There are many things likely to change after the COVID scare nearly decimated this country with overbearing Democrat governor lockdown mandates and trillions in wasted resources. Pro sports have taken a big hit (multiplying the effect of their own left-wing politicization of family entertainment). Universities will be closing down as people realize they are paying too much for too little return. Small businesses and many restaurants will be shuttered for good as online purchasing, carry out, and pickup food services multiply. But this week, it’s obvious COVID has dealt a major blow to the already archaic national U.S. political conventions.

I can’t say the DNC online Zoom convention was utterly boring, although viewership declined substantially day by day and didn’t start at a high level anyway. 

The Weird Selections

There were some bizarre inclusions in the programing. (Too many to name them all.) 

There was, as Don Surber notes, Donna Hylton: 

ITEM 9: Fox reported, "Donna Hylton was known as inmate #86G0206 for 27 years.

"She was behind bars for her role in the grisly murder and torture of Thomas Vigliarolo, a balding New York businessman found stuffed inside a steamer trunk and left to rot in Harlem. Hylton and six others let him die 'in the most heinous circumstances,' the prosecutor said at their trial in 1985. On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hailed Hylton as one of 'America's most impactful community leaders' and asked her to participate in a video reading of the Preamble to the Constitution during a televised portion of the convention."

And there was a “mermaid queen king” who called for the abolition of ICE and prisons. 

The Democratic National Convention on Tuesday featured a panelist who identifies as a “nonbinary/gender transcendent mermaid Queen-King” and who called for the abolition of the police, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and prisons.

According to the panelist’s Wake Forest University bio, J Mai is a “Black-Vietnamese, transgender nonbinary/gender transcendent mermaid Queen-King,” who recently became a “licensed minister in the Progressive National Baptist Church.”

I suppose Republicans who claim to want a big tent party will be faulted for missing out on the number of voters who identify as non-binary mermaid queen-kings or have heinously murdered someone and left him to rot, but I doubt it will be a large number and the Republicans will just  have to grin and bear the loss.

The Democrats Play Let’s Pretend

At the top of the tickets are two failed candidates whom the party is pretending are fit to lead us.

As Lord Conrad Black, in one of his usual fine essays, writes of the candidates and the DNC avoidance of reality: 

It is surely the last round in the great battle between Donald Trump and the national political media.

Mr. Trump’s ostensible opponents, Vice President Biden and Senator Harris, are a spavined political wheel-horse who came in fifth in the New Hampshire primary and a vice presidential nominee who flamed out ignominiously two months before the Iowa caucuses. They are a matched pair of bombed-out losers; Mr. Biden was retrieved by the party elders in desperation that otherwise the Democratic candidate would be Marxist Senator Bernie Sanders. They salvaged Mr. Biden and Mr. Biden salvaged Ms. Harris from the pre-primary ash heap.

The attempt to sell this metamorphosis into political stardom will not be easy. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have no history of political victory that entitled them to serious consideration for the offices they now seek. [snip] The skyrocketing levels of violent crime in the cities governed by the Democratic political machines, like the efforts of the teachers’ unions to keep the schools closed, are barely mentioned in the Democratic press or by their candidates. Their only answer to Mr. Trump’s drastic reduction of illegal immigration is to promise to reopen the border.

This is what happens when instead of a campaign by candidates who were popularly chosen, the waxworks presidential candidate is inaccessible while the Trump-hating press conduct the Democratic campaign of relentless and systematic vilification of the president.

Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris were just picked off-the-shelf to avoid the Marxist Sanders and the unorthodox Pete Buttigieg; they are going through the motions, and they are sitting ducks if subjected to serious scrutiny.

Throughout the programming ran a mother lode of denial.

There was Billy Porter singing “Something’s Happening Here” as the convention steered clear of the widespread riots, looting, and mayhem in Democrat-run cities. Something Townhall Media remixed to make clear how preposterous the airbrushing of reality was: 

There was  the bizarre selection of make-believe Indian Elizabeth Warren on the native American panel. 

The Cherokee Nation, long offended by Warren’s ancestral claim to tribal ancestry, demanded Warren apologize in the aftermath of the test results and rescind her false assertions of blood association with the Native group. Warren has since apologized several times and said she no longer identifies as an American Indian. Yet still the DNC put her on its Native American panel today.

And the just as eye-popping selection of Hunter Biden, the exposure of whose extramarital affairs and Ukrainian graft have kept him under deep wraps. Essentially, he was there, I suppose, to fool us about of Biden family values -- only if you are so low-information you know nothing about them.

Pretending that Warren is a Native American was par for the course of this folly-packed online confab. 

There was the reality challenged John F. Kerry still claiming the Obama-coddling of Iran was brilliant statecraft:

It took approximately 20 seconds for former Secretary of State John Kerry to drop the first flagrant lie in his Democratic National Convention speech, when he claimed that the Obama administration’s so-called Iran deal had “eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon.” It didn’t get any better from there.

Kerry knows well that sunset provisions in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action provided Iran’s government with a pathway to building nuclear weapons in a few years. He knows well that Israel uncovered a giant cache of documents with instructions on how to jumpstart a program to build a nuclear arsenal, which undermined both the spirit and the rationale of the nonproliferation agreement Iran signed. He knows that Iran was developing ballistic-missile programs.

Kerry’s big accomplishment was to destroy a sanctions program that was working, thereby saving the Islamic Republic from economic ruin. This allowed the Islamist government to strengthen its proxies in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen and Iraq.

The Voters are Underwhelmed

In any event, the country was not buying this. Freddy Magnus beat me to this:

“It’s not uncommon for candidates to receive a bump after a national political convention. It’s just that usually the convention is their own and not their opponent’s.”

The approval rating lift was also reflected in the in the numbers of viewers and the market

The President’s approval rating on Rasmussen was 47% as the convention began. Once underway it soared to 51% and has stayed there.

Why wouldn’t it? Apart from the bizarre circus sideshows and amateur-hour programming, there was denial, mendacity, and projection wrapped in a box of negativism about the country, things I doubt appeal to most voters.

There was Biden’s rank lie about the President’s remarks on the Charlottesville riots, something that caused Dilbert creator Scott Adams to dub Biden a “racist dead end hoaxer.”

Another hoaxer speaking at the convention, Governor Andrew Cuomo, noted killer of old people, had the supreme chutzpah to attack the President’s response, something the president refused to leave unanswered. Brad Polumbo at the FEE organization trenchantly observed how such wretches like Cuomo rise to political power:

“[Hayek] argued with great insightfulness that ‘the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful’ in any society in which government is seen as the answer to most problems,” FEE President Emeritus Lawrence W. Reed explained. “They are precisely the kind of people who elevate power over persuasion, force over cooperation. Government, possessing by definition a legal and political monopoly of the use of force, attracts them just as surely as dung draws flies.”

Hayek himself wrote, “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tenderhearted person would get the job of whipping-master in a slave plantation.”

Cuomo’s rise and New York’s COVID-19 saga prove Hayek right and leaves us with a clear lesson: So long as we entrust massive amounts of power to the government, we will continue to unintentionally place our fate in the hands of the worst among us. However, by leaving more of our problems to be solved by the private sector and civil society, we can ensure that true innovators and moral leaders are the ones leading us forward.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed at record highs on Friday. There are several explanations for this. Here’s mine: The country is raring to get back to business and the party of mermaids, pretenders, and grifters are unlikely to manage that.

My online friend the Great Iggy pegged the Democrats’ projectionist failings as well as anyone else has:

It is profoundly absurd to listen to progs' wailing and gnashing of teeth over Q-anon and Infowars and the nefarious Millie, while promoting the grandest conspiracy theories of all, like universal institutional racism, that America was founded for the purpose of promulgating slavery, that Trump is Putin's stooge, that the Wuflu is all Trump's fault and the deadliest scourge known to history, that Trump is a nascent dictator destroying our democratic institutions and a hundred other loony tune fairy tales. 

The only difference is their crackpot theories destroy cities and bring the country to a halt and cost us trillions while Q and Infowars cost no one anything and have virtually no influence.

They should change their favored handle from Progressives to Projectionists.

I think the voters have caught on to this.

Speaking of blaming Trump for COVID, their vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, already known as one of the most self-seeking, unprincipled candidates around, made some ridiculous claims about the virus, claiming that systemic racism was the reason blacks, Latino, and native people are suffering “disproportionately of it.” Scott Johnson at Powerline blog tried to parse her gibberish and was only moderately successful.

Harris continued with a statement that requires translation, but translating this is beyond my poor powers: “This virus has no eyes, and yet it knows exactly how we see each other -- and how we treat each other.” 

Is she saying that “the virus” reveals the disparate impact of social inequality? Does anyone really know what she’s talking about? They -- those who brought us this speech -- think we’re morons. That’s what this really says.

The conclusion of this passage distills the Democrats’ higher wisdom: “And let’s be clear -- there is no vaccine for racism. We’ve gotta do the work.”

There is no vaccine for stupidity either, but I can translate “we.” It means “you.”

The bizarre anti-Trump Washington Post “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin tweeted that the convention brought tears to her eyes 15 or 20 times, but I didn’t see her explain whether they were tears of joy or sadness. In any event, sentient people are laughing out loud at the DNC circus.