There was a time when Hillary Clinton was a bona fide leftist radical, but those days have past, swallowed up by her lust for power and money.

Don’t get me wrong; she’s still a true liberal who stands for everything I oppose, and her White House ambitions and her flawed character are a dangerous mixture. She’ll say and do whatever she has to in order to win.

But as I’ve said, I’m not that fearful that she’ll even be nominated. What does have me concerned is the degree of extremism inhabiting the Democratic Party that makes it necessary and even acceptable for her to make radical statements to stay in contention. What does concern me is that such extremism is no longer considered as such by an ever-growing number of people. I’m troubled by the number of rank-and-file Democratic voters willing to overlook almost anything to advance an agenda they support. I’m alarmed by the lack of moral clarity among people who see nothing wrong with Hillary’s trail of scandals or her arrogant refusal to address the most current batch.

I guess I need to make a better effort to fit into this century, where morality is relative, ethics are situational and truth is subjective.

Let’s look at Hillary’s most recent outrageous utterance to show how far we’ve descended. In some choreographed meeting with “economists” (read: ministers of social justice), she pretended to study a graph charting the growth of real wages for the wealthiest Americans. It was reportedly a “bar so steep it hardly fit on the chart.”

Clinton, feigning indignation and non-hypocrisy, reportedly pointed to the top category and said the economy requires a “toppling” of the wealthiest 1 percent. The economy requires a toppling? I guess that was an inadvertent misprint. Surely, The New York Times meant to say, “Hillary Clinton’s pseudo-populist campaign requires that she position herself as a public servant who lies awake at night agonizing over the plague of income inequality and contemplating what she can do to rescue the bedraggled, impecunious and deprived 99 percent of Americans, with whom she could once identify and now can only imitate.”

I’ve long marveled at liberal voters’ willingness to ignore the gross inconsistency between the causes liberal politicians champion and the conduct of their personal lives. I now understand it, however, because I realize that liberals judge people not based on their personal character or conduct but based on the political and social views they publicly promote. This is how Hillary knows she can make whatever ridiculously hypocritical statements she wants and get a pass from the Democratic base.

Sadly, Republicans are not going to lay a hand on Democratic candidates by pointing out their hypocrisy, so maybe they should consider the novel idea of contesting their ideas instead of emulating their phony platform of compassion. For whether or not Hillary’s the nominee, the eventual Democratic presidential candidate will mouth the same platitudes and manufactured grievances.

There are so many things wrong with Hillary’s alleged plan to “topple” the rich. First, her statement assumes that the top tier of income earners is destroying this miserable economy. For six-plus years, President Barack Obama has been peddling the myth that the corporatist banker fat cats caused the 2008 financial crisis, when the evidence indicates that the primary culprits were do-gooder liberal politicians — the same ones who began pointing fingers at the bankers as soon as the crisis hit to deflect blame from themselves and make convenient scapegoats on whose back they would further grow the regulatory leviathan.

Second, her statement probably assumes that most of those in the top 1 percent got where they are as a result of corruption or manipulating the system, which is equally untrue — except, of course, in the case of the Clintons.

Third, if it doesn’t assume corruption or manipulation, then it assumes that it is inherently immoral for some to earn a great deal more than others. That is, in fact, what many of the leftist community organizers believe, but it is out of phase with the American idea — not to mention morally wrong to demonize the successful, or else God wouldn’t have prohibited covetousness.

Fourth, Hillary’s statement implies that this disparity in incomes occurred because of policies she opposes, but in fact, she effectively supports the economic policies of Obama, on whose watch these current disparities exist.

Fifth, it assumes that there is a fair, legal and effective way to remedy this disparity, but short of fascist, Marxist confiscation, no such remedy exists, and those tried by socialists in the past have failed.

Sixth, it assumes that even if there were an effective remedy for the disparity, it would somehow make society better or help the other 99 percent, but it wouldn’t, because punishing success and penalizing wealth would hurt not only the wealthy but also the overall economy.

Seventh, the statement betrays an astonishingly hostile attitude toward the undying ideal upon which this nation was founded — liberty.

I sincerely hope that as this campaign unfolds, the Republican nominee will have the courage to challenge the underlying assumptions of socialism that animate the modern Democratic Party and will recapture and articulate the messages of liberty and economic growth and explain how a rising tide truly does lift all boats.

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