A lot of hay has been made over the Republican field this year, due not in the least to the blubbering authoritarian half-wit who’s commanded so much of the primary electorate so far. A lot of people, under the impression that it sounds smart, have pronounced that Donald Trump is “what the Republican Party deserves;” Stephen King claimed that Trump is the logical end-result of “the dragon’s teeth of partisan politics” (which is kind of funny, since a few days ago King implied that Republican primary voters are racist by default; talk about partisanship!). There is some truth to the idea that Trump is a consequence of Republican incompetence and duplicity—the GOP has perfected the art of capitulating to much of liberalism’s demands, and a lot of voters have figured this out—but you get the idea that that’s not quite the criticism liberals want to effect. And then there is also the bizarre idea that Trump is not a reaction against conservatism but rather conservatism itself. The Left is mostly only aware of the Right as a fantastical caricature of what it really is, and in a sphere of self-imposed ignorance it is easy to convince oneself that Donald Trump is some kind of ur-conservative distillation of the conservative electorate.
(With that last part in mind, it’s fun to ask liberals: who would you rather see in the Oval Office, Trump or Cruz? Invariably the answer is: Trump. Why? “Because Cruz is a real conservative with actual principles.” Oh, that.)
But whatever the state of the Republican race, it can’t hold a candle to that of the Democrats. The dismal conditions of the Democratic primary have been lost in the functional insanity of Donald Trump’s meteoric rise to the top of the polls. But it might be worth stepping back for a bit during the GOP primaries and surveying what the Democrats have to offer: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
Sanders, of course, is a batty septuagenerian socialist who once posited that women get cervical cancer because they don’t have enough orgasms; he also once wrote a bizarre, creepy political treatise in which a woman fantasized about being gang-raped and a man fantasized about abusing women (imagine the hysterics if a Republican had written such things!). He has proposed literally trillions of dollars in tax hikes, much of which is based on the politics of envy but which would also take almost 10% more from the middle class. He also expends a surprisingly amount of energy targeting and attacking American citizens. Really, Bernie Sanders is more of a Democratic emblem than Donald Trump is a Republican one: Trump is just for Trump, but Bernie wants to take your money, pit you against your fellow citizens and believes climate change is our greatest national security threat. Donald Trump might be the future of the 2016 election, but Bernie Sanders is almost certainly the future of the Democratic electorate.
But Sanders is virtually guaranteed to lose the primary this year, which means Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President of the United States this year. I can imagine few greater plausible political embarrassments than nominating Hillary Clinton to be a party’s candidate for president. Ignore her tenure as Secretary of State; surely she’ll do her best to ignore it, and most likely her electorate won’t care that much at all (aside from the families of the Benghazi dead, anyway). Ignore, also, the grating onslaught of identity politics that is sure to come our way—not just during the campaign, but also if she wins the election and faces a recalcitrant Congress—the accusations of “sexism” and “anti-woman rhetoric” and “fear of a female leader.” Ignore the fact that virtually her entire political relevance is based on her cynical and calculative marriage to a serial adulterer and abuser of women, that she implores us to “believe” accusations of sexual assault even as there are credible and repeated accusations that she once bullied a victim of her husband’s into keeping quiet.
Ignore all of that and just focus on the most relevant political fact of Hillary Rodham Clinton: it is essentially incontestable fact at this point that she is a felon, a pathological lawbreaker who has been lying about her lawbreaking ever since it first became apparent.
Continue reading Daniel Payne…
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