Whither Democrats?

Farewell to the Party of False Decorum

(Originally published on Medium - February 5th, 2020)

The past week has been almost impossibly bad for Democrats and their partisans. With the Republican president still not clear of impeachment, one would expect the Democrats to be gathering the force of the proverbial ‘blue wave’ just as the primary season begins in earnest and we barrel toward Tuesday, November 3rd, the day that marks the beginning of the end of the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

This is the story we’ve been told. This is the narrative. This is what would have the ‘hashtag resistance’ achieving final form as the weight of their pure goodness simply washes the country clean of all its animosity and division, the battered husk of the orange villain being carried out to sea among the cigarette butts and prescription pain pills rushing through our sewer lines in a toxic tide.

How can it not be so? We were told there would be cake!

For anyone who’s still unclear on just how thoroughly incompetent the Democratic Party is, this week is the culmination of the last (nearly) five years of collapse in microcosm. Let’s break it down, shall we?

This is probably the time that I, like everyone who tries to so much as express less anger about the state of things in the presence of a hashtagger, must clarify that I am not, in any sense, a Trump supporter or part of ‘the MAGA crowd’. I have said elsewhere that I do not intend to vote for him unless the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders. I have argued this at long length, so if you want to know why, go here. None of this will be satisfactory for those whose only reaction to information that doesn’t reinforce their preconceived notions about reality, not to mention their sense of self, consists of declaring the source of that information corrupt or a tool of the enemy. The inability of hashtaggers to interact in a sane way with the outside world remains confounding. For four years I’ve been trying to convince these people to behave rationally. It rarely works. The apparatus of the news media, the Hollywood entertainment culture, and the influence of tech ensure that the voices of reason are drowned out by the voices of anger and division that continue to drive massive corporate profits.

Shall we talk impeachment? We shall!

No discussion of impeachment should begin without recognizing two overarching details of the Trump presidency:

First, much of the left, all of the hashtag resistance, and many elected Democrats and Democratic appointees have been, to one degree or another, trying to impeach Trump since before he even entered office and on every minute possibility since. Billionaire lunatic Tom Steyer has spent in the neighborhood of $200 million on campaign/impeachment commercials since Trump’s January 2017 inauguration. For this, he’s achieved nothing but some fairly pathetic debate performances, a creepy flirtation with Bernie Sanders, and 0.3% of the votes in the Iowa caucus. Steyer’s net worth is estimated at $1.6 billion. That’s a hell of a lot of money, but not enough to burn through $200 million on ineffectual virtue signaling.

Second, impeachment was never going to work and was a terrible idea. Apart from whether or not Trump “deserved”, in some moral sense, to be impeached, there was not a conclusive justification for doing so on the basis of the Ukraine quid pro quo, nor any reason to believe that the chance of removal was greater than zero. I say this assuming that Trump was, indeed, guilty of what he’s been accused of doing — delaying foreign aid in a barter attempt to publicize potential corruption on the part of Democratic Party rival, Joe Biden and his son.

The Founders warned against partisan impeachments for good reason. It would be nearly impossible to remove a president from office on a party-line vote and without public support, the process could do nothing but further polarize the nation. This isn’t 20/20 hindsight. This was the obvious conclusion well before the House Judiciary Committee questioned its first witness.

Speaking of witnesses, the Democrats began their hell week by unsuccessfully making an appeal to the Republican-controlled Senate to subpoena witnesses in the impeachment trial that the House had bypassed in order to speed along their impeachment vote. To be clear, no one forced the House’s hand. The timeline on the vote to impeach was chosen based on the holiday calendar and the primary schedule. That’s not speculation, that’s fact.

We’re meant to believe that the Democrats saw impeachment as a solemn duty, a somber act, but one not meant to get all mixed up with Christmas break or to continue on so long that the compulsory attendance at the Senate trial by candidates Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren would run into the primary season proper and distract from their chances to win. But that explanation was not the company line. No, the reason for the rushed process, the stunted testimony, the withdrawing of subpoenas for John Bolton, et al was that the President was such a dire and immediate threat to our nation, to Ukraine, and to the November election, that he must be impeached without delay. The vote to impeach was called and passed in bipartisan fashion — just not the right sort of bipartisan fashion. Two Democrats voted against the articles, and longshot presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard voted ‘present’.

Democrats, the media, and partisans all celebrated in very somber ways. They were somber on Christmas. They were somber at the Golden Globes, forced to watch as a mean man made jokes in their somber presence, their somber outfits costing twenty-thousand somber dollars, their somber speeches on politics and oppression ringing through the somber ears of an oh-so-somber nation.

But these proceedings came to a sudden halt in short order. Gone was the hurried pace of the House hearings and the vote. Nancy Pelosi made the bet that she could extract concessions on how the trial would run in the Senate by withholding the articles of impeachment. Democratic leadership wanted guarantees that the Senate would call witnesses who did not appear in the House hearings. Pelosi made this bet against Mitch McConnell. Cocaine Mitch. The same Mitch McConnell that refused to allow consideration of the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. McConnell did not waver, even slightly, and Pelosi was forced to turn over the articles with nothing gained. Again, it doesn’t take 20/20 hindsight to say this effort had no chance of success. Pelosi had no leverage. Withholding the articles was an act of desperation, nothing more.

Nevertheless, they persisted.

Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, and a band of scrappy Democratic underdogs with nothing on their side but their unabashed self-righteousness, were on a mission from a just god. All they had to do was convince a nation that, for the most part, had already rendered their verdict — “meh”. The sheer force of their ‘rightness’ would create such fervor that the Republicans would have no choice but to relent, to call on John Bolton to testify in the Senate chamber, and then crumble under the weight of the unassailable truth — Donald Trump is literally Hitler.

Just one problem. That’s not how it works. In 1999, in the midst of the Clinton impeachment debacle, Joe Biden wrote the following: “The Senate may dismiss articles of impeachment without holding a full trial or taking new evidence. Put another way, the Constitution does not impose on the Senate the duty to hold a trial.” Also, “In a number of previous impeachment trials, the Senate has reached the judgment that its constitutional role as a sole trier of impeachments does not require it to take new evidence or hear live witness testimony.”

Joe Biden was right. The House has the responsibility of gathering evidence and witness testimony. The Senate hears that evidence and renders a verdict. That is what has happened. It’s an indisputable sign of his own hypocrisy that Adam Schiff simultaneously calls the case of the House Managers ‘complete and overwhelming’ but still demands witnesses. Either we need John Bolton’s testimony or we don’t. If your case isn’t compelling enough without his testimony, then it certainly cannot be complete or overwhelming.

Again, the House had every opportunity to call Bolton as a witness, regardless of how the White House may have protested or delayed. Democrats do not shy away from using every tactic in their arsenal when condemning the president, but the expectation is that the president should not defend himself with every tool available? Even if it took six months, if Bolton’s testimony was necessary or earth-shattering, surely the solemn somberness of this sacred duty warrants the delay. After all, we can’t allow the president to stay in office after John Bolton reveals the damning truth of what most of us already believe. There is no question about this — the Democrats chose not to wait for Bolton’s testimony in the House, believing that they could win the political battle in the Senate. That gambit was stupid, unequivocally.

With absolutely no leverage, Adam Schiff repeatedly threw himself into the breach in an attempt to call witnesses. He did this while simultaneously refusing to consider calling Hunter Biden, the whistleblower, or himself to testify. The Democrats and the media at relayed two conflicting narratives (well, two more) at once: that Bolton’s testimony was necessary because we need to know all aspects of this heinous abuse of power, but that Hunter Biden’s (and thereby Joe Biden’s) potential corruption was irrelevant, that the whistleblower’s motives were irrelevant even though his own lawyer, Mark Zaid, had declared a ‘coup’ as early as 2017 — one that would be carried out ‘in many steps’ and one he predicted CNN would “play a key role in” — and that any interactions between the whistleblower and Schiff’s office were on the up and up, requiring no examination.

Slight digression: Adam Schiff claimed in the Senate trial not to know the identity of the whistleblower. That claim beggars belief. A simple Google search can reveal the identity of the whistleblower. It’s been pointed out that Chief Justice John Roberts’ refusal to read Rand Paul’s question in the Senate trial, because it contained the name of the whistleblower, in fact confirms the whistleblower’s identity. There is no way that Adam Schiff has not come across this name since the whistleblower first came forward. If somehow Schiff was involved in cultivating the claim in service of impeaching a sitting president, that strikes me as extremely relevant to the proceedings.

The Democrats and their media allies have stopped at nothing to perpetuate the narrative that the Senate vote to acquit Trump is the death knell of democracy because ‘there is no such thing as a fair trial without witnesses’.

But even that claim is false. 17 witnesses were called in the House impeachment inquiry and it was still the shortest impeachment investigation in history. Why? For no reason other than the Democrats’ political schedule. Nancy Pelosi was forced by the hashtag resistance to go against her better judgment in even bringing impeachment to the floor. It is crystal clear that she is not happy she relented.

Schiff even made a last-ditch attempt to compel Republicans to allow Chief Justice John Roberts — an unelected member of a branch not tasked to decide the matter — to vote on whether to call witnesses in the case of a tie, so that the elected representatives could allay their Constitutional responsibilities. Of course, the media narrative was that, as a Republican appointee, Roberts’ vote to see witnesses would be impossible for the President’s defenders to challenge — yet another preposterously stupid bet. Roberts stuck to his principles and declined to participate.

On Friday, the Senate voted to move forward in the trial without hearing from any further witnesses, a result both predictable and justified. Why should the Senate be forced to take up the duties of the other body? As a favor? An act of charity? Democrats claimed that the new hearings would be wrapped up in short order, but of course they would not, and everyone knows it. That the country will not hear from John Bolton is of no consequence to anyone unless you happen to believe that he would’ve revealed something so damning that the nation would’ve collectively changed its mind. But if that were the case, why be so squirrely about the book? The book is finished. It’s to be released in six weeks, barring any unforeseen delays or litigation. The media reports that 70% of the country wishes to see witnesses. One must wonder, how many in that 70% know that’s already happened?

Near the end of the witness consideration, a ‘bombshell’ leak dropped in the form of a passage from Bolton’s book, purportedly confirming that the President, in no uncertain terms, ordered Bolton to participate in the delay of sending funds to Ukraine until the Ukrainians did his ugly bidding. But everyone already knew that. Odd timing for a leak, no? Schiff couldn’t convince the Senate to call witnesses, but surely it must now. This ‘shocking’ revelation did not change the calculus at all.

In normal times, the impeachment debacle alone would be enough to shatter a party and destroy their chances in the upcoming election, but that’s merely the swirling conical head of the shit-pile emoji that is the 2020 Democratic party.

Over the weekend, the DNC decided to change its qualifications for who is allowed to grace their debate stage. Throughout the duration of the interminable primary, the prestige of appearing alongside Marianne Williamson, Tom Steyer, and the other also-rans was dependent on garnering a certain level of support in the opinion polls and collecting donations from a certain number of individual donors. The DNC obliterated this system, changing their ‘rules’ on a whim so actual brilliant billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, would be able to participate in future debates despite his scant donor base. One wonders what the purpose of rules might be if they’re subject to change at any time.

Both hilarious and entirely predictable, the response from Democrats around the country has been nothing short of awful. Bernie Sanders’ supporters see the party’s propping up of Bloomberg as a clear attempt to keep their candidate from winning the nomination. They’re right, of course, but thank goodness the DNC doesn’t care about the independent socialist from Mars. The woke wing of the party is enraged, arguing that the prior rules prevented candidates-of-color Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Julian Castro from taking the stage in the debates, the main cause of the candidates ending their campaigns. No credence is given to the fact that all three were absolutely terrible candidates who proved quite conclusively that they had no business being on the stage, not to mention none of them were able to build the sort of organization to keep themselves relevant.

This wouldn’t have been a problem for the DNC in the past, as the organization knew what it was there for — choosing the party’s presidential candidate and getting Democrats elected around the country. Rather than affirming their role in past cycles, they have appeased the extremists in their party and subjected the process to the popular vote of the most active, and thereby most partisan, elements of their voting bloc. All of this was blown apart in 2016 by Bernie Sanders and his fans, believing that the DNC should allow voters to choose the party’s nominee through direct democracy, while somehow not realizing that they lost on that account as well. This notion expressly misinterprets the DNC’s role and has now degraded the organization to near-uselessness.

The rules set up for debate qualification were flawed from the outset. If the standards for a candidate’s viability were solely performance in polls and number of voters, the responsibility for success would be almost entirely up to the media — CNN, MSNBC, HuffPo, Vox, and the editorial boards of The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc…

What could be more dangerous, more stupid, more utterly clueless about the state of the world than to rely on for-profit media to choose your candidates? The 2016 election cycle exposed not only the overwhelming power of media narratives to influence national politics, but their bias and incompetence as well. The media has contributed billions of dollars in ‘earned’ advertising to Trump’s campaign, presidency, and eventual re-election, all while breathlessly and self-righteously trying to ‘take him down’ and ‘call him out’ and ‘expose him’, as if Americans don’t have their own eyes and ears.

I don’t need my morality handed to me from on high by the likes of Don Lemon and Lawrence O’Donnell, and I doubt anyone else does either.

Without a doubt, the media tried to make Kamala Harris happen. That failed because Kamala Harris is almost singularly shameless in her dishonesty. She lacks anything resembling a political or moral core. The media has been trying since then to make Elizabeth Warren happen. Elizabeth Warren, the candidate with ‘a plan for everything’, doesn’t actually seem to have a plan for anything. Last week she said that any Secretary of Education she would appoint would have to be screened by a transgender teen. I am not making this up. When she is questioned about how to pay for Medicare For All without raising middle class taxes, she ignores the question. How could one get away with making claims far more preposterous than ‘Mexico will pay for the wall’ but continue to feign frontrunner status without a complicit media?

The Democrats have found themselves being called out by their own base for oppressing Democratic candidates of color. How profound must be your incompetence to yield this as a result?

When we were kids, my younger brother loved card games so much that he would play his hand andhis imaginary opponent’s when he couldn’t convince another family member to join him. He would occasionally lose to himself. I always found it hilarious.

Do I even need to say the next sentence? The parallel is obvious.

On Monday, the House Managers and the President’s defense team both presented their closing arguments in the impeachment trial, an impotent recitation of the arguments they’d made prior which, to every observer, had already failed.

But who would want to stop with that abject failure? By midday, candidates (mostly Bernie) were creating conspiracy theories to explain why the final Iowa poll hadn’t come out. The expectation was that the poll would help Bernie and that the ‘establishment’ shut down its release, thereby taking away his final rallying cry to potential caucus attendees. The system, the system! It is rigged! And the only way to fix it is through a political revolution supported by fringe conspiracies by a socialist pauper on the public dime and his feckless fans.

But, oh, Tuesday. Tuesday would be the day! The Iowa caucuses.

Trump has been calling CNN the ‘fake news’ for an awfully long time. But surely, they’re not. They have Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, and the Glenn Greenwald of Carl Bernsteins, Carl Bernstein. This is a network that demands to be taken seriously, even when Ana Navarro is not on the air. They’re absolutely not the sort of network that would spend months centering their anti-Trump reporting around the criminal-lawyer (not criminal lawyer) Michael Avenatti, or run a second-by-second countdown clock to their coverage of the Iowa caucuses only to reset the clock for the countdown to when the caucuses were actually starting. That would be beneath the dignity of the ‘most trusted name is news’.

As the countdown clocks ticked out their last precious seconds, CNN’s 28-person panels held on with bated breath, anticipating the dawn of the Warren era, or the confirmation of Biden’s inevitability, or for this to be the time the Bernie revolution actually begins. Whoops.

No results were forthcoming. CNN’s rotating roster of scripted partisan hacks appeared and disappeared as the hours drew on, the caucus results delayed by technical error, or human error, or human technical errors, or technical human errors. Or whatever.

The DNC, as it is wont to do, decided to boldly charge into a future that does not yet, and may never, exist. They determined that the way to ‘expand voting rights’ would be to usher in the new age of technocracy by having the Iowa caucus results compiled by an app created by a for-profit outside firm called, incredibly, Shadow Inc.

Even as I write this, I sit here thinking, how the hell am I not making this up?

The app in question was funded by the Iowa Democratic Party. The goal of the app was to help precinct chairs and volunteers compile the results of the caucuses and submit them for final tabulation and delegate allocation. But why? Was this something we needed an app to fix? Or was this just what the unholy matrimony of the tech-obsessed radical leftist college students and tech-ignorant retirees who compose the decision-making wing of the Democratic party deemed necessary to compete with the Republican electoral-tech advantage? Correct, the Republicans have the supposed advantage in use of tech. How is the party of Barack Obama so thoroughly unable to function in the real world? The incompetence is staggering.

Despite multiple warnings that they may end up in exactly this situation, the party pushed ahead with the app. DNC Chair Tom Perez confidently assured us that everything would be just fine. It was not. They couldn’t even properly equip party officials to compile results by phone. Precinct officials had calls drop after hours-long waits on hold.

After enough prodding from CNN panelists, the candidates began rushing to the stage at their post-caucus parties to give ‘victory’ speeches to their supporters, i.e. steal the national television spotlight while the only story is the party’s incompetence. First up was Amy Klobuchar. She is probably the best potential president left in the race (outside of Bloomberg, perhaps) but she’s almost devoid of charisma. She won the race to the mic, but did little with it. Joe Biden was next up. Elizabeth Warren appeared onstage within a minute or so of Biden, too late to get the television coverage she was after but she, you know, persisted nevertheless. Then we were treated to the 17,000th showing of Bernie’s one speech, then Buttigieg brought it all home. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, the bard once wrote.

We slept Monday night without a caucus winner and awoke Tuesday to the same. Word came that we could expect results around 5pm eastern, so CNN fired up the countdown clock once again. I ate lunch watching the seconds tick down, almost ready to explode with pent-up anticipation. It’s been nearly 24 hours and we still do not have 100% of the results in, nor do we have a clear winner, though it’s held steady with Buttigieg leading Bernie by a narrow margin, followed by Warren, Biden, and Klobuchar.

It no longer really matters which of Buttigieg or Bernie actually wins. The delay in getting the results meant no one would really have the chance to care, even for half a news cycle. Buttigieg’s performance drives a stake into the heart of the Biden campaign, emerging as the frontrunner of the moderates in the race. Klobuchar outperformed expectations. Biden did not. He believes South Carolina is a firewall. We’ll see. His campaign sent an angry letter before any results were announced, ostensibly concerned about the fairness of the results. It’s almost as if they knew they were screwed. (They did.)

Bernie Sanders, in a fitting sequel to 2016, declared victory even though he didn’t win. For a man so constantly clamoring for fairness, justice, integrity, and honor in our politics, he seems to have no qualms with refusing to accept the results of any election he does not win. It’s amazing that Trump saying the election was rigged before he won in 2016 was a direct threat to our democracy, yet the likes of Bernie Sanders, Stacy Abrams, and Hillary Clinton refusing to accept election results years later is meant as a shining badge of virtue.

To be clear, Bernie Sanders has no shortage of conspiracy theorists among his supporters. There is a reason they mirror Trump’s so completely. Declaring victory in this environment, based on the Sanders campaign’s own “internal data” is nothing more than a prelude to upheaval. In the minds of Sanders’ most ardent fans, Bernie won Iowa, no matter what the results say. If the results say he lost, that’s only further proof of corruption on the part of the DNC. This is untenable, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Bernie to come out against it. Election integrity is for other people, not for Bernie, for Bernie’s cause is just and any sacrifice in service of the cause is justified by the cause itself.

As if that isn’t a dangerous way to conduct politics. It’s, dare I say, Trumpian.

After the first round in the 2020 Democratic Party primary, 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, IN, Pete Buttigieg is in the lead, ahead of the man with the supposed national political revolution behind him, ahead of the holdover establishment candidate who served as Vice President, and ahead of the choice of the liberal media. (Note: The New York Times editorial board actually endorsed both Warren and Klobuchar.)

A lot of good it did him. His capture of the news cycle didn’t even last an afternoon.

And suddenly, Tuesday night is upon us, and with it, the State of the Union.

It’s important to realize that Donald Trump was invited to the House Chamber to give this speech. It was not required that the House provide Trump that stage. Pelosi invited him in the midst of his impeachment.

Why? Why do Democrats continue to believe that their tactics will work? Did Pelosi really think a shamed and diminished Donald Trump would appear before them, tail between his legs? Did they think he’d punk himself by being unable to resist addressing impeachment? Whatever calculation Pelosi and her ‘squad’ made, it was the wrong one. Again.

Trump walked to the mic, ignoring Pelosi’s greeting, and commencing with an absolute barn-burner of a speech replete with consequential actions and results achieved on behalf of American citizens of all walks of life, and totally bereft of the normal Trump tendencies toward self-inflation and insanity. It’s baffling that after nearly five years of believing Trump will hang himself just because you’ve given him enough rope. The man is nothing if not a master of his own survival. If you give him that much rope, at this point, you should expect it around your own neck, and then bear full responsibility for your miscalculation.

I’m not a fan of the ‘reality show’ elements of this presidency, but this clearly isn’t about what I want or what I like. Presenting a scholarship to a young black girl and reuniting a soldier with his unsuspecting family seem more appropriate on a game show, but that doesn’t diminish the acts in themselves. It’s impossible for any witness of those events to hold back a smile unless you’re stuck wearing a white skirt-suit… again. It was “so powerful” last time. Except that it wasn’t. No one cares.

On every issue, Trump’s speechwriters found the exact pain points to target in the Democratic Party narratives, exposing them as false and pandering. On each issue, Trump went to a different member of the gallery, often people of color, as examples of how he and his administration were helping the country and its citizens while Democrats sat on their hands. It was as if two high school clubs had reserved the cafeteria at the same time, one for a party and the other for a hunger strike that no one noticed. Trump had First Lady Melania present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to bogeyman Rush Limbaugh the day after he announced late-stage lung cancer. Every change of subject in the speech brought a new opportunity to twist the knife in the side of the Democratic party in what could only be an act of ritual sacrifice to whatever heinous god has set 2020 upon us.

At points, Democrats refused to rise and cheer low unemployment rates of women and minorities or rising wages of the country’s lowest wage earners. These are issues that Democrats give constant lip service to, yet rarely positively affect. And when it happens, they sit on their hands? It’s almost as if they consider women and minorities to be nothing more than blocs of guaranteed Democratic voters from now until eternity. I’m disgusted by very little, but the fact that Democrats believe immigration will give them a permanent ruling majority, as if everyone turns blue while crossing our borders, does the job.

Democrats believe that they have captured the votes, in perpetuity, of entire races, as if everyone from a non-white ethnic background votes as a monolith. Party members and their media allies have spent the hours since the speech ended saying that Trump was using the people of color in the gallery to make his political points, as if the help he was providing these individuals was somehow not real or that they were simply rubes, too ignorant to know what’s good for them. The Democratic Party has a particularly broad definition of racism, except when it doesn’t advance their own causes. If you think I’m full of it, Google Ralph Northam. Type in Justin Fairfax while you’re at it. They’re like this with women, too.

When one party depends on women and ‘people of color’ to function as its base, regardless of whether or not it improves their lives, we should be free to wonder, who’s really “using” these people?

Ask yourself, how would a party guarantee itself the votes of huge demographic blocs without successfully achieving anything that benefits the people within them? Well, you could do everything in your power to convince those people that the other side hates them. To be clear, I am not saying that racism does not exist on the right or the far right, and I am not excusing Trump from his own problems with minorities. I am simply explaining what it looks like beyond the institutional gated narrative.

I’m continually shocked by the ‘woke’ ability to promptly cast aside any woman or any person of color or any member of the LGBT community who doesn’t agree with them in full. It’s almost as if they care only about their political motivations and not at all about the members of the communities they ostensibly are working to help. Check that, it’s exactly that way. The party that believes they can capture entire identity groups to vote for them has the unmitigated gall to accuse others of using these people. It’s astounding.

At the end of the speech, Trump left the mic as he arrived, with no attention paid to Nancy Pelosi who had spent the last 80+ minutes stewing, smirking, head-shaking, and barely containing her rage. The problem with a speech like the one Trump gave last night, from a purely political standpoint, is that there is no amount of spin or ‘fact-checking’ that can counter what happened in real time, and she knows it.

After being forced to begin impeachment proceedings that blew up in her face, sending the comically ineffectual Schiff and Nadler to the Senate with no hope of winning, seeing her party’s wannabe technocrats utterly destroyed in Iowa as they shuffle through a pile of retreads and never-weres vying to take on Trump, and then having the orange supervillain throw every one of her own issues right in her face, Pelosi could justifiably bear no more. It’s hard to blame her. Nonetheless, she made a totally unforced error that isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.

The Democrats have spent nearly five years cycling through a handful of explanations for why Trump is so terrible and how he will fail the country, and their predictions are not paying off. They have sold off all their good will and public trust as they’ve shown themselves to be exemplary models of everything they say they hate about Trump. You want corrupt? They’ll do corrupt. Power hungry? Here’s Kamala! Petty? You got it.

As the speech ended, Nancy Pelosi, standing next to Vice President Mike Pence, held the printout of Trump’s State of the Union speech in front of her and tore it in half, dramatically discarding it in front of her. And ooooh-weee did that send the hashtag resistance into a joyful frenzy, for this one moment represented everything they’ve been thinking.

They’ve been trying as hard as they can. They’ve been believing. They have done their duty, supported (and given money to) candidates they’ve never heard of, made signs for marches the news doesn’t even pay attention to, proudly declared their pronouns on Twitter, made enemies with everyone around them who wasn’t down with the cause, and for what?

For the big orange monster to trample all over it.

The only way not to see Trump’s 2020 State of the Union as an absolute thrashing of the Democratic narrative is to be trapped so far inside the bubble that anything contradicting your personal narrative becomes proof of that narrative. That’s tinfoil-hat stuff.

The strongly worded letters didn’t work? The editorials didn’t work? Don Lemon’s library of faces of righteous indignation didn’t work? White skirt-suits didn’t work? The squad boycotting the event didn’t work?

But howwwwwww?

After the State of the Union, cable pundits sat around baffled, unsure of how much they could talk about Pelosi’s bold paper-ripping before they lost whatever last remaining shred of credibility they were desperately clinging to. Luckily, about four minutes later (there was a countdown clock) Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer gave the Democrats’ formal response.

In all honesty, like the rest of their week, the Democrats would’ve been better off skipping the response. It was bland and boring. It didn’t address Trump’s State of the Union in any substantive way. Whitmer even admitted as much in the speech, a vague paean to the notion that Democrats are ‘above’ playing in the dirt with Donald Trump, as if that has worked for them even once.

One of the central stories in her speech was about a local kid who was sick of potholes in the roads and went out, shovel-in-hand, and filled them. What a great kid! There’s only one problem. The example was used to point out Trump’s failure on infrastructure. Leaving aside the fact that the example seemed quaint in comparison to what had just happened in the House, potholes are a failure of government to do what the people have already tasked it with doing. Pointing out government inadequacies in fulfilling its simplest duties is not a strong argument when you’re the party seeking to expand the duties of the same government.

Bernie Sanders, one of the leading candidates for the party’s nomination, wants government to control healthcare, housing, education from kindergarten through grad school, business, the environment, transportation, and literally everything else under the sun. What doesn’tBernie have a plan for?

And here we have the crux of the problem.

In one week, the Democratic Party has shown staggering incompetence in everything it has attempted from impeachment, to strategy, to messaging, to the execution of its own primaries.

How do they respond in the face of unmitigated disaster?

Rip up a speech that has already been given?

The party looks completely dissembled. They look small, petty, and immature.

They have taken on the faces of the so-called ‘squad’ as their own avatar, donned pussy hats as helmets, and ridden Adam Schiff into a hopeless war.

They are whiny, preening, perpetual victims.

They are constantly ready to become the very thing they say they hate.

Every attempt they make to ‘fight fire with fire’ reminds us that there could be no worse advice on what to fight fire with. They are wholly incapable of playing Trump’s game, and they look pathetic trying.

There is no indication that the party is any closer to sorting itself out. They have been broken in every sense by Donald Trump. These five years have not given them any pause. They’ve adjusted none of their tactics.

What else is left but to simply rip it all apart?

Who in their right mind would willingly accept leadership from these people?