DEMS SURE SPEND A LOT OF TIME CALLING PEOPLE PHOBIC: Roger Simon: Are Republicans Crazy Xenophobes? Answering Fareed Zakaria. “Trump is a symptom, not the problem. And the problem is the cancer in Islam itself which people like Zakaria (and Obama) refuse to accept or even name, deflecting the issue to Trump’s pronouncements.”

My question: What have the xenos done for us lately? And maybe, with Obama’s election being an example of xenophilia, others are asking the same thing. An excerpt from my earlier post, during the now-prescient Giuliani flap:

Obama’s appeal in 2008 lay in no small part in xenophilia: We’re so open-minded, we’re not just electing a President with a Muslim-sounding name, we’re electing a President with the same name as our most recent wartime foe! It let people feel enlightened, and progressive.

But all those differences that seemed so appealing can quickly flip into grounds for suspicion, especially when the object is behaving suspiciously. After all, if — like me — you believe in evolution, you might think that xenophobia, as such a well-established human trait, must have had beneficial functions: Maybe the xenos couldn’t be trusted, or even expected, to have the polity’s best interests at heart. Maybe, when people start getting worried about the polity’s future, those novel characteristics that once seemed so appealing now seem threatening. So while there’s a general reason the establishment wants to take the patriotism question off the table — patriotism is unsophisticated, and so limiting — there’s also a specific reason, which is that it’s something Obama’s vulnerable on right now, and it’s something the establishment can’t afford to cast Obama loose on, for reasons internal to its coalition.

I think the fact that the Dems are doubling down on their latest phobia charge is related to this. Meanwhile, the one phobia they won’t talk about is oikophobia.