Why is this man smiling? Maybe it's the "hysterical delusional affirmation."
Jim DeMint, once senator and now Heritage Action head honcho,
promises in a
Wall Street Journal op-ed that "we won't back down on Obamacare." Why? Because the guy who deals with data at Heritage Action published a report saying everyone's premiums are going up under Obamacare and it costs too much and someday single payer and because someday "most Americans are consigned to poor care through the exchanges and Medicaid."
Elections? Terrible approval ratings? Bah!
Forget the consultants, the pundits and the pollsters; good policy is good politics. If the Republicans had not fought on ObamaCare, the compromise would have been over the budget sequester. Instead, they have retained the sequester and for the past three months ObamaCare and its failings have been front and center in the national debate. Its disastrous launch was spotlighted by our defund struggle, not overshadowed, as some contend. With a revived and engaged electorate, ObamaCare will now be the issue for the next few years.
Yes! That's why the shutdown was so successful: spotlighting the lauch of Obamacare! Priceless. Now we could spend a lot of time debunking all of DeMint's assertions. It's easy to do, because it's been done sooooo many times before. Instead, let's look at maybe why DeMint, and so many of his friends, are so convinced that they can get rid of this law. Charlie Cook took a stab at trying to understand why these folks seemed so divorced from reality. He
had to get professional help to understand.
I consulted a psychiatrist and a psychologist on this question. Both said there is no formal term for the behavior some Republicans are exhibiting, but one described the groupthink as “hysterical delusional affirmation,” and the other named it “delusional synergy.” One said, “It entails suspension of logical intellectual processes with a selective consideration of only confirmatory input. Paranoid people typically experience ideas of influence and control where they believe that they see things that others cannot. This process is often propelled by delusions of grandeur, quite often messianic in nature.”
"Hysterical delusional affirmation" sounds pretty spot on. They're definitely hysterical (in
all of its definitions!) and pretty damned delusional, too. And does "delusions of grandeur, quite often messianic in nature," sound like any junior senator from Texas we might know? Thought so.