Damage

The Democrat's trained hamsters in the media want the public to remain focused on Donald Trump and his self-inflicted problems. Although the hamsters still talk Trump and more Trump (after all, he's the guy who improves rating), they have done their predictable pivot and now have adopted Hillary's latest meme—"trump in 'tempermentally' unfit to be president. Although that actually might be true, the BIG question (which is verboten among the hamsters) is whether Hillary's dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence make her characteristically unfit to be president.

I had to laugh when the hamsters breathlessly noted the historic moment associated with the first woman gaining the nomination of a major party. There was another contemporaneous historic moment—Hillary if the first person under active FBI investigation who gained the nomination of a major party. Oh well.

Daniel Henninger identifies the real winner in this circus—Bernie Sanders. He writes:

The real claim to Democratic Party history belongs to Bernie Sanders. Sen. Sanders has recentered the Democrats, once and for all, as a party of the political left. He has reimagined the Democrats—almost with the force of his personality—as a party of the state, of government and of redistribution. Period.

Barack Obama himself became a Bernista in his June 1 speech in Elkhart, Ind., when he essentially proposed delinking Social Security’s benefits from any known economic reality.

The party of Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson and its alliance with private-sector industrial unions made Democrats aware that their fortunes ultimately were joined to the success of the private sector.

The Democrats are now the party of Bernie Sanders, the progressive icon Sen. Elizabeth Warren and—make no mistake—of Barack Obama, a man of the left from day one. Rather than distrust the private sector, they disdain and even loathe it.

And therein lies the problem—left-wing ideologues like Sanders and Warren truly do "loath" the private sector. They despise profit, viewing it, I think, as some kind of social evil; they condemn wealth, considering it an affront to "social justice." They reject business, thinking it a soulless enterprise that focuses on success along with P&L as opposed to "saving the planet" or "changing the world."

They view their own country as an aggressor and elevate the "oppressed" (both inside this country and outside it) to a level where the "oppressed can do no wrong. They encourage a totalitarian form of governance where PC rules, and there can be no discussion that challenges their narrative.

Henninger expands on this:

The policies of John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, now in disrepute, ensured that annual economic growth remained at its postwar average of about 3%. Those Democrats understood the private sector, even if they distrusted it.

That understanding is gone, as proven by the seven-year Obama growth rate between zero and little more than 2%. If Hillary Clinton utters the phrase “corporate tax reform,” she will lose the election. The Sanders wing of the Obama coalition will walk away from her.

In the new Democratic Party, defined by the substance of Sen. Sanders’s campaign, the role of the private sector is to transmit revenue to the public purse. Private business has become an exotic abstraction, like the province of Cappadocia in the Roman empire.

As the Obama presidency made clear, this new relationship is not based on the tax code, which the new Democrats think of as a kind of dumb sump pump. The driver now is legal prosecution or the constant threat of it by government enforcement agencies—Justice, Labor, the NLRB, and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose originator was Elizabeth Warren.

The Democratic party has now become a party of left-wing true believers—people who reject history, reject facts, embrace fantasy prescriptions for "social justice," and reject those who suggest a more moderate approach.

Given this crazy election year, the truth believers might very well take hold of the reins of power. And if that happens, history will repeat itself as it did in Cuba, Venezuela, much of Central America to name only a few local neighbors. As they say, when reality collides with fantasy, reality wins every time. But as the collision occurs, there can be massive, unrecoverable damage—and that's not something I want for my children or grandchildren.

UPDATE:
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In an unintentionally amusing example of moral preening, Andrew Rosenthal, wrings his hands and proposes to tell us "Why Republicans Won't Renounce Donald Trump?" The fact is that many prominent Republicans have, in fact, renounced Trump's ill-advised statements and policy proposals seems to have escaped Rosenthal.

What's amusing is that Rosenthal doesn't address the question of why Democrats don't renounce Hillary Clinton's lies about email, Benghazi or a dozen other important issues, why they don't renounce the operation of the illicit money machine that is the Clinton Foundation, why they don't renounce the pay-for-play influence peddling that was part and parcel of Hillary's sojourn as Secretary of State, why the don't question the competence of the Secretary of State who presided over the Russian reset, the China pivot, the debacle in Libya, and the beginnings of the Iran "deal."

By the way. as bad as trumps words may have been, they are only words uttered when he was running for office, NOT while he was in office.. Hillary's dishonesty, corruption, and incompetence are all associates with her time IN office. There is a rather big difference, but who's keeping score?

In fact, I can't recall a single prominent Democrat (with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders) who has so much as questioned these issues. But don't bother Andrew Rosenthal with any of that—he's too busy with his lame attempt to convince us that GOP members are moral midgets while Dems are, by comparison, moral giants. Heh.