The self destructive left in the US

David Harsanyi:

In the 2004 comedy “Team America: World Police” a squad of terror-fighting marionettes lands in Paris to subdue a small group of terrorist infiltrators. To head off the presumed coming carnage, the Americans unleash an array of destructive weaponry without any regard for the civilian life or the city itself, destroying the Eiffel Tower and leaving central Paris a smoldering, hollowed-out war zone. “Bonjour, everyone!” one of the puppet warriors tells the surviving denizens, “Don’t worry, everything is bon. We stopped the terrorists!”

This scene, from this delightfully absurd movie, is the most fitting analogy I can think of to describe the Democrats’ efforts to save democracy from the presidency of Donald Trump. For over two years, resisting Trump has been a moral imperative, an all-consuming preoccupation, a zero-sum struggle that supersedes every constitutional and civic norm of American life. One Politico columnist compared the 2016 presidential election to Pearl Harbor, and countless others would warn of the coming Fourth Reich — because, as everyone knows, the Schutzstaffel were huge fans of religious freedom and capital gains tax cuts.

Sure, many in the media helped fuel Trump’s chances during the Republican primaries, handing him billions’ worth in air time and transparently soft coverage. The smirking confidence would dissipate into dread as Democrats grappled with the reality of Trump demolishing eight years of Democratic Party gains that had been built on executive fiat and little more.

There’s little doubt, as many commentators would warn, that Trump’s rise would forever transform the Republican Party. I argued the very same. Yet, in the end, no institution would be changed by Trump’s victory quite like the Democratic Party. From Day One of his administration, whether or not Trump was acting particularly Trumpy or merely advocating for conventional conservative policies such as tax cuts and border security, every response would be marked by hypermoralistic, hysterical, and apocalyptic rhetoric. Democrats would start conflating their anti-Trump policy preferences with the rule of law, with “democracy,” with decency, and with patriotism. Even more consequentially, they would usher in an unprecedented radicalizing of the Left.

Bonjour, everyone!

The first order of business, and liberals weren’t exactly tilling new ground here, was trying to delegitimize the president. Now, Democrats never really lose elections, do they? If it’s not gerrymandering, it’s “voter suppression”; if it’s not the faulty ballots, it’s the weather. This time, they went full scorched-earth.

During the final raucous presidential debate in October 2016, a defiant Trump warned he wouldn’t accept the results of the election if he felt it was “rigged” against him. Even hinting that elections could be manipulated, commentators had correctly noted, might erode public trust in the fairness and veracity of the system. The New York Times alleged that Trump had “cast doubt on American democracy” itself. Clinton snapped that she found it “horrifying” and “denigrating” to the system. Trump was “talking down our democracy.” An entire panic-stricken news cycle focused on the disarray America would fall into if the losing candidate wouldn’t accept the peaceful transfer of power.

The warnings weren’t wrong, exactly. But it turned out to be the Left who would make the case that the election had been manipulated. Many once-serious people convinced themselves that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s second-rate, flailing former superpower could hijack American democracy through hacked Democratic National Committee emails and a few hundred thousand dollars of social media ads.
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Most Democrats seem to buy into the hoax perpetrated by the Clinton campaign through its opposition research efforts that led Fusion GPS to hire Christopher Steele to dress up some third-hand hearsay and gossip into a phony intelligence report or dossier as he called it. 

The media especially bought into the hoax and desperately wanted it to be true despite any substantial corroboration.  They wanted to "protect" the Mueller investigation which turned into an extortion racket that used unrelated crimes and process crimes to try to get people associated with the Trump campaign to support the bogus Russian hoax theory of the election. 

Now that it is clear that it was a hoax, there has been little to no recriminations by the Democrats are their cohorts in the media.  Their Trump hatred seems to overwhelm their integrity.