RICHARD FERNANDEZ: I WANT MY MONEY BACK:

After more than seven years of “hope and change” not just the US but the world seems to have arrived at a strange and unexpected destination.  Peggy Noonan, who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, asks her readers if they’ve looked around lately and noticed how strange the scenery is.

Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will. … My Moment came a month ago. I’d recently told a friend my emotions felt too close to the surface—for months history had been going through me and I felt like a vibrating fork. …

Because my country is in trouble. Because I felt anguish at all the estrangements. Because some things that shouldn’t have changed have changed. Because too much is being lost. Because the great choice in a nation of 320 million may come down to Crazy Man versus Criminal. And yes, I know this is all personal, and not column-ish.

But that was my Moment.

You’ll feel better the next day, I promise, but you won’t be able to tell yourself that this is history as usual anymore. This is big, what we’re living through.

As Richard writes, “The significance of Peggy Noonan’s 2016 moment is not only that it so perfectly coincides with the end point of seven years of progress towards Hope and Change, but it marks the moment when the penny finally dropped for the American upper middle class.”

But even at this late date, Noonan still can’t see that already chose the Crazy Man once, back in the fall of 2008.

Despite being a speechwriter in the 1980s for a man who spent decades doing his homework to transition from Hollywood studio system actor to president, Noonan didn’t recognize in 2008 that the DNC-MSM myth machine had created a fictitious construct as thoroughly fake as an movie character. Given a choice between someone whose narrative was as entirely contrived as a cartoon superhero posing in front of Styrofoam Roman columns, versus an earnest war hero and then-Alaska governor, Noonan, like many elites, went with the cartoon superhero. She apparently forgot to heed David Mamet’s warning that “If you’re in the con game and you don’t know who the mark is … you’re the mark.”

And apparently having that moment, experiencing that epiphany, is still too painful for her.