Projecting

The Democrats are at it again.

Projection is an unconscious defense mechanism by which a person attributes to someone else unacknowledged ideas, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Or, as the Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health puts it,

It’s often called the “blaming” mechanism because in using it the person seeks to place the blame for personal inadequacies upon someone else.

It’s also a broader, more innocent thing: the attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others. Which is to say, in the latter case in particular, the assumption that everyone else is just like the one making the attribution.

Here’s Hillary Clinton, with that in mind.

Clinton said that laws requiring voters to show identification at polls were part of “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”

And

Clinton even made it personal, saying potential general election foes Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rick Perry were “deliberately trying to stop” minority voters from participating.

It takes a racist to manufacture a racism beef where there plainly is no racism involved (for the particular record, black voter turnout is the same or higher in those states with relatively stringent voter-ID laws than in those states without, and it’s the same or higher in those states with them than it was before those laws were enacted in those states). But then she’s a leader in the party of the racist KKK, she’s a leader in the party of racist Jim Crow, she’s a leader in the party of racist and sexist affirmative action.

She’s projecting.

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