The left and the Democratic Media Complex are gorging on emotion

With about two months to go until the 2018 midterm elections, we're assured of the following menu in our diet of news: Total Trump, Trump 24/7, Trump. President Donald Trump unleashes his brutal Twitter thumbs, and the Democratic Media Complex rises to meet those thumbs of his.

But with the focus on Trump, something is being missed: America's left is devouring itself with emotion.

You can see it in the clubbing of a liberal by the hard left in Portland, Ore., for the sin of carrying an American flag. Or in the reporting of that heartbreaking story from San Bernardino, Calif., of the husband of a pregnant woman arrested by those cruel federal immigration authorities. And you can see the signs of it as former CIA Director John Brennan, drone-master, becomes the left's Sir Galahad in their battle against their dragon.

These signs point to the left's gorging on wild emotion; and violence, both rhetorical and physical, is unleashed as the midterms grow near.

The other day in Portland, Paul Welch, 38, a cook and liberal Bernie Sanders supporter, carried an American flag in an anti-fascist protest. Black-clad and masked antifa thugs — the violent shock troops of the left — told him to drop the flag, saying it was a symbol of fascism. He refused. A video that has gone viral shows what happened next. He was beaten to the ground with a club and hospitalized.

Yet Democratic leaders won't be pressed on it. The midterms are approaching. Power is at stake.

And what of that emotional story of the poor pregnant woman on her way to the hospital to deliver a child? Her husband, a Mexican immigrant in the country illegally, was arrested by federal ICE agents. Many media outlets offered this up, emotionally, as evidence of Republican cruelty.

Hearing the shorthand story on the radio in the car, I couldn't help but picture the heartbreak: the woman weeping, the husband hauled away by thuggish federal cops and shouting "My son! My son!" as the baby was being born.

It turned out that the husband, Joel Arrona-Lara, was wanted for murder. Mexico had asked that he be arrested. He allegedly beat a man to death. Yet even when the media learned that fact, it was underplayed. Why? Because who wants to get in the way of emotion when a story about immigration policy is being told?

But the most amazing sign is the elevation of former CIA boss John Brennan to hero status. He has repeatedly accused Trump of treason. Yet Brennan offers no proof. Trump stripped Brennan of his security clearance, a perk used in Washington to financial advantage, and this has been characterized by many in the Democratic Media Complex as an attempt to silence Brennan. But Brennan hasn't been silenced, only magnified. Trump relishes this kind of thing.

Trump would rather distract from special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team winning a conviction of Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and the guilty plea of his former fixer, Michael Cohen.

Yet in the more hysterical punditry about Brennan being silenced, a statement from Sen. Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was ignored.

In a round of television news interviews on Sunday, Brennan lashed out at Trump. Brennan has the right to speak his mind, to write op-eds for the New York Times, to be paid for his speech from MSNBC.

The interviewers used Brennan as a cudgel to achieve their goal, a beating administered to Trump. That didn't bother me.

What did is that in the interviews I watched, Burr's statement was avoided. And Brennan wasn't asked about his history of lying to Congress on drone strikes and other matters.

The TV talking heads didn't want to ruin the emotional content of their shows.

For decades, the American left and their handmaidens in the Democratic Media Complex viewed the "intelligence community" with proper suspicion and fear. Yet now, as the left reaches for power, Brennan is elevated. And as they become the statists, they stoke emotion.