CNN's 
Chris Cillizza, who works for an organization that has turned itself into a resistance network, hailed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for going full political against President Donald Trump. This is part of the general idolatry of Ginsburg which peaks on Labor Day with the CNN Films paean to Ginsburg, RBG. Does anybody remember CNN's adulation of Justice Antonin Scalia? No? I thought not.
Cillizza begins by painting a grim picture of the Trumpocalypse in which shell-shocked liberals have primarily one person around whom the snowflakes can rally in "How Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the face of the Trump resistance."
The past two years have been nothing short of a hellscape for Democrats.
The stunning election of Donald Trump in November 2016 has been followed by a presidency that has taken as its fundamental motivation the undoing of everything President Barack Obama accomplished -- from the Affordable Care Act to a series of clean air and clean water regulations to some sort of path toward citizenship for children brought to the United States illegally by their parents. Republicans have been broadly willing to rubber-stamp Trump — and overlook his conservative apostasies, exacerbating Democrats' angst.
Who, oh who, can be the John Connor of the resistance to the evil Trump machine?
With the Democratic Party largely leaderless and the 2020 presidential primary race still a long way off, one person has served as a rallying point for dispirited Democrats: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
At first glance, Ginsburg seems like an odd figure to provide hope to Democrats, who have been forced to watch over the past few years as everything they hold sacred has been dragged through the mud by Trump. After all, Ginsburg isn't a politician -- and has no interest in being one. So how did we end up here?
Um... Maybe it's because a politician is exactly what Ginsburg became.
It began during the 2016 election campaign, when Ginsburg broke the politics-what-politics? stance usually favored by Supreme Court justices, speaking out bluntly about her concerns regarding Trump.
"I can't imagine what this place would be -- I can't imagine what the country would be -- with Donald Trump as our president," Ginsburg told The New York Times in a July 2016 interview in her Supreme Court chambers. "For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be -- I don't even want to contemplate that." Ginsburg doubled down on those comments in a subsequent interview with CNN, calling Trump a "faker," and adding: ""He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego."
Thank you, Chris, for so quickly contradicting yourself.
While Ginsburg subsequently said she regretted her overtly political comments -- "On reflection, my recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them," she said -- the narrative stuck, particularly after Hillary Clinton's shocking defeat at Trump's hands. If Trump represented everything Democrats hated, then Ginsburg was everything they loved.
Since Ginsburg discovered that being overtly political was self-defeating, she attempted to become a bit more subtle about it such as wearing judicial robe collars that signalled her hatred of President Trump.
Though she has yet to return to her overt and public criticism of Trump, Democrats take moments like her skipping of the State of the Union or her insistence that she will serve on the court until she is 90 (and, theoretically, someone other than Trump is President) as acts of defiance. At a time when so few people, in Democrats' minds, will stand up to Trump's bullying style of leadership, a tiny octogenarian woman has stepped into the void and seemed to say: I'm not afraid of him at all.
By 2020, Democrats will have picked their nominee to take on Trump -- and, if history is any guide, will pour their hopes and dreams about resisting the President into that person. But in the interim, the face of the resistance is a bespectacled grandmother with a killer workout routine. Politics is a funny business sometimes.
It's especially funny when seen through the purple-framed lenses of a certain CNN Editor-at-large who considers planking to be a "killer workout routine."
Oh, and if you want to know why CNN is in the ratings toilet, a big part of the reason is their hyping of projects few will view such as RBG on Monday.
