This is regarding Bret Stephens’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal issue of August 8, 2016, nominally about Sean Hannity.  Here is  Mr. Stephens’s dream scenario:  “the only hope for a conservative restoration is a blowout Hillary Clinton victory, held in check by a Republican majority in Congress.” Mr. Stephens is apparently hoping that the vulgar Mr. Trump loses, that the Republicans nonetheless end up in control of Congress (not just the House, Congress!), and four years later America awakens from its deep slumber and finally elects a true, conservative, genteel grammarian as our President.  One will spare Mr. Stephens a Trumpian response and settle for this:  the odds on the Stephens dream-scenario are awfully long.  Moreover, Mr. Obama has already schooled us on the irrelevancy of a Republican Congress when it is up against a chief executive run wild.

If Mr. Stephens imagines that there will be a viable nation left, after 4 years of a more-corrupt version of the Obama regime and the filling of one or more Supreme Court vacancies with Ruth Ginsburg clones, he is having a tantrum, not an epiphany.  Every day it becomes more clear that he, along with most of his colleagues at the Journal, would rather the Republican candidate be right than President.  William Buckley and Ronald Reagan would be laughing.  Every day it also becomes more clear that the Democrats’ control of the press, the entertainment industry, the academy, and all other conventional means of communication with voters, is so complete, and their use of it so cleverly manipulative, that it is hard to believe any other Republican candidate would have had a chance.  If Rubio, Cruz, Bush, Kasich, Christie, and the rest of the field wilted in the course of merely trying to defeat Trump, how would any of them have had a better chance of beating both the media and the Clintons?