Pruden: Not quite a return of 'The Gong Show'

The Democrats are finally tuning up for the party’s first presidential primary debates next week, and so far the only topics they can be expected to “debate” is who hates Donald Trump the most and who loves socialism the most. Nothing much to debate there.

Hating Donald Trump is no doubt fun for those who like hating — soccer, ladies’ professional basketball and curling demonstrate that any sport can attract capacity crowds if the arena is small enough. Trump haters need fresh material. Can’t anybody come up with a new reason to wish the Donald ill?

Bernie Sanders, who has lately flirted with the slippery slope, down which all old politicians slip and few return to a life after death, reckoned he had put on the brakes with a full-throated celebration of socialism. “Come on in,” he told a group of callow college students the other day, “the water’s fine.”

Bernie imagined that his embrace of the economic scheme that has never worked puts him farther left than any other Democrat. Perhaps not so long ago it would have, but then a newly-elected member of the City Council in Denver said she won with her promise to impose communism on Denver “by any means necessary.” The toothsome but fatally loopy Candi CdeBaca (even she sometimes misspells it) does not look big enough to handle an AK-47, the weapon of choice of revolutionaries out to employ “any means necessary,” but there were immediate comparisons of Miss CdeBaca to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the reigning pin-up queen on the farther reaches of the liberal left.

The Democrat debates next week will be high among the firsts of the unfolding campaign. There are 23 Democrat candidates for president, with more in the wings and already the most ever. So many, in fact, that the feast of intellect and sobriety must be spread across two nights. There will be the welcome and unprecedented sight of so many women that the scent of estrogen will hang heavy over the hall.

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