Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) wrote in an op-ed at World Net Daily yesterday that the GOP suffers from Stockholm syndrome. They must, he says, because they haven’t stopped President Obama on immigration.
Yes, this is the same Tom Tancredo who lost the Colorado gubernatorial primary this year and so might be feeling some sour grapes; and the same Tom Tancredo who in another classic sour-grapes moment, launched a “Stop Christie Pac” to keep New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie out of the White House, saying,
“I very well might have started a PAC designed to stop Republican RINOS, but Christie helped me put a face on it.”
Tancredo has always worn his extremism on his sleeve, and if he hates RINOS, he hates black presidents more. As I wrote here in May, if there is one thing Tom Tancredo knows about the Negro, it is that they should not be president. Look how the poor GOP has suffered for it, afflicted with Stockholm syndrome!
Tancredo writes,
Millions of Americans who voted against President Obama’s policies on Nov. 4 are no doubt puzzled by the Republican Party’s cowardice in responding to attacks on the Constitution by Obama. It appears the Republicans are again afflicted by a peculiar species of political disorientation, the Stockholm Syndrome.
Let’s leave aside for the moment fantasies of “attacks on the Constitution.” Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, as Wikipedia tells us,
is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.
Wait a second…empathy and sympathy for Barack Obama…from the House? From Republicans?
Tancredo insists,
The Stockholm Syndrome in this case is a natural byproduct of Republican Party’s imprisonment for six long years in the Barack Obama-Harry Reid Fun House, where no Republican proposal ever enjoyed a floor debate or a roll call vote. Although they now do have majority control of both houses of Congress, they have forgotten how to legislate. The mere threat of an Obama veto, like the threat of a Harry Reid temper tantrum, is enough to send Republicans back to the drawing boards in search of a more “bipartisan solution.”
One, I don’t think Tancredo understands what Stockholm syndrome is. Two, Tancredo and I are remembering the last six years very differently.
Tancredo remembers the “good old days”:
In 1994, Republicans in the House of Representatives got tired of living in the shadow of perpetual irrelevance. They created and then campaigned on the “Contract with America,” a series of pledges on specific policy issues. Running against the cynicism and conventional wisdom of the day, they won 26 new seats in the House and became the House majority for the first time in 40 years.
He claims that “What Republicans need now is not a new “contract” but a new backbone. He warns Republican leaders of the “impotence” of their “‘words not deeds” strategy.
“Words not deeds.” Tancredo thinks that six years of non-stop obstructionism, six years of opposing every word Obama has uttered and every action he has taken, in the process defunding everything they could defund, is evidence of a lack of backbone?
Republicans even shut down the U.S. government, for crying out loud, at a cost of billions of dollars. To the dismay of their own governors, they are threatening to do it again.
They spent billions investigating “scandals” they themselves had invented, and billions more voting again and again to repeal Obamacare even though they had no realistic chance of doing so.
Impotent yes. Because they’re ideologically blinkered idiots. Not because they identify with their “captor” Obama.
And “repudiated”? (And keep in mind this is the party that thought they had a mandate when Obama won in 2008 and again in 2012). How is it then that every liberal initiative on the ballots in November (raising the minimum wage) were passed by voters, while every conservative initiative (cell personhood) was defeated? That doesn’t sound like any sort of a Republican mandate to me.
And if you look at the polls, what the people want jibes much more closely to what Obama is offering, than to what Republicans say they intend to do. If Republicans are assuming the midterms give them some sort of mandate – that might be part of the problem.
But let’s look at Tancredo’s “solution”:
Instead of yelling “Cowards!” at this group of impotent leaders, we need to find a more constructive way to awaken them from their hypnotic trance. And, of course, they all have citizens back home in their states and districts who might be so upset by this spectacle they could be inspired to administer either a healing bromide or a swift kick in the behind. As the old saying goes, if they can’t see the light, maybe they can feel the heat.
Fortunately, there is a path out of this maze, a compass that every elected official has been given and has sworn to follow. Each member of Congress has a compass called the U.S. Constitution. Each takes an oath of office to defend and protect that Constitution. Today that Constitution is under direct assault by the president of the United States, and the only question – I repeat, the only question – is whether members of Congress will fulfill their oaths to defend and protect that Constitution.
Face-palm moments such as this have defined the GOP’s past six years. First, Republicans would have to prove Obama violated the Constitution. They haven’t done that because they can’t do that. They can’t do that because Obama would have to first violate the Constitution, and he hasn’t done that.
It isn’t Stockholm syndrome Republicans are suffering from, but cognitive dissonance.
Tancredo has been saying for a while now, “He should have been impeached many times.” He just can’t ever explain why. The best he could do back in May, according to the Colorado Statesman, was all those invented scandals:
Tancredo ticked off several potential charges, including the so-called Fast and Furious scandal, the White House’s reaction to an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and Obama’s use of executive orders to enact policy.
And even this was just more of what Tancredo had been spewing two years before.
You might remember when, leading up to Election Day 2012, how cognitive dissonance-inflicted Tancredo took a vorpal blade to reality in World Net Daily as he made a tortured argument for impeaching President Obama for treason – over Benghazi, of all things. Which the world now knows, of course, thanks to the Republicans’ own report – as Tancredo knew then – was much ado about nothing.
Reality is still crap to Republicans and Obama is still the enemy in Tancredo’s eyes. He always will be, because he is a black man living in a White House. And by living there, Obama is “destroying the America that I love.”
The America Tancredo loves doesn’t exist, and has never existed. It is, in fact, forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. But Tancredo wants us all to join him on his crazy train to nowhere.
Without realizing he is talking about himself, Tancredo cautions that, “There is precious little time remaining to free them [Republicans in Congress] from their illusions.”
He is right about that. But the illusion is that America wants what they want. America doesn’t, and Republicans will get slapped in the face again by reality on Election Day 2016.
Only cognitive dissonance will keep Republicans from feeling it.
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