THE BRAIN-DEAD CONVENTIONAL WISDOM.

Democrat operative with a byline at the Los Angeles Times Doyle McManus frets that #CrookedHillary will stick.  (I prefer Naggin' Crooked Hillary, but whatever.)  How, though, does Naggin' Crooked Hillary push back?

She'll start by doing her best to ignore Trump's jibes. He'd like nothing better than to lure her into a Nixonian response: “I am not crooked.”

“Don't expect us to engage directly on his attacks like 'Crooked Hillary,'” a Clinton aide told me. “He does best when he gets others to engage in insults.”

Instead, Clinton says her first response to Trump will be to change the subject to her strengths — her long list of policy proposals.

“I'm answering him all the time,” she told reporters in Virginia on Monday. “I'm answering him on what I think voters care about” — issues such as child care and the federal minimum wage.

Yeah, that's predictable.  Ask Debbie "Blabbermouth" Schultz, "Gators or 'Noles?" and her response will be "Any of the Democrats will do a better job with the issues the people care about."  But will it work?  Ask nominee Marco Rubio or nominee Jeb Bush.  Oh, wait.

Point, for those of you who could benefit by a modicum of repetition: the Trump campaign has caught on because it's so gol-darn refreshing.  Substance is for the at-the-end-of-the-day-bipartisan-compromise-process-consensus-comprehensive-reform crowd.  Snore.

(Never mind that Naggin' Crooked Hillary is a landlubber with no clue what "loose cannon" refers to.)

Still, there's one more thing Clinton can and should do on the “honesty” front:

Talk more about reforming the campaign finance system. That sounds counterintuitive, I know, because she's knee-deep in big-money fundraising, from Wall Street donors to super PACS.

She's caught in a familiar trap for Democratic candidates: She's denounced the campaign finance system, but she's using it to bankroll her election. When she launched her presidential bid, Clinton said campaign finance reform would be one of the four “pillars” of her platform. But aside from a speech outlining reform proposals last year, she hasn't talked about the issue much.

Nor can she. Democrat policy proposals are palliatives that keep the poor poor whilst generate rents for the rent-seekers to dissipate.

To Pajamas Media's David Solway, the failures of Beltway conventional wisdom are evident, and pose greater threats.

When a civilization, or its cultural and intellectual curators who wield the instruments of power and authority, re-interprets reality as merely discretionary, decline and eventual extinction are guaranteed, and the Angel of History will preside over the ruins. When pretending becomes believing, and believing becomes mandatory, and calling out the naked emperor is punishable by law or fine or ostracism or loss of employment or worse, and when the scale of such abuses becomes effectively global, the “lifeworld,” or communal nature of daily life, as we have known it has ceased to exist.

Biology, Nature, economic forces and human nature are not disposable artifacts, fashion accessories or hypothetical creations of unanchored will. They can be investigated, plumbed, to some limited degree modified and harnessed to advantage, but they cannot be turned into something they are not or conveniently abolished without unleashing tragic consequences.

Perhaps that includes the Trumpening.  Larry Kudlow uses the overused buzzword, "disruptor," in characterizing the phenomenon.  But when the conventional wisdom is brain-dead, perhaps disruption (in the traditional sense of the word) is the rational response.