That's that thing where stuff is blowing back on Democrats these days. They got drunk on success after taking out Nixon and their media dominance was proven and they thought they could get away with anything, and didn't have to play by the same rules. So when Bush flipped Thurgood Marshall's seat by nominating a strongly conservative black man to replace him, they couldn't use their race-baiting that had worked for them since the 60s. They ginned up the sexual harassment stuff without contemplating for a minute whether or not that was a bigger problem for them than for the GOP in general. Then Clinton takes office, and people apply the sexual harassment ideas that were floated to make the Thomas accusations seem more plausible, and the military stuff gets hit with it, and what the hell, no skin off the administration's ass. It's not like the military and its supporters are their base anyway, not to mention there are numerous books detailing the general contempt in which the administration held the military. So Clinton sells them all down the river, and never mind that sex scandals were a feature of his campaign (joke I heard on inauguration day - Clinton's first presidential order is to have Flowers fresh on his desk every morning), it's that thing where Democrats believe they hold all the high cards and can act with impunity.

That's still going on. That's how we got Donald Trump. The day Marla Maples' name became a household word, people would have bet their life savings on the idea that if Trump ever had political aspirations, they were over now. A guy so publically caught cheating wasn't going anywhere in New York politics, let alone national. But Clinton lowered the bar and he did it by brazening his way out, by accusing his opponents of playing politics, and by reminding his partisans that he was all that stood between them and the dominance of the old Reagan-Bush-Dole GOP establishment that might, horror of horrors, occasionally toss a bone to the conservative portion of their base.

And while the aforementioned establishment Republicans flailed helplessly and let him get away with it, their staffers and volunteers and kids of conservative families, who had ideals and didn't have a public reputation to worry about, watched and fumed. And they took notes. They watched Gore almost steal the election from Bush by trying to recount the votes exclusively in heavily Democrat counties, recalling the old Richard Daley tactics of withholding the Chicago results until he knew the totals needed to get Illinois' electoral votes to the Democratic candidate, except this time it was on cable news, instead of being kept off the pages of the Chicago papers by numerous gentlemens' agreements between the print media and political establishments. They watched Bush play nice and make gentlemanly gestures while the Democrats held violent protests, wrote books and movies fantasizing about his assassination and mocked him in crude, low and mean-spirited ways. Conservatives defended him loyally, praised his leadership on 9-11 as if he actually did anything necessary beyond avoiding stepping on his own crank, many of whom bent themselves into absurd positions attempting to defend his foreign adventures. Then he signed an immigration amnesty bill and tried to give Rhenquist's seat on the court to a female Texas lottery commissioner with a law degree from Southern Methodist University, who was an old statehouse crony, so they threw up their hands, stayed home and let the Democrats take Congress back.

The Democrats claimed this as a justification and mandate for their issues and agenda and as soon as there was no Republican in the White House to get in their way, went right back to the same policies that gave Congress to the GOP in the first place. They began using procedural tricks that came from having a supermajority, changed the rules to prevent the minority from blocking them, and used executive orders to throw out the few compromises the Republicans managed to obtain in the legislation. Obama threw out that now famous "elections have consequences" line to justify his blatant disregard of the ideal of bipartisanship the Democrats had professed when the opposition had the White House and both houses of Congress.

And the Republican establishment was content to stroll along like it was business as usual. They played nice, they made compromises with Obama, they disregarded the Tea Party whenever they could, they ignored the message the voters sent them of Eric Cantor's metaphorical head on a stick. They gave the nomination to John McCain because it was "his turn" and he had raised lots of money and did all the right stuff for the party insiders while trashing the party's ostensible values, sucking up to the New York Times and briefly acting conservative every six years to get re-elected. They then nominated Romney, a conservative caricature, who, when Obamacare was a metonym of all that the right hated about the administration, had pioneered a similar system in the state he governed. But he was the son of an old party hand (who had been among the saboteurs of the Goldwater campaign, one of the few legitimately conservative nominees the party ever had in the modern era), and had graciously ceded the nomination to their pick last time, so now his dues were owed. They thought a rich, establishment Mormon was good enough for their Christian base, and so the VP slot went to the wunderkind they were grooming, who made the corporate wing of the party and the big donors excited. And a thoroughly polarizing president, who threw away a supermajority in a mere two years in office, and presided over one of the poorest economic recovery performances since the Great Depression, got re-elected. Ryan, the insider VP nominee got to be Speaker of the House, where he could keep compromising with Obama and they geared themselves up for the next round of acceptable candidates they could foist off on a public who had no choice. They didn't care what Hilary would do as president, THEY would get their piece of the pie, because the grownups in the Democratic party would keep the system running, which had a place for them. They set up a nice little contest of their favorite telegenic politicians they thought would put up a good show before losing to Hilary, and hey, maybe they might even pull off a miracle if she got caught with the figurative live boy and dead girl, and wouldn't that be a nice bonus.

And that's where we are today. The voting public, after years of obnoxious leftist ideals circulating in not only the media and academia, but now in entertainment media and academic curricula, and arrogance by the Democratic elite, rejected the establishment in the last election. The leftwing activists want more of what they were promised, believing their own side's press releases about the transformations the Obamessiah would bring about, wanted better than an aging hack who backdoored her way into power and promised more for the power groups and donors who could do something for her, than for her alleged constituency. The voters wanted Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately for them, the party elite has tighter control over their nominating process than does the GOP, and Hilary, having been burned by that in '08 when they couldn't pass up as attractive a candidate as Barry O, made damn sure she was controlling those levers this time out. But the Democrats found they couldn't put the genie of extremism back in the bottle. A lot of their radical progressive voters who wanted more than just a vagina under the Oval Office desk stayed home or wrote in other candidates or voted third party, especially when Wikileaks, so beloved of the far left when exposing the national security apparatus they distrusted, cast a light into the proverbial smoke-filled backroom.

Meanwhile, on the GOP side, a guy who could talk to regular people, who had his finger more firmly on the pulse of what Americans wanted, and had not been briefed on the interests of the governing class, rode the popuism and personality cult forms of politics into a runaway for the nomination. The Democrats loved it, because he was sabotaging all the 'real' Republicans, and using the playbook that had served Kennedy to Clinton so well, in ignoring the bipartisan system which the Democrats had employed to get people into place who would support their cultural revolutions. He was a showman, who emphasized personality and big ideas rather than serious details and nuts and bolts of policy, and people don't actually care about sausage recipies, as long as they get one on their plate that tastes good. He promised them one they wanted, and they didn't care how it inconvenienced the cooks to make it, which is why the GOP & Democrats both had refused to put it on the menu.

And all the stuff that would normally have disqualified Trump in a more serious race - that was all stuff the Democrats had led the way in discarding. Sexual behavior had been effectively divorced from character assessments and standards of trust, largely in support of Clinton's presidency. Combative rhetoric and dismissal of opponents, and appealing to racial and cultural partisanship, had been pioneered by Obama. His media supporters wouldn't call it that, but we had the internet now (which it pleased Al Gore to take credit for inventing, so that's another Democratic innovation coming back to bite them), and alternative commentary had been identifying Obama's tactics for years. The Democrats thought they were being cool by letting YouTube sponsor a debate in a prior election, making candidates take questions from a snowman video, but Trump did them one better, and took to social media to get his message out. The Democrats spent decades bemoaning Republican genuflections to military heroism and the practice of wrapping oneself in an American flag or using military service as a high benchmark of political worthiness, and then were appalled when Trump was unaffected by critics hiding behind their service, and even willing to hit back at them regardless of their service or connection to deceased personnel.

The Democrats weren't satisfied all those years ago with playing the game and getting gradual changes and sharing the pie, so they went radical. They stirred up mobs, they lowered the bar for political attacks by claiming a subjective moral supremacy, they dismissed the very concept of fixed or objective moral standards in order to cover their own behavior, and viciously used their media advantages to get away with it, and to punish their opposition. And now their media coverage isn't nearly so effective, their opposition has taken to heart the obsolesence of the old rules of conduct and has accepted the passsing of the old standards, and now they are standing around like country club Republicans in the 1960s wondering when politics got so nasty.

Hilary knew her way through the old maze, and was willing to tear down walls when it was convenient for her, but things are coming through the old holes she helped to make. She was one of the feminists who thought they could make up all the rules for social interaction to suit themselves. It will be very interesting to see if the feminist institutions and currently fashionable champions accept her hypocritical formulations, or if they will stay consistent with their established positions and rules and Move On from Hilary Clinton, writing her off for making one verbal gaffe too many.