Hillary Clinton is right. Last night, on Seth Meyers's late-night show, Clinton had this to say about Donald Trump's candidacy: "I no longer think he is funny." Earlier in the week, the Huffington Post announced that it was un-banishing Trump from the "Entertainment" section and would now properly cover him under "Politics." Arianna and Hillary are correct -- what started out as a hilarious joke is no longer even the slightest bit funny anymore.

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A few years back -- right around the time I started blogging, in fact -- I was also considering doing a writing project that never actually took shape. I wanted to write a book about how Populism was about due for a resurgence in American politics. This was after watching Ralph Nader and Howard Dean, but before John Edwards and (obviously) Bernie Sanders. The disconnect between how the politicians (of both parties) set their priorities and agenda and what the American people actually wanted from their government was growing into a chasm, which is why I began entertaining thoughts of writing about the historical parallels and the possibility of a Populist wave building in the near future.

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On Monday, I took a look at the Republican nomination race, so I thought it'd be fair to check in today with the Democratic contest. One obvious reason why I (and others in the political commentary world) have been paying so much more attention to Republicans is the continuing volatility of the GOP campaign, which still has (as of this writing) 14 official candidates running. By comparison, the Democratic race is a lot more calm after half the field has already dropped out, which has left only three candidates still in the contest: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O'Malley.

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What is going to happen to the Republican Party in next year's general election campaign? We could be on the verge of a major shift in the American political system, which is always interesting to speculate about (whether it winds up happening or not). Donald Trump, love him or hate him, has certainly followed through on making this one of the most interesting presidential nomination races of all time. As the saying goes, we're all cursed to be living in interesting times -- at least for the next year or so.

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We took last week off for the holidays, so we've got a lot of ground to cover today. Sadly, this included two terrorist attacks in America, one in Colorado and one in Southern California. The truly sad part is that these mass shootings are becoming so common nowadays that within a few months most people will have forgotten them, as we all focus on fresher, more recent tragedies. Welcome to a very grim "new normal," in other words. Sorry to start off on such a heavy note, but such news is impossible to ignore.

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Two interesting campaign articles today both point out a frightening new reality for the Republican Party. Previously considered unthinkable, unconceivable, and downright unimaginable, some Republicans are now struggling to come to grips with the fact that Donald Trump might actually become their party's standard-bearing presidential nominee. The first of these articles, from the New York Times, documents how "irritation is giving way to panic" over Trump-as-GOP-nominee, because many in the party feel that this could "imperil the careers of other Republicans." It continues:

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Ben Carson hasn't had a very good couple of weeks. He first exposed his ignorance on what is happening in Syria during a debate, claiming (falsely, he later sheepishly admitted) to have solid proof that China was in the midst of the conflict. This was just before the Paris attacks, so it might have been prominently in voters' minds during the aftermath. Then some of his advisors went public in the New York Times claiming Carson desperately needed to study up on the rest of the world because he knew so little about such things as the Middle East, while the candidate himself was making news by claiming the pyramids were nothing more than grain silos. After the Paris attacks happened, Carson wrote an editorial on what to do about the Islamic State for the Washington Post which was borderline incoherent (read it in full if you think this is an exaggeration). And now it looks like this floundering on foreign policy is beginning to hurt his standing in the polls. Could this be the start of Carson fading into irrelevance in the Republican presidential nomination race?

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Republicans, of course, do the whole fear thing very well. Democrats cannot hope to ever stoke the public's fear as effectively as Republicans. This is a well-known fact, but this week it was on display more than usual, because there are still 14 Republicans running for their party's presidential nomination. So what we witnessed was a race to the bottom, as each candidate tried to top the lunacy emanating from all the other campaigns.

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Imagine for just a moment that, right now, there were thousands of refugees from a land over the seas who not only wanted to come to America, but were actually now physically on the North American continent, heading north towards our southern border. In this scenario, the country they're fleeing has, in the past, dumped on American shores criminals and mentally disturbed people, in a wave of migrants. Up until the very recent past, this country was also officially listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. It actually sheltered terrorists who had committed acts of terror against Americans on American soil. And now 2,000 people from this country were trying desperately to get north to the United States.

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Since it's such an auspicious day, perhaps it's time to have a discussion about the increasingly-real possibility that Donald Trump or Ben Carson could actually become the Republican nominee for president next year. It's a scary, scary thing for most to contemplate, but the punditocracy's inside-the-Beltway strategy of just clapping our hands real hard and hoping that Tinkerbell quietly lies down somewhere to die just doesn't seem to be working. Pretty much every pundit under the sun -- from the hard left to the hard right -- has so far written a column this year predicting Trump's imminent political demise. To date, none of them have proven even slightly true. Trump is now challenged for the lead, but he's still polling at roughly the same level of support that he has pretty much ever since he got in the race. Ben Carson has risen to Trump's level in the polling much more than Trump has fallen back. The "Trump (and now, Carson) is going to fade -- it's inevitable" line of thinking is getting more and more divorced from the polling realities. So perhaps it's time to start thinking the unthinkable: either of these two men could actually become the Grand Old Party's nominee for the highest office in the land.

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