Annihilation

As we prepare for the entry of 2019, it's worth noting that Democrats will take center stage. They will conduct interminable and rabid investigations of Donald Trump and his administration; they will oppose anything and everything that Trump does—no matter how much it would have aligned with Democrat principles had a Democrat president done it; they will anoint a contender for the 2020 presidential election—fighting among themselves to determine how far to take identify politics and intersectionality in their rush to identify the "most leftist" contender. Driven by what many have called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), they will do little to benefit the country, nothing to compromise with the GOP, and everything to regain the broad power that they and they alone believe is eternally theirs.

Jonathan Turley comments on all of this:

Washington has long been a stranger to principle other than the principle of self advancement. Yet, something new seems to be emerging across the country. Politicians have long felt the need to disguise raw political agendas in the pretense of principle. That pretense has disappeared.

In this age of rage, voters seem to have no patience, let alone need, for leaders speaking of abstract principles. They want immediate unequivocal action in supporting or opposing President Trump. For Democrats, that all consuming purpose has led to the abandonment of core unifying values, including many that first drew me to the Democratic Party. While they would vehemently deny it, Trump is remaking the party in his inverse image. This past month shows how far that transformation has gone.

The remaking of the Democratic Party was evident last week with the reaction to the decision to withdraw troops from Syria. There was a time when a sizable number of Democrats opposed undeclared wars and unending military campaigns. Now, they are appalled that Trump would not continue a war in one of the myriad countries with American troops engaged in combat operations.

The irony of this is inescapable, but driven by TDS, the Dems' reaction was also eminently predictable.

Turley, an law professor, goes on to examine the Democrat reaction to the intrusive and highly questionable investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016. He writes:

In supporting the investigation of Trump, Democrats have embraced expanding definitions of crimes like obstruction, conspiracy, and the like. Historically, Democrats have resisted such efforts to stretch the criminal code to criminalize broader and broader areas of conduct. During the Trump administration, Democrats sound like legal hawks in demanding criminal charges for conduct long treated as civil matters, such as campaign finance violations and foreign agent registration violations.

In pursuing Trump, Democrats have also adopted a type of “red scare” mindset. While Republicans long pumped up the Russian menace as a political Cold War narrative, Democrats are now adopting the same type of rhetoric over the Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 president election. Democrats for the past two years speak about how Russians “stole” the election or destroyed the legitimacy of the results, with little empirical data to support such irresponsible and unfounded claims.

While many of us support the Mueller investigation and the need for sanctions against Russia for its interference, Democrats now routinely refer to Russia as our “enemy” and accuse any people with alleged connections to Russians as “traitors.” Special counsel Robert Mueller may have more to reveal on Russian hacking, but there is little evidence that either the trolling operation or leaked emails of the Hillary Clinton campaign had a material impact on the 2016 presidential election.

But the Dems will not be swayed. Power is in the balance and their hatred of all things Trump may very well warp their actions and their political strategy. Turley uses an apt metaphor when he writes:

Democrats are now defined by Trump the way that antimatter is defined by matter, with each particle of matter corresponding to an antiparticle.

In physics, when anti-matter collides with matter, something called "annihilation" occurs. That's the path that the Dems have chosen—a collision that results in significant heat, but nothing else of substance.