Maybe it all started with Donald Trump. Up to 2016, politics had an established rather traditional trajectory. Maybe that is because it had been controlled by the so-called “establishment” for decades.
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That changed on November 8, 2016 when a person who had “no path to the presidency” was elected President of the United States. By all contemporary measures, Trump should not have been elected. He was not even likely to win the Republican nomination. Most Americans did not want him as their President and an even larger number did not expect him to be their President. But he won. How crazy is that?
That campaign shattered all norms and resulted in the most serious attack on an entrenched Washington establishment – Democrat and Republican — since the Civil War. What gives Trump his strength today is not winning in 2016, but what he has done in terms of conservative governance. He has been a pleasant surprise for those who voted for him with apprehension.
The most obvious consequence of the 2016 election was the sudden rise of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It was a political malady that created the unprecedented #neverTrump Resistance Movement that coalesced Democrats, liberals, major news services and even some establishment-type Republicans into an obsessive and irrational … and crazy … army of obstructionist zombies.
For almost three years, Democrats attempted to prove that Russian meddling in the 2016 election was synonymous with Trump, members of his family and campaign staffers conspiring with Vladimir Putin – even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller completely debunked that accusation against the Trump folks.
Democrats then undertook the most partisan impeach process in American history – and the first without any underlying statutory crime. Even a lot of Democrats thought that was a crazy idea.
With all that history, I suppose one should not be surprised to see the 2020 presidential campaign go completely off the rails. Like the world on the other side of the looking glass, nothing seems to make sense anymore.
The frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination is a guy who Hillary Clinton says “nobody likes” – a guy who has served in Congress for 13 years without notable accomplishments other than the ability to get the voters in Vermont to keep re-electing him. Senator Bernie Sanders is a guy who has viciously railed against millionaires and billionaires even as he became one of them while in public service. In a recent debate, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that was crazy.
Should independent-socialist Sanders win the Democrat nomination, he will be the first in history to be the standard bearer of a political party he refuses to join when not running for President.
As an alternative to America’s opportunity society, Sanders proposes an impossible socialist model of governance – with trillions of dollars of supposed “freebies” — that should have prevented him from getting any political traction outside of Vermont. Instead of being relegated to the margins of political reality, Sanders is – at least for now – the Democrat frontrunner. Maybe there is a reason he is referred to as “Crazy Bernie.”
And guess who said that FOX News is fair and more balanced than MSNBC (besides me). None other than radical leftist Sanders.
Hitherto well-liked former Vice President Joe Biden – who, by experience, powerful friends and countless political chits, should be, and once was, the odds-on favorite – is fluttering and sputtering as he attempts to get off the ground. In early primaries, he has even fallen behind an obscure mayor of a small town in Indiana. The very idea that Buttigieg is leaping from the obscurity of South Bend to become a credible presidential candidate is more than crazy. It is just plain nuts.
The only person seemed to be in a position to threaten Sanders, is a hitherto Republican multibillionaire from New York City who has managed to crudely insult every interest group that composes the Democrat base.
Michael Bloomberg has proposed throwing young black males against the wall to be frisked for no other reason than they are young black males – who he claims commit all the crime, anyway. If you want to know who committed a crime in New York City, you just need to xerox “young black male” as the description of the suspect.
Bloomberg expressed his belief that the abolition of the highly racist policy of redlining was the reason for the housing crash that led to the so-called Great Recession of 2008. No one has seen redlining as a good thing since Democrats invented it in the early 20th Century.
It is hard to imagine that a candidate with a rather extensive record of treating women badly – resulting in a number of lawsuits ending in payoffs and non-disclosure agreements – would have traction among Democrat feminists post the #MeToo Movement. No, not Trump … Bloomberg. I suppose if feminists could rally around such sexual predators as President Clinton and the late Senator Ted Kennedy, they can forgive anything except being a Republican.
Should Bloomberg be successful, he would be the first Republican to carry the Democratic Party banner to the General Election. Democrats seem to be lacking a farm team these days. Maybe that is because the Big Apple mayor views farming as an occupation of the less intelligent. Bloomberg’s only advantage is that he is crazy rich.
Elsewhere, there is now a feud developing between two of the left’s wealthiest fat cats. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and uber left-winger George Soros. Seems like Soros is calling for Zuckerberg to step down – or be ousted – from the company he founded. Stepping down is extremely likely and being ousted is impossible. So, why the crazy feud?
If all that is not crazy enough, consider this. Pete Buttigieg – as the first openly gay candidate for President of the United States – is being excoriated on television by a Christian pastor for both the mayor’s gayness and his support of abortion. That may not come as a surprise but for the fact that the pastor is Rhyan Glezman, Buttigieg’s brother-in-law. That’s right, his brother-in-law. What particularly upset Glezman was Mayor Pete suggesting that you cannot support Trump and be a good Christian. Do we need to wonder who Glezman is supporting? Now THAT is crazy.
It is a crazy world when the defining issues are Klobuchar remembering the name of the Mexican president. Biden stuttering – if that is what it is. Bloomberg spending billions of dollars to make himself President of the United States. A male couple residing in the Oval Office. Proposing programs that cost more than the entire federal budget.
If it is true that those the gods would destroy, they first make crazy, the Democratic Party is in serious trouble – maybe even the entire nation. Maybe time to change the national motto from e pluribus unum to non compos mentis.
So, there ‘tis.