THE ASSHOLIFICATION OF ASSHOLES.

There's already been enough conservative blubbering over the shutdown-shutdown -- as well as declarations of Good News for (People Who Want to Murder) John McCain -- that I could fill up my Voice columns with it for the rest of the year. But there's something particularly weird about Daniel Henninger's sobfest in the Wall Street Journal, in which he accuses Obama of "Romneyizing the Republicans." At first I thought he meant Obama deviously finagled Romney onto the 2012 GOP ticket, the way Deep Throat suggested Nixon did to the Democrats with McGovern in 1972. No such luck:

As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda...

Barack Obama is Romneyizing the Republicans. He's doing to Ted Cruz and the House Republicans what he did to Mitt Romney and the 1%. It may be voter brainwashing, but in the expanded media age in which we all marinate, it works.

Though he uses words like "brainwashing" and "propaganda," Henninger doesn't tell us what things Obama said about Ted Cruz and the House Republicans that were untrue -- and in any event they have been no worse than what Republicans have been saying about Ted Cruz themselves. Henninger complains the way a murderer may complain that the cop has put the cuffs on too tight:

Everyone recalls the 2012 campaign's carpet bombing of "the wealthiest," even after they'd been shelled with a tax increase. Barack Obama has found—actually, it was handed to him—a scapegoat analogous to "the wealthiest" and "the banks" for his campaign to suppress votes for GOP candidates in the 2014 elections. It's "tea party Republicans."

As "'the wealthiest'" (by whom I guess Henninger means the wealthiest) do not attract my sympathy even when they have been "shelled" by a six percent tax increase, and as the "tea party Republicans" were "handed to him" by the fucking Republicans themselves, I am left with the impression that Henninger is mad because the President has fought back against his political enemies, which is considered unsporting in a Democrat.

There's actually one way Henninger's proper-name-to-verb usage makes sense: In the sense of Vietnamization, the process by which Nixon was supposed to transfer responsibility for the war from the Americans who'd been fighting it on their behalf to the ARVN. Conservatives are used to talking about the Tea Party and its affiliated nutcake causes as if they were natural patriotic reactions to the tyrannical reign of the Kenyan Pretender. Phony scandals, birtherism, noisy buffoons in Colonial Williamsburg costumes -- these were all described as natural phenomena. But like the AVRN, they have been kept afloat by the largesse of wealthy patrons. Maybe by "Romneyization" Henninger is signaling that these people have been cut loose by The Movement, and must sink or swim on their own. Wingnut welfare never runs out, of course, but it may be better invested in the future.

UPDATE. Fixed misrendered acronym -- thanks, readers, for letting me know.