Terrifying

The progressive commentariat is all atwitter (no pun intended) reacting to Donald Trump's first organized, well-structured, and remarkably honest attack on Hillary Clinton. Here is a sample from Michelle Goldberg at Slate:

Donald Trump’s Wednesday morning speech about Hillary Clinton’s record is probably the most unnervingly effective one he has ever given. In a momentary display of discipline, he read from a teleprompter with virtually no ad-libbing, avoiding digs at Bill Clinton’s infidelity or conspiracy theories about Vince Foster’s suicide. Standing in a low-ceilinged conference room bedecked with square chandeliers in the Trump SoHo, a lawsuit-plagued hotel and condo development, Trump spoke for 40 minutes without saying anything overtly sexist. Instead, he aimed straight at Clinton’s most-serious weaknesses, describing her as a venal tool of the establishment. “Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs and effectively let China completely rebuild itself,” he said. “In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!” He added, “She gets rich making you poor,” and called her possibly “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

Of course, Goldberg, in true Clintonista fashion, labels most of Trump's comments as "lies" while suggesting that he is a deranged conspiracy theorist, but concludes with this: "it was terrifying to watch him succeed."

Heh. The reason it was "terrifying," Ms. Goldberg, is because a GOP candidate finally punched back—hard. The reason it was "terrifying" is that on balance, what Trump contends about Clinton is true. The reason it was "terrifying" is that Clinton is a target-rich environment. Her background is peppered with scandals, lies, self-serving politics, incompetence, personal enrichment that comes not from creating a private sector business, but from peddling influence by using her public positions. The reason it was "terrifying" is that even an uninterested observer will raise his or her eyebrow when told that Hillary Clinton went form "broke" (her own words) in 2000 to a net worth estimated at over $100 million in 2015. How did she accomplish that? Terrifying, indeed.

UPDATE:
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Virtually every article written by the progressive commentariat on Trump's speech makes much of his use of a teleprompter—as if that somehow negates the content. That's particularly rich in the sense that the commentariate's gold standard for political excellence, Barack Obama, has trouble stringing 10 or 12 coherent sentences together without a teleprompter. Progressives can't have it both ways, even though they always try to do so.