Totally not spying you guys. pic.twitter.com/IFed56PDRe

Sean Davis was not alone:

How embarrassing that the NYT used to call spying spying and will no longer ever be able to call spying spying, if they wish to remain consistent with their utterly ridiculous new standard that the use of wiretaps, overseas intelligence assets, other surveillance is not spying. pic.twitter.com/O4nwrHzbBM — Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 12, 2019

And the great Andrew McCarthy provided the proper literary reference for understanding the attitude of the FBI's counterintelligence operation where Peter Strzok worked:

"When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” Or: https://t.co/WCpxo4C3ik pic.twitter.com/McswETKOGd — Andy McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) April 12, 2019

Sane people and institutions would realize that feigning outrage over their enemies' use of a word they had themselves frequently employed for the same phenomenon would only damage their own credibility. Especially when their bête noire is fond of — and accomplished at — calling out their own hypocrisy.

Yet here we have leading Democrats, media, and even the former director of the FBI piously denouncing the use of the word "spying" by A.G. Barr to describe the undeniable use of electronic surveillance (AKA wiretapping) and even the attempted insertion of covert agents into the Trump campaign.

I don't think they imagine that the internet has developed amnesia. Nor have they developed amnesia about their own fondness for the term "spying" to describe domestic surveillance. In my view, the explanation lies in a compulsion, driven by clinical derangement, specifically Trump Derangement Syndrome, that short-circuited all rational consideration of the wisdom of this approach.

Their derangement is leading them to slit their own throats, and they don't even see it. They are making themselves objects of scorn.

We live in a remarkable time.