One of the most frustrating things about Republicans these days is their shameless hypocrisy, which is often rooted in projection. Their concocted criticisms of Democrats are almost always versions of things that they have done in the past, or know they will do in the future if they are in power.
No one does shameless hypocrisy better than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After adopting a strategy of total obstruction during the first six years of Obama’s presidency, he has been the one accusing Democrats of being the obstructionists lately. A few weeks ago, when he thought that Democrats were dragging out the process for approving presidential nominees, McConnell actually said, “this is new, and it needs to stop…This systematic obstruction is unfair to our duly elected president.”
How devoid of a conscience do you need to be in order to deny a sitting president a hearing on his Supreme Court nominee and then turn around less than three years later and suggest that Democrats dragging their feet is something new that is “unfair to our duly elected president?” You’d have to be a sociopath to avoid hearing that as anything but mind-boggling.
My favorite example of Republican hypocrisy is evangelical Christians who, in order to justify their support for a serial liar and adulterer, claim that God is in control and uses imperfect humans to enact his agenda. I can only assume that God took a break from being in control during the Obama presidency, because he was demonized by many of these same people on a daily basis.
That brings us to a remarkable compilation by NowThis demonstrating the unique brand of hypocrisy practiced by the propaganda network known as Fox News.
What if Fox News covered Trump the way it covered Obama? It would look like this pic.twitter.com/dLfhHToieL
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 16, 2019
I hope you can take a couple of minutes to watch that because, as with most art forms, to explain it is to rob it of its punch. Those clips hit home because we all witnessed how Fox News pivoted 180 degrees during the transition from Obama’s presidency to Trump’s. The hypocrisy couldn’t be more blatant.
The truth is that this kind of hypocrisy is just another form of propaganda that we should add to the list. To the extent that our minds are boggled, that is probably the point. As a Twitter user with the handle Darth Putin wrote: “We don’t do propaganda so you believe something. We do it so you believe nothing. And more importantly, do nothing.”
