from Kevin Williamson at National Review, The Celebrity Campaign:

But Democrats are hardly immune to this sort of thing, and probably should not get too smug about Republicans’ currently excruciating circumstances. If you are looking for a guy with loopy political ideas, very little knowledge of how the real world operates, and a horrible record when it comes to how he treats women, I give you Sean Penn — and if you do not think he could make a credible run at the Democratic nomination, you haven’t learned the lesson of 2016. How many celebrities with truly insane ideas — about vaccines, about 9/11, about conspiracies of international bankers — can you think of off the top of your head who could use the Democratic party the way Trump is using the GOP? Sixty? Eighty? How many degrees of separation do you imagine there are between Hollywood bigs and the murdering, torturing, socialist regime in Venezuela? Alec Baldwin does a good Trump impersonation. It’s funny. Alec Baldwin could also be a Democratic political candidate, if he were halfway interested in doing so, and his personal history makes Trump look like — well, an awful, embarrassing excuse for a human being, but one who is not obviously worse than Alec Baldwin.

HKO

The Democrats learned this years ago and created the super delegates to maintain control, and even that only barely worked this time.  The framers of the constitution understood the limits of democracy; they understood that democracy and demagogue come from the same root. The party leaders should actually exercise some leadership.

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