If you’d asked me even six months ago, I would have told you that the Republicans were the party of shooting themselves in the foot.

That, even when given great advantages by the American voting public — simultaneous majority control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as the presidency — their leaders managed to squander those and disappoint their most ardent supporters.

That, when given the power to deliver on key promises made to their constituents such as balancing the budget or reducing waste of taxpayer money, the GOP too often devolves into power struggles, indecision, conflicts of interest and, sometimes, corruption.

But as we move into the final days before the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrat Party is giving Republican tone-deafness and incompetence a very public run for the money — and then some.

Here are 10 big-ticket causes that have put Democrats largely on the wrong side of most Americans ahead of the midterm elections:

The media hates him, Hollywood hates him but every hysterical piece of abuse they throw at him just makes Trump stronger and now the Democrats are heading for a midterms disaster. It all boils down to one thing:

President Trump is winning.

There is simply no other way to fairly interpret the fact that he’s just hit a new high in his approval rating.

Even better for Trump, he’s officially more popular than his predecessor Barack Obama was at the exact same stage of his first tenure as President.

According to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is now at 47% approval, compared to Obama’s 45% two weeks before the midterm elections in 2010.

Given all the fire, brimstone and perpetual outrage about Trump since he won the White House, this is a truly remarkable state of affairs.

Of course, America’s liberals will respond to the shock poll in the way they respond to all things Trump - with fury, incredulity and by sticking their collective heads in the sand.

Which is why, in two weeks time, he may deliver the biggest knockout punch of his presidency.

If the New Democrat Party was smart, it would do what the old Democrat Party did long ago:

Always sound centrist if not conservative in the last weeks of a campaign, get elected, then revert to form and pursue a left-wing agenda for a year or two—and then repeat the chameleon cycle every two to four years.

But although many Democrats in Trump states still dance the old bipartisan two-step, lots of blinkered progressive wolves don’t even bother to put on the sheep’s clothing.

Evidently, the new progressive and radical Democrat Party is far more honest—or perhaps far more hubristic—than in the past. So what now looks and sounds like a wolf is a wolf.

Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from 2016. Or rather, they still believe it is 2008 all over again, with a host of wannabe Obamas on the 2020 horizon, all appealing to identity politics, Maenad feminism, and neo-socialism.

Thanks to four wolf-made disasters, they are in for a rude shock two weeks from today (10/23).

In 2014, Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran Bureau Chief, was arrested and spent two years in prison.

Iran kept him in one of its worst prisons, he slept on a damp concrete floor, was denied medical treatment, experienced hallucinations due to sleep deprivation and was abused by his captors. His wife was told that her legs would be cut off and her husband would be thrown off a cliff if she didn’t confess.

While Jamal Khashoggi has often been misidentified as a Washington Post journalist, all he did for the radical leftist paper owned by Amazon’s CEO is write editorials promoting the Muslim Brotherhood agenda.

The Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Bin Laden pal was never a journalist. The closest he came to it was acting as a terrorist propagandist in Afghanistan, glamorizing Osama bin Laden.

Why then is the WaPo stoking a frenzy of Khashoggimania?  Because it and all the liberal media are on the side of Islamists and not America.

With yesterday’s announcement (10/23) by U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton that the United States is terminating Ronald Reagan’s landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, much analysis has focused on the impact of that decision on U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations.

Relatively little, however, has been said about how the INF treaty termination could impact Russia-China relations, especially in the military sphere.

Indeed, there is reason to assume that one of John Bolton’s strategic calculi in his push for a unilateral U.S. treaty withdrawal is its detrimental impact on burgeoning China-Russia military relations.

Bolton’s Snooker is a geopolitical tour de force two-fer.  Here’s how it works.

Do not assume that Italy’s insurgent coalition will capitulate to EU demands if risk spreads on Italian debt blow through the fatal line of 400 basis points.

The European Commission’s strategy of ‘controlled escalation’ relies on tacit collusion with bond vigilantes and hedge funds to ratchet up the pressure. The method is to squeeze the capital buffers of Italian banks and ultimately to set off a deposit run, hoping that such financial vandalism does not set off contagion to Portugal, Spain, and Greece.

This is a dangerous game to play unless you can be sure that the Lega-Five Star alliance will back down rather than resort to radical measures in self-defence. The obvious risk is that Italy’s budget fight with Brussels will cause a pan-European financial crisis before either side blinks.

“Brussels can keep sending its silly letters until Christmas. Our budget is not going to change. The gentlemen speculators will just have to get used to it, because we will not retreat,” says Lega strongman, Matteo Salvini, relishing a political knife-fight with the EU all the way to the European elections next May.

It’s a fight we should want Salvini to win.

The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2018 World Competitiveness Report ranks the United States No. 1 in global competitiveness, up from No. 3 in the past few years and its first top ranking in a decade. A high ranking matters.

As the WEF reports: “Global competitiveness is determined by the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country … And productivity leads to growth ... and improved well-being. The U.S.’s top ranking therefore suggests a lot of growth and prosperity to come."

According to the Davos elite (who are no fans of Donald Trump), the U.S. is indeed “great again,” to borrow a Trumpian slogan. It is the country, according to the WEF, that should best prosper in Davos’ “fourth industrial revolution.”

As the world’s most innovative economy, America is well positioned to take advantage of the new competitive environment. This should be welcome news for the Trump administration and a Republican Party fighting to retain control of Congress.  Let’s look at the details.

What has transformed the Democrat party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement?

Even party chairman Tom Perez concedes that there are “no moderate Democrats left,” and lately the rantings of Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez confirm that diagnosis.

How did it get this way?  Let’s start with Obama, who started who started being worshipped as the Democrat Savior and has now become the Fallen God.  It goes downhill from there.

Why can’t women stop buying the Marxist narrative?

If you’ve read this and you’re going “uh, what?” because you’re a woman and not Marxist, don’t worry. What I’m doing is echoing a WaPo editorial by Victoria Bissell Brown (a retired Grinnell College history professor) last Friday (10/12) who starts her insanely stupid article by asking:

Why can’t men organize to change themselves?

Why, Vicky, (yeah, I’m fairly sure you don’t want me to call you Vicky, but since you’re functioning at about a six-year-old level, that’s the best you deserve) that’s an amazing question, that probably made the Post editors drool at your amazingness.

It’s almost as good as “why can’t you take a valium like a normal human being, and stop being crazy?” which is what your editorial made me ask.

Her article starts with a confession of spousal abuse:

Christopher Columbus was an immigrant, but it hasn’t done him much good in the eyes of the Left. The Left in this case prefers someone like Elizabeth Warren, who can claim to be as much as 1/1024th “Native American.” Big whoop.

Columbus was a Catholic and a representative of Western Civilization, so the Left—all those white liberals—would rather that Warren’s distant ancestors had chopped off Columbus’s head and torn out his heart, because liberalism, as James Burnham reminded us long ago, is the ideology of Western suicide.

Beyond the ritualistic incantations of “racism” and “genocide,” the Left sees American expansion—geopolitical and cultural—as bad, (and points to Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer as among its chief villains) and American retreat as good.

But neither Andrew Jackson nor Custer is the villain the Left makes both men out to be. They were American heroes.

China has been brandishing its might and the world is taking notice. Not with military exercises, cyber attacks, or by harassing vessels in international waters.

China has been doing these things, of course, but its latest show of force comes straight from its heart: displays of ultra-nationalism by its diplomats indulging in chauvinistic and all-too-official bullying tirades..

As China’s economy and military might have grown, Chinese leaders have begun to expect obeisance from other powers, both great and especially small.

In 2010, then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi hinted at this in Hanoi when he harangued the assembled representatives of ASEAN with his admonition that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”  Since then the bullying and arrogance has gotten so much worse.