When Larry Hogan was elected as the next Governor of Maryland in November of 2014 I’ll confess that you could have knocked me over with a feather. If there was ever a place that wasn’t going to put a Republican in office in the era of the Social Justice Warrior, it should have been Maryland. Even so, nobody was really expecting him to sweep into office like an east coast version of Sam Brownback and start flipping over all the liberal tables. He ran about as far left as one can go in the GOP and presented himself as a moderate – truthfully argued as the only way you could hope to win office there.

Since then he hasn’t done much to tarnish his moderate credentials either. Maryland’s horrendous gun control laws remain in place, the taxes are sky high, gay marriage is the law of the land and Baltimore is still a de facto sanctuary city. He hasn’t made a move to change any of these things. And yet the Democrats seem to be peeling off their own skin in an effort to find some way to portray him as the devil. This was noted not by Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, but that right wing bastion of wingnuttery… the Washington Post Editorial Board?

Maryland Democrats have Hogan Derangement Syndrome

The latest eruption of the Democrats’ Hogan Derangement Syndrome occurred last week, when African American legislators accused him of racially motivated “assaults” on black communities. The so-called evidence included the governor’s decisions, last year, to kill a light-rail line, trim extra education funding and fund a new jail in Baltimore, while initially withholding funds for a new hospital in Prince George’s County. Both Baltimore City and Prince George’s are majority-black…

We didn’t support Mr. Hogan in his 2014 campaign. Nonetheless, what has been striking since he took office is neither his ideology (faint), nor his agenda (small-ball), nor his governing style (laid-back), nor his partisanship (run-of-the-mill) but the disproportionate attacks by Democrats on a governor whose record so far qualifies him as a moderate.

The Democrats in Maryland are off the leash at this point. When you have the editorial board of the WaPo calling you unhinged, you no longer can be said to even have hinges. They’ve begun attacking Hogan for policies which they officially supported as a party only four years ago, including channeling more money into the state pension system. (Pretty much the opposite of every other GOP governor in the nation.) They attacked him for funding expanded health plans to combat heroin addiction. And his cancellation of a useless light rail program was called “racist.”

Does any of this come as a surprise? When you have a GOP governor in a blue state, the Democrats take it as a call to arms, requiring the most fierce attacks imaginable rather than stopping to wonder why their own loyal residents suddenly decided to give the other party a try. We saw it with Chris Christie in New Jersey and most recently there has been a massive outbreak of Rick Snyder Derangement Syndrome in Michigan. When their water system turned out to be poisonous, the Democrats there immediately skipped over all of the local, municipal and federal agencies responsible for the lead poisoning and called for the resignation of the only Republican in sight. (This despite the fact that he didn’t find out about the lead problem until more than six months after the EPA and the state environmental quality office knew about it.)

Perhaps we should rename this disease Republican Governor Derangement Syndrome. There are enough cases of it going around to qualify as a full blown outbreak by now.