The wishful thinking monster is eating the Democratic Party alive.
On Monday evening, alleged comedienne Chelsea Handler tweeted out her consternation at arriving back in the United States and realizing that President Trump was still, in fact, president of the United States.
Handler prays, as so many Democrats do these days, that some deus ex machina will descend from on high and remove Trump. Never mind that generals invoking the 25th Amendment improperly would be an unconstitutional coup; never mind that the same people who want to disarm the population and believe the police are systemically racist want to hand all power to a group of military men and women. The point is that Trump must go.
Along those same lines, Newsweek ran a piece on Monday evening from Stanford Law School’s Larry Lessig arguing that Hillary Clinton could still miraculously become president:
Lessig’s argument is particularly hilarious: he thinks that Trump should be impeached, Pence should be impeached, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan should become president and make Hillary his vice president and then resign his post, making her commandress-in-chief. This makes perfect sense if you hit your head incredibly hard on the sink after slipping while hanging a clock above your toilet, and instead of coming up with the flux capacitor, you come up with the stupidest political chain of events known to modern man.
Yet there seem to be many on the Left who continue to hope and pray for some otherworldly intervention to place Hillary in the presidency. This is the same motivation that lies behind the Left’s constant refrains about Russian intervention in the election: Hillary can’t have lost, and if she did lose, it was corrupt, and if it was corrupt, she should get another shot at the top office.
Such silliness isn’t restricted to the Left, of course — for years, some fringey characters on the right, including the current president, insisted that President Obama must have been ineligible for the presidency based on his secret birth in Kenya. And it’s not that conspiratorial fringiness can’t lead to political success, as President Trump amply demonstrates. It's that conspiratorial fringiness poisons politics altogether: if you think that the system is “rigged” and that those who don’t agree are part of the overall conspiracy, you’re more likely to agree with extra-constitutional measures and think least of your fellow Americans.
So, no, Hillary Clinton isn’t going to be president. And no crazy scheme will undo that simple fact. So for the sake of the country, isn’t it time to focus on normal politics rather than pipe dreams?