant and more practiced on the left. The #MAGAs are relatively new at this. The liberals, by contrast, are old hands. Being hypocrites is kind of their thing.