Forever

As we leave one political convention and move toward a second, there's little to celebrate. On the one hand we have a candidate who could prove to be disruptive—but the question is whether his disruptiveness would lead to a good outcome or a bad one. On the other hand we have a candidate who will be anything but disruptive, providing us with a reprise of the eight awful years of the Obama presidency.

The mainstream media, after using Donald Trump to boost ratings during the primaries, has, as I predicted, allowed its left-wing bias to flower in the wake of Trump's acceptance speech. Trump has been dismissed as "angry" and "dark," [it's almost as if a memo with that narrative was sent to the media's trained hamsters]. 

Montage created by Mike Cernovich for Tweet

At some level,  there appears to be a combination of desperation and fear in the language. Deep down, the hamsters are worried about their candidate—a dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent politician, who just might loose to Trump. So they parse his every word, fact check his every claim and otherwise do with Trump what they will never do with Clinton—scrutinize him. They will be relentless, brutal even, but only with the GOP candidate, never with the Democrat. There is, of course, no surprise in any of this.

Early this afternoon, Hillary introduced her running mate, Tim Kaine, to a gathering in Florida. Her speech and Kane's were characterized as "powerful", "moving", and "on target" by the media hamsters who couldn't seem to remain subdued in the face of Clinton's wonderfulness.

But something else is going on as well. A Democrat president and his party, in power for 8 years, have done little to improve the country and less to improve the plight of the middle and lower classes. A few lowlights:

• The economy is sluggish at best, reflecting the weakest recovery in modern history;
• The vaunted promise of Obamacare has crashed and burned;
• Debt—now topping $19.4 trillion—has doubled while the Dems held the White House;
• Income inequality has increased under the rule of the Dems;
• Political correctness has morphed from a harmless attempt to enlighten people to a vicious policy that attacks free speech and borders on thought control
• Scandals have proliferated and the Dems, rather than investigate and correct the wrong-doing, have done everything possible to obfuscate or ignore it;
• Race relations are as bad as they were in the late 1960s with a new twist that targets cops;
• Islamist terror attacks have returned to our shores;
• Big government gets bigger and more intrusive, and
• Foreign policy is an absolute, unmitigated disaster on every front.

This assessment might be characterized as "angry" or "dark" in the eyes of the left-leaning mainstream media, but when used by the media elite, those are just synonyms for "honest."

Richard Fernandez comments:

Most of the time voters see elections as contests between two opposing statesmen. By contrast, statesmen is probably not the word the public would use to describe the candidates who are now shown not as they wish to be perceived, but the way they would prefer not to be seen. The collapse of the Narrative, the breakdown in party discipline and the general chaos of 2016 has basically thrown the choreography and costumes out the window. We see the contenders pretty much as they are. The sight is not necessarily pretty, but it's true. There's a saying that the truth shall make you free, but only after it makes you miserable.

If both Trump and Hillary are so nearly equally flawed, the logical implication is that the 2016 election cannot be the solution, but at best only the necessary prelude to a real one. In the same way the wrecking-ball precedes the construction of the actual building perhaps the role of this election is to destroy politics as usual to make way for something different.

The question of whether Hillary or Trump will create more favorable opportunities down the track is interesting one to consider. The argument for Hillary is that she is a known catastrophe; that one should vote for her because she is bad and electing her will bring bring on a crisis that would make genuine reform unavoidable. On the other hand voting for Trump runs the risk that that he might not be as bad as the press portrays him; in which case he might actually delay the crisis which Hillary will reliably precipitate, without being skilled enough to fix the current dilemmas.

As I mentioned in a recent post, "Trump is a risk. Hillary is a frightening certainty." Fernandez may very well be correct when he suggests that either candidate, when elected, would be a placeholder, running in place as the national political infrastructure implodes. Our current path is (to use a word loved by progressives) simply not sustainable.

We cannot again double the debt over the next eight years. We cannot continually add millions of additional people to those who are already dependent on Big Government. We cannot continue to centralize Big Government power and expect those who are removed from the two coasts to bend to its increasingly intrusive will. We cannot limp along with a GDP that hovers at 2 percent. We cannot raise taxes as economic activity sputters and expect to pay for additional big government entitlements (e.g., "free college"). We cannot mandate a $15.00 per hour minimum wage and expect that unskilled employees will not be replaced by automation. We cannot countenance open borders and expect to maintain a national identity, much less have resources available for our own downtrodden citizens. We cannot continue to dismiss Islamic terror as a regrettable nuisance and expect our way of life to roll along unaffected.

To paraphrase Glen Reynolds of Instapundit: 'Something that can't go on forever, won't.'

Donald Trump is difficult to read. It's hard to determine whether he would be an effective disruptive force or just an ineffective buffoon. Hillary wants the unsustainable legacy of Barack Obama to go on forever. She may very well become president, but in the end, she'll be nothing more than a placeholder until things implode.

I suppose that's "angry and "dark" as well. Too bad it's also the truth.