John L. Perry
Thursday, Aug. 26, 2004

In the study of mental illness is a definable aberration known as “projection.” Sigmund Freud said that’s when a patient, threatened by or afraid of his own darker impulses, resorts to attaching those unacceptable qualities to someone else.

One description in the psychiatric literature puts it this way: “Projection reinforces guilt by displacing it onto someone else, attacking it there and denying its presence in one’s self – an attempt to shift responsibility to others.”

Politics of the Mental Ward

Sensing himself losing instead of winning, the Democrats’ presidential candidate has adopted this defense mechanism as the recurring tactic of his campaign. It works like this:

The Kerry camp resorts to outrageous personal attacks against George W. Bush – demeaning him as a witless dunce, branding him a deserter from military service, depicting him as an illegitimate president, pillorying him as a reckless gunslinger, accusing him of moral cowardice and offering him up to history’s judgment as a latter-day Adolf Hitler guilty of atrocious war crimes.

Nor have those lies been confined to the usual whispers of gutter politics; they have been shouted from the rooftops through the global megaphones of multi-millions of dollars of television ads and an ersatz movie “documentary.”

Hollywood Loonies Acting Out

Even as Kerry stands by smiling and applauding, empty celebrity after valueless celebrity has gone nasty on the public stage to parrot those themes.

Then, quick as a flash and prepared in advance, the moment Bush or anyone in his campaign dares refute any of those lies, Kerry and his surrogates are all over a slavish television accusing the president of attacking him with “fear” and “smear” and “slime.”

Kerry accuses the president of “misleading the American people, hiding behind front groups, saying anything and doing anything,” when in truth Kerry, himself, is guilty many times over of just exactly that.

Kerry Through the Looking Glass

Kerry then has the audacity to ascend the platform once trod by Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union in New York City and intone: “My duty is to be a president who tells the truth.”

In the next breath, he manages to project his projection defense mechanism into the future, a feat that would surely have impressed Freud. Kerry forecasts that the Republican National Convention will consist of four days of “slogans and personal attacks.”

And what was the Democratic National Convention but a feast of hatred for the president of the United States?

Ricochet Mud-Slinging

Discover an immense wart on your own nose and tell the world it’s growing on your opponent’s.

Prof. Freud, if that isn’t a clinical case of psychiatric projection, what is?

The temptation here is to trot out example after example of how Kerry commits a blatant dishonesty or utters a gross calumny about Bush, then immediately blames Bush for doing what he, himself, has just done.

But, in what has become a campaign way of life for Kerry, the man reels them off faster than you can receive them, embalm them, lay them out and give them a proper eulogy.

Keep Him Under Observation

Instead, as this campaign unfolds, simply bear in mind Freud’s defense mechanism for the mentally ill and note how often Kerry employs the subterfuge of projection – blaming Bush for having his own worst qualities and impulses.

Joseph Goebbels, who turned the sick behavior of projection into a political art form for the Nazi Third Reich, accompanied it by repeating the Big Lie over and over until it came to be accepted simply because of its incessant recurrence.