The greatest enemy for getting anything done in politics is sentimentality, an exaggerated concern for propriety. The left in politics have for many years made suckers of the right by pretending to care about things that the right really do care about but which are mere levers to anyone on the left. That Mrs Clinton can have made an issue about some locker-room tape of a decade ago while still married to Mr Clinton is only possible because Republicans actually care about such things while no Democrat ever really does. But they do pretend. I also think of our own piling on of Bronwyn Bishop over a helicopter ride by both sides but when Tony Burke was found to have done even worse, the story lasted a day or so and then died.

So Hillary said that she would accept the result of the election. But that was before and now there is mileage to be made in not accepting the result so off she goes. This being an election year in which anything can happen, I am not reassured that there is no basis for such a challenge or that it cannot succeed. It also depends on what success is, and actually becoming president is only one possible outcome. Weakening Trump’s authority to act is another. And there are no doubt others.

That the Democrat political constituency is from a different planet has been evident for a long time, but this story from The Washington Post has really confirmed it: I haven’t slept in my room since the election. I discussed it yesterday – under Socialism is a cult – but thought then that it might be satirical. Nothing of the sort. I asked myself whether he was just very funny or was insane. Turns out he’s not a satirist, but you really must read it all to appreciate the raw material of left politics in the US. This is how it begins:

Since the election, I haven’t slept in my dorm room once. I’ve slept on couches, futons, floors and unoccupied beds in my friends’ homes. At first, it came from a need to be with people who supported me and understood how scary this political moment is for young people who grew up under the liberal auspices of an Obama presidency and came of age politically in a time marked by progressive movements such as that of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But after I went home for clean clothes to find an anti-gay hate message written on my door, right next to a set of stickers spelling out “Vote 4 Hillary,” my couch-surfing took on new urgency. I was no longer searching for comfort from my peers — I was trying to preserve a sense of safety.

More to the point even is to read the comments on the article which is at the Washington Post so it’s not some hicksville readership. That there is widespread understanding and sympathy with this lad’s psychodrama does make me wonder about how mad the world may really be.

The only bit of flotsam I still cling to is that perhaps Trump is normal and the people he will bring into government are also normal. But first there are the recounts and then, who knows, the entire mess might yet end up being decided in Congress. That is, if the death threats to the members of the Electoral College don’t turn enough votes to Hillary first.

AND FURTHERMORE: This is Helen Smith discussing the mental problems of the left in an article on Maybe Their Mental Health Wasn’t That Good Before the Election found at Instapundit. She quotes from an article in The Economist titled, America’s election has led to a boomlet for therapists.

Around the country therapists say anxious conversations about politics have become inevitable. “I’ve never had an election like this,” says Joe Kort, a psychotherapist in Michigan. Some of his clients are apparently showing signs of post-traumatic stress. Many have decided to skip the usual turkey meal if it means avoiding a confrontation with a gloating uncle. Awkwardly, avoidance is not an option for some of his trickiest customers: married couples who pulled levers for rival candidates. “I have clients who say ‘I don’t know if I can stay married to someone who would vote for a misogynist, a xenophobe’. I try to get them to stop trying to change each other’s minds, to just hear each other.”

The problem, though, is that many of these therapists are as loony as their clients:

Therapists often pride themselves on their neutrality, but demography tells another story. Most are concentrated in left-leaning cities on the coasts, and more than two-thirds are women. Many will privately allow that they too have been grieving since the election. “Trump is unleashing the worse angels of our nature,” says William Doherty, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. His manifesto against the rise of the bullying tactics of “Trumpism” has collected over 3,500 signatures from fellow therapists.

What a double dose these people must have endured with the almost simultaneous death of Castro. The dissonance in their lives must be at fantastic levels. You might want to laugh at such people – truly hard to find room for sympathy – but they are doing so much to ruin the world that it is impossible to do other than to wish many more years of suffering on them as they have to live through a generation of sound government, with hopefully the first eight led by Donald Trump.

As is said, if you have nothing good to say about the dead, say nothing at all.

This is Conrad Black speaking for the most part nicely about Obama, but he also thinks nicely about FDR so it is par for the course. Nevertheless, he also says this:

So this is the legacy the president and his press-ubiquitous claque are clangorously raising heavenwards like a messianic effigy. A depression was avoided by doubling 233 years of accumulated national debt in seven years to get an annual economic-growth rate of 1%, as 15 million people have dropped out of the work force. The auto rescue could have been much better designed and even Chapter Eleven for Chrysler and General Motors would not have repudiated corporate bonds altogether, would have provided a pittance for the equity-holders rather than nothing, and would not have handed control of much of the industry to the self-destructively greedy United Auto Workers who were at least half the problem in the first place.

Wall Street “reform” has meant stifling red tape, a witch hunt among traders and fund managers but continued fiscal subsidization of those who substitute velocity of money-transactions in place of activities that add value, precisely the practice that Mr. Obama denounces elsewhere in Mr. Remnick’s article as creating the menace of increasing unemployment and income disparity, dangers that this administration has done nothing to allay.

“Banning torture” means stopping waterboarding, which is frightening but not painful and may, in some conditions, be justifiable in counterterrorism. “Marriage equality” is a state-by-state matter and the legalization was by the Supreme Court, and the whole issue is the applicability of the word “marriage,” not the right to same-sex civil union. Lilly Ledbetter, for the 99% of readers who would not know, involves the Supreme Court decision allowing limitations on claims of discriminatory pay-scales to begin at the last paycheck — hardly a ground-shaking tweak of the law, though a respectable reform.

Justices Sotomayor and Kagan are acceptable judges but no better than most confirmed under recent presidents of both parties. The whole court has gone to sleep while the Bill of Rights has putrefied, and there is no sign that Justice Kagan, an ex-solicitor general, will do anything about it. “The end of the Iraq War” was thoughtlessly hasty and spawned the Islamic State, handed 60% of Iraqis to the overlordship of Iran, and helped generate an immense humanitarian crisis (a fact that Mr. Trump and Senator Sanders were the only presidential candidates to acknowledge).

The “opening of Cuba” just legitimized the Cuban seizure of American assets and accomplished nothing for anyone, least of all the victims of the Stalinist Castro regime. The Paris climate-change agreement was unspecific piffle about an unproved threat. Two relatively scandal-free terms could be said of all 13 previous two-full-term presidents except Grant and Mr. Clinton. The elimination of bin Laden is conceded as a fine achievement, and Obamacare, “heavy investment in renewable-energy technologies,” and the Iran nuclear deal are all almost unmitigated disasters.

For me, Obama cannot be gone soon enough. Whatever patriotism he had was never in my view to the United States of America. More to my taste is this, the first of the “top” comments at Instapundit:

“It would have been no less fair for the Republicans to have tied Mr. Obama hand-and-foot to Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.” Are you fucking kidding me? It is precisely the GOP’s refusal to go after Obama for his sordid America-hating past that made conservatives and Republicans so disgusted with Romney and McCain. Obama was a target a mile wide … and the GOP didn’t even pull its gun out of the holster … All because the GOP has no balls…And worries about one thing .. Will the media call the GOP names? Pathetic. I have zero respect for the GOP for one main reason…They do not fight and expose the Dems for what they are….treasonous socialist racist America hating scumbags.