In earlier, more tender times, it was assumed that adults pretty much ran the world with precision based on knowledge and moral rectitude.  Sure, there was evil and there were bad people, but it was recognized and they were consigned to outlier status as aberrations.  Humphrey Bogart, Clint Eastwood, or Iron Man would pretty much clean things up in a couple of hours.  In simpler times the evil were exposed and paid for their sins. 

But times and values have changed in the new postmodern America.  For many, truth and what’s right are no longer universal standards but instead what they’re made to be, and particularly if they’re made flexible, fluid, convenient and can be put to political use.  The two-year Great Russian Collusion Caper that we now know was the Great Democrat Coup Attempt, perpetrated by bad, very arrogant people of the Deep State, a morass of leaders and bureaucrats who elevated themselves over the electorate and countered the will of the people.  Also recall the Democrat histrionics of the Kavanaugh hearings and those with advanced Eve’s Syndrome creating a false reality, forever tagging this conservative judge with fiction of abusing a woman.  Just imagine if President Trump wins in 2020 or he appoints another conservative judge within the year.  What might we expect next from the Left?

There are no limits to what we might expect.  The oft-heard refrain of “existential threat,” rather than climate change, is for the left, actually Donald Trump.  Forget what he’s done despite of the resistance.  It’s his persona; it’s Just because he is and he is the president.  The Democrats are desperate to win in 2020 and it will be a no-holds (and other things) barred event.  You can bet on it.  Note Richard Cohen telling us how he really feels in the Washington Post:

It would not matter to me if he brought peace to the Middle East and combined the two Koreas, he would still be a national embarrassment, a Fox News take on the Statue of Liberty, looming out of New York Harbor, giving the world the finger.

So, the refined, insular coastal elites have had their tender sensibilities ruffled up by Trump and his proletarian ways.  Now that’s hardship.  I have been embarrassed by and for the Democratic Party and its front-row players for twelve years now.  That is not to mention their unholy sacrament, abortion, or their ruinous governing everywhere they do.  Note, for example, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Oakland, Newark, and San Francisco, where Democratic governing has been ensconced for over a half century or more.  Common civic graces include rampant crime, drugs, homelessness, cronies enriched with public funds, poor business environments, and union sympathizers rewarded with ludicrous pensions.  And broken down, apocalyptic-looking, deep cities, and byways.  So much for the dirty masses and the horrific misuse of the bandied phrase “social justice.”  One might conclude that Democrats are giving their deep-city constituents the finger.

In one of Biden’s recent, humorous gaffes, perhaps he unwittingly but truthfully summed up contemporary Democrats when he quipped, “we choose truth over facts.”  Well, yeah; their truth, that is -- not what’s universally known to be right and unchangeable.  Truth masquerading as wild, counterfactual proclamations appealing to the emotions of the weak, the confused, and the uninformed.  In the case of the Democratic presidential candidates -- the cliché-coalition -- it allows these arm-waving, grasping people to obsequiously pander, offering more and more and threaten that the evil climate cataclysm cometh.  More giveaways, more fear-mongering -- two areas of liberal excellence.

Former vice-president Joe Biden may be enjoyable in a one-on-one conversation, but his mundane, career-long political record is as imaginative as a bowl of Cream of Wheat without the sugar unless we count his family’s concurrent profiteering issues.  His values, over his thirty-plus years have been chameleon-like, depending on the landscape.  He is now 76,  misremembers, misstates, and confuses.  He should just plead nolo contendere and be finished.  Are there powers nudging him along with a de facto president in mind, someone behind the curtain, should he win? One thing though, his climate-change proposals are dime-store stuff compared to his far-left competitors.  Joe Biden clearly is not a leader; he is an office-holder, and he is finished.

In regard to the proposals of the Democrat candidates and their costs, some context: according to one source, our annual budget is about $4.1 trillion, of which about a trillion is deficit spending.  Our national debt is now over $22 trillion.  If we paid down our $22 trillion debt at the rate of a $1 million a day, it would take over 60,000 years, almost a Lyellian deep-time span.  Right now, the collective promises of the Democrat candidates exceeds $50 trillion. 

Not a problem for the whiter-than-white, frenetic uber-Anglo, Elizabeth Warren though, who will now ban fracking from a fossil-fueled economy… everywhere, from day one.  Her other giveaways  include a free college education, forgiving college debt, universal child care, and more affordable housing.  Don’t forget medical care for illegal aliens.  This can only be estimated to be $15 trillion, give or take another $15 trillion, without even mentioning “Medicare for All,” the cost of which can barely be imagined, let alone accurately calculated.  Not surprisingly, there have been no speeches detailing how it will be paid for.  But an advisor can be imagined giddily saying, “imagine it, tax it!”

With the warmth of Ebenezer Scrooge, socialist Bernie Sanders, who has gone devotedly and completely into serving his fellow man while accumulating three homes, is not be outspent. His Green New Deal alone could cost $16 trillion or $32 trillion -- take your pick -- over 15 years.  But he also offers the “Medicare for All,” proposal which one source estimated at a $32 trillion price tag over ten years.  You might want to double that.  One should have the utmost confidence, though, in an old communist who has never run a single business to transition a burgeoning fossil-fueled economy to the imagine-it-do-it Green New Deal.  However, turning the nation into Caracas, Venezuela is going to really strain that trust, Bernie.  If it helps, he will be willing to facilitate abortions in developing countries.

Climate change -- the convenient crisis -- has been with us in one form or another since the 1950s. The end times have come and gone now several times now, due to a new ice age, a “Great Die-Off”; heavily polluted, unbreathable air; and a massive extinction of animal species, including all the important sea creatures.  These horrific events — four of ‘em — were all to have occurred by year 2K.

Ironically or not, Paul Ehrlich, the proponent of many of these failed predictions, including that of the “Great Die-Off” by 1989 because of human overpopulation, holds an endowed chair in -- wait for it -- Population Studies at Stanford.  Ideology and dogma over facts, Joe Biden would have said.

Our nation does have two existential threats, one internal and the other external.  Donald Trump and climate change are not among them.  Communist China and the unbridgeable, ideological division in this nation as noted here two and a half years ago are the real threats to this nation.  In regard to China, consider a moment the Hong Kong demonstrators waving American Flags.  Would they have been inspired by the Obamas’ world apology tour; his eight years of regressive policies and foreign capitulation, or the new nationalism of president Trump holding China to account?  The Democrat clown camp has no answer for either of these problems.  It’s not even clear they are aware of them.