Liberal establishment is failing

OPINION:

I didn’t watch the Academy Awards, but I sure enjoyed them — via Twitter. The collection of world-famous and super-rich liberals and leftists had one job, and they failed. The spectacular screwup of announcing the wrong winner for Best Picture wasn’t even the issue, or about one person making a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time.

In reality, this vignette of fools is a perfect illustration of why the liberal establishment is in collapse: hate-obsessing on something that contradicts their own self-reverential worldview, condemning them to perpetual distraction. The result is the inevitable crashing and burning.

In other words, Democrats and liberals have been driving drunk while texting for eight years. Swerving into the wrong lane, they crashed into oncoming traffic and sit, dazed and confused, wondering what happened. The few survivors crawl out of the clown car screaming at the innocent people they’ve harmed. After all, it’s never their fault, you see, it’s everyone else’s for daring to get in their way.

Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel led the way, as Entertainment Weekly noted, “The first salvo against Donald Trump was fired only a few minutes into the Oscars — and then they just kept on coming. In what might be an unprecedented number of jokes, allusions, and sincere articulations inspired by a single person during an awards telecast, Hollywood’s most luminous tackled Trump and his policies. …”

The target may have been President Trump, but the derision was meant for the people who elected him. Nothing says “oops” like ridiculing your audience.

I apparently was one of the millions who didn’t tune in, causing the ABC network program to be the least-watched in nine years. The Los Angeles Times spent thousands of words trying to explain why the awards show had its third year of ratings decline. It was late, they explained, small budget films and, they mused pensively, maybe, just maybe, “[t]he promise of strong criticism of President Trump from the Oscars participants may also have put off some viewers.”

Ya think? But it’s not about criticism of any particularly president, it’s Hollywood’s constant sanctimonious lecturing of the unwashed hoi polloi.

The transformation of actors into thugs condemning those who don’t conform is something George Orwell would understand, and they are in the same free-fall as their beloved Democratic Party. Vanity Fair reported last year, “The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out that ’in 2016, the film industry is on pace to sell the fewest U.S. tickets per person of any year since perhaps before the 1920s and the fewest total tickets in two decades.’ “

Fortunately, on Oscar night the only people harmed by liberal clueless sanctimony were the smug liberals themselves. Much worse happens when they actually wield power.

Obamacare is Oscar night writ large: A concept based in fantasy, and as Jonathan Gruber, one of its architects was exposed as noting, it relied on “the stupidity of the American voter.” Obamacare, reliant on lies and presuming the average American is a rube, ruined people’s lives and almost destroyed our health care infrastructure.

The rise and spread of the Islamic State terror group in 2014, and the consequential U.N.-recognized genocide of Christians in the Middle East, was made possible by a president who decided (and publicly stated) the bloodthirsty terrorist group was a “JV team,” signaling that no action would be taken against them.

The National Review reminds us: “In the following months, ISIS established a de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria; took large swathes of the country and swept into northern Iraq; captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, before moving on Baghdad; attempted genocide against Yazidi minorities in northern Iraq; and drew the United States into an air campaign in September 2014.”

As reported by The Sun, by the summer of 2016 a leaked White House intelligence assessment revealed ISIS now has “fully operational branches in 18 countries.”

The president was too distracted by his “legacy” and remaking American society to actually get his hands dirty dealing with a rising terrorist cancer.

Then there was Mr. Obama’s dramatic “red line” declaration in 2012 about Syria’s chemical weapons use on its own citizens. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized,” Mr. Obama said.

Later that same year, Syria’s butcher Bashar Assad murdered 1,500 people in a chemical weapons attack, but Mr. Obama backed down. Why? Business Insider learned: “Obama reportedly declined to enforce a red line in Syria after Iran threatened to back out of nuclear deal.”

Lots of talk, lots of drama and moral preening, then collapse when details and commitment matter.

The ultimate example of distracted Democrats’ fixation on completely the wrong thing leading to disaster is the debacle of the Hillary Clinton race for the presidency.

Perhaps they were relying on the stupidity of the American voter, but that was the wrong equation. In the various autopsies of that miserable campaign, her failure comes down to fixation on herself and entitlement. The presumption was the election was hers.

Overconfident and smug, her strategy required taking her base for granted and waltzing to the inauguration. For the entire campaign season, she was told there was only one name on the card in the winner’s envelope, and it was hers. Until it wasn’t.

Sound familiar?

• Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.