THAT PRESIDENTIAL REMARK – QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 10:31 A.M. ET:    We haven't commented about the president's allegedly obscene remarks this week about certain foreign countries, because we still don't know all the details.  If the president said it, shame on him. 

But shame on others, who seem gleeful over the president's blunder.  The fact that Mr. Trump's ill-advised statement can damage the United States means nothing to this crowd.  They care only about bringing down this president.  Consider these wise observations by Roger Kimball, at American Greatness: 

It is curious how close certain seemingly contrary emotions can be. Consider, to take just one example, the feelings of glee and outrage. At first blush, they seem very different. Glee occupies a positive register in the metabolism of human emotions. There is such thing as malicious glee, of course—the German word schadenfreude captures that perfectly. But by and large, I believe, glee is a sunny, allegro emotion.

Outrage, on the contrary, is a dour beast. It glowers. It fulminates. It glories in moral indignation, which it eagerly manufactures whenever it is in short supply.

And it is there, in the manufacture, affectation, the pretense, of moral indignation that that outrage shades in smarmy gleefulness. You can see this in operation right now, today, by the simple expedient of turning to CNN and watching commentator after commentator explode in gleeful outrage over Donald Trump’s alleged comments about the relative desirability of immigrants from countries like Norway, on the one hand, and countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and various apparently unnamed African countries on the other. (I say “alleged” not because I doubt the substance of the report, but simply because the president has disputed some details of the reporting.)

Two questions: Were all those commentators at CNN (and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other purveyors of sanctimony)—were they more delighted or unhappy about the president’s comment? Think carefully before answering.

Sometimes, the experience of outrage, and its accompanying moral indignation, is essentially a feeling of displeasure—at a wrong done or suffered, an injustice or cruelty observed, etc.

But sometimes, outrage is but a patina of indignation whose chief motive is incontinent delight. Which is it for the talking heads at CNN?

COMMENT:  Very well stated.  Some of these commentators are overjoyed.  They will hurt their country, but they will serve themselves.  And, after all, which is more important to them?

January 13, 2018