“Some people should be beaten regularly, like gongs”—Noel Coward

Case in point, the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro. In a piece this week, he condemns Obama encouraging people to seek treatment for mental illness despite the stigma that comes with it.
According to Munro that’s the kind of disgusting nanny-state wimpiness that saps American vitality—real Americans just snap themselves out of it! “Americans have typically responded to stress and sadness by urging stoicism, hard work, marriage, prayer and personal initiative, and by stigmatizing unemployment and passivity.”
And besides, it’s not like depression is a real disease: “professionals have broadened the definition from severe, distinct and rare ailments, such as schizophrenia and compulsive behavior, to include a much wider set of personal troubles. Those broader problems include stress and sadness, which are medically dubbed ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’ by professionals.” Oh, and he seems to think reducing the stigma of mental illness is just another scam for psychiatry to get more tax dollars.
No. As LGM observes, sadness is not depression. Depression is depression, and it’s a horrible thing (I’ve known people with it, and I’ve been sad and the difference is obvious). More belittling of the odious Munro from The Atlantic.
LGM also catches a new argument against immigration: All those people coming here fleeing socialist tyranny will turn the country into a socialist tyranny! It seems to be a recycling of the “poor people are greedy and vote themselves benefits!” argument (because the poor are eeeevil).
I was also amused the author is shocked and horrified that welfare to immigrants might actually sap the Baby Boomers’ Social Security and Medicare payments when they’ve worked so hard to earn them. Any time a conservative announces concern for saving Social Security I automatically assume a con (unfairly, but I’m not usually wrong).
Oh, and here’s a reminder the GOP’s current candidate for Virginia attorney general once proposed a bill that would require any woman who suffered a miscarriage to contact the police within 24 hours or face up to a year in jail
And then there’s a conservative group that in the name of parents’ rights, allegedly defends abusers.
And last but not least, we have a Brit who thinks women who wear pants are deliberately showing hostility to men. Why? Because men want women to look a certain way, ergo women who refuse to be attractive must be man-haters!
Moving on … In light of yesterday’s post, here’s one by Alex Pareene on college Republicans struggling to find a way to rebrand the GOP. He comments at the end that as long as the GOP is stuck with its die-hard old bitter white male vote it has no way to broaden its coalition (some day that will change, but it’ll take a while) so we’re stuck with the policies I find so unacceptable.
I suspect one reason GOP politicians keep openly saying that they want to prevent college students and liberals from voting is that some of the base don’t go “That’s unconstitutional,” they’re thinking “Yeah, he has my back!” (I do not have objective evidence of this, though).