I sometimes think that some ideological partisans, particularly on the left, live in a fantasy world, or at least a different world from the one most people live in. They may not believe in a real devil, but they conjure a reality in which Lucifer roams the earth masquerading as a conservative Republican. Among his most malevolent machinations, in the minds of the crowd at the most liberal network on television, MSNBC, is the alleged conservative "war on women."
Apparently indifferent to the fact that at least as many insulting things have been said about women by the hosts of this very network than anything one can find anywhere else in mainstream media (don't take my word for it, just google the word "misogyny" plus "Keith Olbermann," "Ed Schultz," "Chris Matthews," or "Martin Bashir") the liberals at MSNBC are determined to convince the nation that if Republicans come to power, women will be confined to the attic and only allowed out when the house needs cleaning.
Now, despite having recently gotten themselves into hot water by laughing at Mitt Romney's biracial family, someone at MSNBC tweeted that conservatives will probably be offended by a television commercial for Cheerios that depicts...a biracial family.
This bit of cognitive dissonance has received so much pushback from biracial conservative families that MSNBC finally took down their ridiculous tweet. You might think that it'd occur to someone at the network to ask why they keep accusing conservatives of doing the very things they themselves have actually done and what that says about their intellectual integrity, but, no, they just march insouciantly onward ("leaning forward," they call it), convinced that conservatives are evil and need to be exposed, while apparently unaware of how foolish their hypocrisy makes them look.
A psychologist might speculate that they're engaging in a form of subliminal expiation. At some level, perhaps, the MSNBC folks are aware of their own vices and feel the need to disavow them, but they can't bring themselves to acknowledge that these egregious sins are really their own so they project them onto people who in many cases are completely innocent. It's sort of like the Old Testament practice of scapegoating.
Or maybe our imaginary psychologist might hypothesize that the folks at MSNBC suffer from a form of contempt born of jealousy. Perhaps the staff at MSNBC recognize, at some subconscious level, that those who are the objects of their mockery are actually more virtuous than they are themselves, and this recognition, bubbling up out of their id like a vague but unpleasant memory, they cannot bear. It leads them to strive to discredit their opponents by convincing their audience, and themselves, that their opponents are just as bigoted as they subconsciously know themselves to be but cannot admit to being.
Whatever the case it's a remarkable phenomenon that's unfolding at MSNBC, a kind of moral boomerang effect. So many of the indictments of alleged conservative sexism and racism hurled from this network apply a forteriori to themselves.
UPDATE: I just read that MSNBC has fired the tweeter and apologized to those offended by the tweet. That's appropriate, I suppose, but one wonders when the people who run the show there are going to stop and ask themselves what's wrong with the people they hire that they have to apologize about every other month or so for their behavior.
