The next 100 days..

In the feeding frenzy surrounding Donald Trump's first 100 days that is the MSM's meme du jour, few have taken notice of his opposition and their relative progress since January 20th, 2017.

What have they done, actually?

Well, I guess it can be summed up by one of my favorite You Tube snippets:

But, before I enlarge on this thesis, I would like to call to your attention the words uttered by Trump's opponent last year. This, in its stark rudeness, were the sentiments uttered by Madame Hippo Flanks a scant 227 days ago and what passed -- at the time -- for political commentary by the left:

"I know there are only 60 days left to make our case -- and don't get complacent, don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, well, he's done this time. We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

At the time, I was offended by this classless woman's assertions but, in the heat of a political battle, it did not seem as much of an affront as it does now when viewed in the wake of the sheer, unadulterated hatred, evil, childishness, and downright lawlessness exhibited by Donald Trump's opposition. And, in all honesty, if any group is worthy of being condemned to a basket, box, prison cell, or a general hole in the ground, it would seem to be these folks.

But they soldier on, united in their mutual hatred of Trump, the laws of this country, and the good honest people who got tired of their crap and gave them the heave ho back in November.

But to return to the point, an article in the Free Beacon turns the mirror on them and ponders how they have fared in their first hundred days. And the picture ain't pretty. It's one of disunity, desperation, disarray, and dreariness.

What do the Democrats have to show for these first months of the Trump era?

Little. Trump's defeats have not come at the Democrats' hands. Those setbacks have been self-inflicted (over-the-top tweets, hastily written policies, few sub-cabinet nominations) or have come from the judiciary (the travel ban, the sanctuary cities order) or from Republican infighting (health care). Deregulation, Keystone pipeline, immigration enforcement—Democrats have been powerless to stop them.

Chuck Schumer slow-walked Trump's nominations as best he could. In fact his obstruction was unprecedented. But the cabinet is filling up, the national security team in place. On the Supreme Court, Schumer miscalculated royally. He forced an end to the filibuster for judicial appointments, yet lost anyway. If another appointment opens this summer, and the Republicans hold together, the Democrats will have zero ability to prevent the Court from moving right. No matter what he says in public, Schumer can't possibly think that a success.

We tend to forget that Trump's sub-cabinet nominations are still not complete and Schumer and his cronies are playing their four corner offense in a vain attempt to run out the remaining -- what? -- four years? Good luck with that.

Also, remember that this is the same brain trust who thought it was a good idea to filibuster the slam-dunk Gorsuch SCOTUS selection and the guy who got so pissed at a prominent Dem who voted for Trump he made a scene at a swanky NY restaurant and even followed the little old lady outside, with pasta fazool dripping down his chin and onto his bib started screaming at her.

It seems that this sense of entitlement and the divine right to governance is part of the genetic structure of the left and when wrested from them, they react like spoiled children.

The prevalent anti-Trump sentiment obscures the party's institutional degradation. Democratic voters despise the president—he enjoys the approval of barely more than 10 percent of them—and this anger and vitriol manifests itself in our media and culture. So Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert enjoy a ratings boom, the women's march attracts a massive crowd, the New York Times sells more subscriptions, and Bill Nye leads a rainy-day "march for science." The desire to ostentatiously "resist" Trump leads to better-than-expected results for Democratic candidates in congressional special elections. But the candidates don't win—or at least they haven't yet.

Democrats feel betrayed. The Electoral College betrayed them by making Trump president. Hillary Clinton betrayed them by running an uninspiring campaign. James Comey betrayed them by reopening the investigation into Clinton's server 11 days before the election. Facebook betrayed them by circulating fake news. This sense of resentment isn't so different than the sort Democrats attribute to Trump supporters: irritation at a loss of status, vexation at changed circumstances. The despondence of a liberal is alleviated when he sees throngs of protesters, hears Samantha Bee, scrolls through Louise Mensch's tweets.

Makes him feel better.

It is similar -- but on a much grander scale -- than when Obama was elected and we conservatives took to our blogs, meetings, and tea parties. But I cannot remember a single demonstration (save for the Tea Party assemblages) nor bitter outburst of public vitriol on the scale of all the childish left today. (Also, while nowadays distressing on one level, it is certainly a bumper crop of schadenfreude that I absolutely revel in.)

But I digress.

But [this bitter liberal's] party is in tatters, reduced to 16 governors, 30 state legislative chambers, a historically low number of state legislative seats, 193 members of the House, 46 senators. The Democrats are leaderless, rudderless, held together only by opposition to Trump. The most popular figure on the left refuses to call himself a Democrat while sitting alongside the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee. That chairman, dirty-talking Tom Perez, represents a professional, technocratic class that supports Wall Street and globalization as long as there is room for multiculturalism and social liberalism. That is a different strategy from both the 50-state approach of Howard Dean, Rahm Emanuel, and Schumer that brought Democrats control of Congress in 2006, and the anti-Wall Street, protectionist, single-payer left of Bernie Sanders. Perez fights with Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi over whether there is room for pro-lifers in the party—Perez thinks not. Pelosi enjoys the distinction of being an American political figure less popular than Donald Trump.

What is the Democratic agenda? What does the party have to offer besides disunity, obstruction, incoherence, obsession, and obliviousness? They haven't rallied behind a plan to fix Obamacare or an alternative to the president's tax proposal. They seem dead set against enforcement of immigration laws, they seem opposed to any restrictions on abortion, they seem as eager as ever to regulate firearms and carbon dioxide. It's hard to detect a consensus beyond that. Banks, trade, health care, taxes, free speech, foreign intervention—these issues are undecided, up for grabs.

Sadly all they have is the pathetic hope that their beloved Magic Negro will return from his seemingly endless vacation somewhere and do something -- anything -- to right this ship and restore them to their former safe spaces with their binkies and puppy videos and cookies and milk. But, I fear the aged warrior has other retirement plans involving self adulation adn scraping up $400,000 retainers from Wall Street overlords to prolong his self-indulgent reverie.

For eight years President Obama supplied the Democratic message, provided the Democrats answers to public questions. Now Obama himself is under fire for agreeing to deliver a $400,000 speech to Cantor Fitzgerald. He is already a figure of the past: His hair gray, his legacy under siege, his time spent lounging on Richard Branson's yacht or listening desultorily to Chicago undergrads. The energy is with Bernie, with the identity-politics movements, with the paramilitary "antifa" bands, and each one of these overlapping sects are outside the party establishment Obama represents.

That establishment is just as befuddled as its Republican counterpart at the current political scene. "I don't know what's happening in the country," Hillary Clinton is said to have told a friend at some point during the recent campaign. This apprehension of distance between herself and the everyday lives of her co-nationals is one of the most perceptive observations Clinton has ever made. Her problem was she never figured out the answer, never came to realize that the various guesses she and Obama and other professional Democrats have wagered about "what's happening in the country"—racism, sexism, nativism, gerrymandering, Citizens United, Fox News Channel and talk radio, Russia—are insufficient. What the Democratic Party has yet to understand is that its social and cultural agenda is irrelevant or inimical to the material and spiritual well being of their former constituents. And until the Democrats recognize this fact, their next 100 days will be no better than their first.

Life is good, isn't it?