TDS: The symptom, not the disease

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is only a symptom of our very sick, sick society (we don't have a "culture" anymore). Whoopi Goldberg's failure to maintain a civil conversation with her "View" Thursday guest, Judge Jeanine Pirro, in discussing Trump's accomplishments is the only result we could expect from a leftist-dominated media world, for several reasons.

I cringe using the term "liberals" today, because I know what real liberals were from my younger years, and these ain't them. Classic liberals were able to maintain a conversation because they had one key ability that today's "liberals" don't: They were able to entertain an idea without adopting it. They would take it inside their mind, examine it from various sides, watch the way the light skimmed across its surface, note the rough edges or unseemly lines, and then test its merits in conversation with whomever had introduced it into their life.

Why can't today's "liberals" do this? There are three reasons:

1. "Liberals" live within "safe spaces," which are devoid of less-than adored ideas. They live within the confines created by Other People's Money (OPM).

2. With the last election "liberals" lost political power. This was the power they needed to have control of OPM through taxation, the IRS and government decree, which expanded their OPM fantasy world.

3. Finally, "liberals" have no idea of how the world works. Their lives seem to be one gigantic protest against the existing world. OPM and government decrees erected a fantasy world in which they lived their lives. This they mistook for reality. With OPM and political power gone, their fantasy world is vanishing from before their eyes.

Here's the thing: If you have enough money, you can isolate yourself from the real world. Donald Trump certainly could do that, but he hasn't. Obama used the power of the presidency to isolate himself from reality; not to improve the world situation.

Reality said the Senate must approve treaties. Obama's fantasy world said he could make them up, use taxpayer money to buy compliance, and the world would be a better place. Well, certainly it was for him. At least until his exit from the Oval Office. That's when Obama's "Iran Deal" met the real world where the Senate must approve treaties to give them permanence. Executive orders have a shelf life until the next guy comes along.

The real world doesn't go away because we've rejected it in favor of a lovingly crafted fantasy. OPM just means that you have the temporary ability to blot out the bits of reality that you don't like.

This is why Venezuela is such an interesting case. How could anyone watching that nation decay before our eyes, taking its citizens along with it, believe that socialism is a preferred economic order over capitalism? Can those possibly be the views of an educated person? A responsible citizen? A compassionate human being?

Fantasy worlds can be great fun. I would expect they are even more fun when they don't cost you anything to create and maintain. OPM gave lots of people whatever reality they wanted to inhabit, while the rest of us paid the bill. The cost isn't only to manufacture the fantasy world. There is an added cost to cleaning up the carnage the fantasy world leaves behind when it collides with the real world.

Open borders? MS-13, skyrocketing welfare and medicaid costs, K-12 education costs, depressed wages for American workers, voter rolls stuffed with illegal voters. But those are the costs open-borders fantasists never think about. The real world beckons, but no, no, give me my safe space.

What a disgrace it is that so many public officials are willing to provide fantasy for their voters. Surely they know the difference. Why then, do they lie to get elected?

Teachers unions bear a large part of the failure of public education to teach children to read and think. For generations these unions have supported liberals, who funneled money into the educational system, which the union funneled out as wage increases, benefits and retirements. The children? If they were really the reason for the union's efforts, then why did the unions demand rules that kept incompetent teachers in the schools? At some point, "education" became indoctrination. No one objected, though, as long as they got some of their views into the schools.

How are those who are not taught to think for themselves expected to consider viewpoints with which they disagree? They have no arguments to support what they believe. They simply lash out in anger and increasingly rage. Big media and big tech feed off the mouse clicks; the mark of a selfish and cynical enterprise.

They do not yet know it, but they will not prevail. The majority of the nation's citizens have already changed their taste from sugar-coated fantasy to the hard reality of repairing the effects of life under OPM for generation after generation. The left's greatest fear, however, is yet to be made manifest unto them: "One nation, under God."

What do you think Earth's Final Kingdom will look like?