There wasn’t much of use to take away from that Psychology 101 course I took all those years ago. (The main lesson I took away from it was not to take Psychology 201.) But learning about the defense mechanism of projection was instructive. Using this we can know what leftists are thinking and doing by paying attention to what they’re accusing conservatives of thinking and doing. It appears to be related to cognitive dissonance, where folks can believe contradictory things at one time. For example, believing at once that being careful with classified material is really important and that it isn’t.

Today I received a pure example of the Democrats’ accusing President Trump of doing a little of what their most recent presidential candidate did a lot of. In a fund-raising email from Florida Democratic U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (don’t ask — I’ve no idea how I got on his email list) we get this breathless revelation: “Just this week we discovered that President Trump passed classified information to Russian officials, which, if true, is a serious breach of national security that could have lasting and dangerous consequences for our country.”

Yes. You spotted it right away. Nelson is the same guy whose presidential candidate in November was one Hillary Clinton, who in her years as Secretary of State treated classified material so carelessly she may as well have put state secrets in the Kremlin suggestion box. (Any third class petty officer who treated classified material in the morning as cavalierly as Mz Hillary did would find himself in the brig before lunch.)

I don’t know if this is an example of projection and/or cognitive dissonance. (So much of psychology is just making up names for things that don’t really need names.) But it’s certainly pathetic.