A malady no one wants to talk about

During the latter part of the 2012 Presidential campaign, President Obama several times noted that his Republican opponent seemed to be affected by a previously-unknown medical condition, characterized primarily by loss of memory concerning political positions that Mr. Romney had only recently endorsed. This condition, identified by President Obama as “Romnesia”, has affected other political candidates over the history of this country, although Mr. Romney did seem to have a particularly virulent strain of the disease.

However, President Obama, most likely in order not to offend those voters who do not feel that such conditions should be publicly discussed or even alluded to, did not mention a much more severe medical condition, which did not affect Mr. Romney, but did seem to be affecting a number of conservative political candidates and pundits. This malady is characterized on one hand by a complete denial of facts which one does not wish to acknowledge and, on the other by an absolute conviction that what one devoutly wishes to be true must therefore be true. This condition appears to have been responsible for a large number of Republican pollsters and officeholders convincing themselves that their own polling results absolutely must be correct, and that any evidence to the contrary from polls conducted by others must be the result of either seriously flawed methodology or outright dishonesty by those conducting those polls. This led, for example, to a number of political pundits on FAUX News making complete fools of themselves in the days leading up to the election, and even as the election results were being reported, even arguing with their own staff members that it could not possibly be true that President Obama was winning the election.

Donald Trump’s deranged, ranting tweets on election night suggested that he, too, was affected by this same unfortunate medical condition. The President chose not to discuss this situation in public, perhaps for the reason I suggested earlier, or perhaps for other reasons. I am also reluctant to mention this matter publicly. However, more recent events, in which some Republican members of Congress remarked that it would no big deal if the government of the United States were to default on its debt, when almost everyone else, including wealthy Republican campaign donors, realized that such a situation would be disastrous for the economy of the entire world, not just for the United States, leads me to conclude that someone must bring this matter out into the open, in the hope that this malady will not infect more individuals than it already has.

I confess that I have not had any medical training, and that I am used to referring to this condition in layperson’s terms, but I believe that the proper medical term for the condition to which I am referring is Rectocranial Inversion, or RI for short. Although it can certainly affect Democrats and Independents as well as Republicans and other conservatives, recent outbreaks of RI that I am aware of seem to have been concentrated mostly at the exteme right end of the political spectrum. One can only hope that a cure for this malady can be found before its victims manage to do irreparable damage.

Note: Since I am not the junior senator from Kentucky, I feel that I should acknowledge my sources when possible. In that regard I need to mention that I first became aware of the formal medical name of the condition I have mentioned here in an episode of the early 1990’s TV series Nurses.