https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-3-17-xd8qchptp7qyv9l3j120iv19c0ljll Just a couple of days ago, in the run-up to the latest round of Democratic presidential primaries, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders faced off in a one-on-one debate. Mano-a-mano, as they say. I’ve lately adopted a strategy of not watching these debates (it’s too painful), but rather getting a transcript after the fact. I […]
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/biden_and_sanders_tweedledum_and_tweedledee.html
“Why is it that people with the most narrow of minds seem to have the widest of mouths.” –Lewis Carroll. ”
That was some debate this pair had, each expecting us to up and vote for one of them.
At Pajamas Media, Stephen Green rightly titled his live blog on the debate, “Grumpy Old White Men: Drunkblogging the Democratic Diversity Debate. But these two old codgers are beyond grumpy; they are both tethered to the already done or distant past.
The first half hour of this match was dedicated to the current crisis of the coronavirus. They both puffed themselves up to tell us all what they would do; each and every suggestion from both of them were things President Trump has already done, already put in place. It was as though neither of them has paid a bit of attention to how on top of this pandemic Trump has been while they were thoroughly absorbed by his attempted impeachment. Biden bragged about the Obama administration’s action on H1N1 in 2008-09, but didn’t mention that it was disastrous. Nothing was implemented in that case until a thousand Americans had died and 300,000 were hospitalized. Neither Biden nor Sanders prescribed a single thing that has not already been achieved. Both of them repeatedly mixed up past epidemics. It was a thoroughly wasted first half hour of the debate. Not a word uttered by either candidate would comfort or likely win over a single new voter.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/comprehensive-immigration-reform-should-be-renamed-michael-cutler/
We must never lose sight of the fact that Bernie Sanders is a pro-communist candidate who has called for a “Political Revolution” in America. He must be taken at his word.
Sanders steadfastly lauds Cuba’s Castro for providing health care and education for Cubans, blithely ignoring the barbaric brutality of the Cuban communist government that has caused many Cubans to flee Cuba by perilously taking to the sea on virtually anything that floats. Sanders also ignores the actual collusion between Castro and Russia that brought the world to the brink of a nuclear World War III in October 1962 when Castro welcomed nuclear-tipped Russian missiles that could have struck cities across the east coast of the United States including Washington, DC and New York.
Bernie has also expressed similar sentiments about former Nicaraguan communist and totalitarian Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega.
It is beyond disturbing and very telling, that Sanders, a candidate for the U.S. presidency, would hold such anti-American foreign leaders in high esteem.
My dad used to tell me that if you want to turn capitalists into communists, take away their money.
It is my belief that Bernie Sanders plans to achieve a total revolution in America through passage of Comprehensive Immigration Reform coupled with his off the charts costly programs to provide for everyone in the United States, not just citizens of the United States with “Medicare for all,” free college and a number of other such expensive programs that would crash our systems.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-israel-problem-11583193753?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
Bernie Sanders would be the first Jewish president. He would also be the president most hostile to Israel.
Two big events this week are bringing this curious dynamic into focus. The first is that the Vermont senator heads into the Super Tuesday primaries leading in the most delegate-rich states. The second is the Israeli election.
In the run-up to these votes, Mr. Sanders has treated us to the full Bernie. At the last Democratic debate, he was asked about a tweet accusing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of providing a platform for leaders “who express bigotry.” Mr. Sanders responded by calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “reactionary racist.”
But for all the fretting about Mr. Sanders, pro-Israel Democrats have a much larger problem. At home, their wing of the party is aging out. Abroad, the Israeli people have reached a post-Oslo consensus about their security that puts them increasingly in conflict with the more dovish preferences of American Democrats.
Let’s start with age. Of the most pro-Israel Democratic leaders, Joe Biden is 77. Rep. Nita Lowey is 82 and retiring. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is 79; Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is 80; Rep. Eliot Engel is 73. At 69, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is the baby of the group.
Before getting into high gear regarding Bernie Sanders & Co., it may be useful to review some previous thoughts for good background information. So, let’s take a look…
Spend some time on many-to-most university campuses these days; read or listen to numerous Jewish commentators and editorialists in the mainstream media dealing with Israel and the Middle East.
With rare exceptions, you’ll be hard pressed finding Jews (let alone others) who have not succumbed to the pressure to adopt one set of standards by which Israel and Zionism is studied and judged, and another entirely different set by which the rest of the Middle East and North Africa—indeed, the rest of the world–is scrutinized. While Zionism is routinely vilified, have you ever heard the word Arabism even mentioned? https://ekurd.net/arabism-zionism-journeys-2019-01-12 Has it come up in any of the Democrat debates to see who gets to confront President Trump in the-fast approaching American election?
Frequently, Jewish organizations (J Street U, Jewish Voice For Peace, and too many others–including even Hillel, at times) are prominent, or at least collaborative, in partaking in the one-sided Israel and Zionism-bashing goings-on of other groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Students Association, radical Leftists, and “Progressive” Liberals.
While students learn about the ‘evil’ quest of Jews to cast off their millennial victim, scapegoat, and whipping post status, they’ll neither hear nor read anything about the plights of scores of millions of other non-Arab peoples in the region. They won’t find, for example, a local chapter ofStudents for Justice in Kurdistan or for the Kabyle or Amazigh (Berber”) people, whose programs they can attend. And they won’t find a post-Zionist, “Progressive” Hebrew or other professor mentioning anything about them either. Together, just the Kurds and Imazighen alone account for some 75-80 million non-Arab people in a region that Arabs claim to be merely “purely Arab patrimony…the real main cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a nutshell.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/28/14-crucial-questions-that-bernie-sanders-surrog
If Ilhan Omar is who Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders entrusts with Minnesota in 2020, America deserves a response to these burning questions about her past.
Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is perhaps best known for her antisemitic rhetoric, radically left-wing policy, and mounting allegations that she committed marriage and immigration fraud.
But as I argue in my new book, “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party,” the sensational aspects of Omar’s story belie the fact that she is not only one of the most prominent symbols of the Democratic Party’s ascendant far-left base, but a powerful player in her own right. Her collusion with Islamist adversaries foreign and domestic, and alleged criminality and proven corruption, should send chills down the spines of Americans.
Ilhan Omar Is a Significant Democratic Player
Omar’s clout was demonstrated most recently when Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders tabbed her campaign co-chair in the all-important 2020 state of Minnesota. The congresswoman also recently introduced a battery of bills concerning foreign policy that senior Obama National Security Council official Ben Rhodes characterized as the “new progressive baseline.”
Lest we forget, this is a House member who, in spite of her known virulent antisemitism, blame America first positions, and potentially compromising background, retains a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which grapples with the most sensitive national security and foreign policy information and issues.
The party signaled a willingness to allow her to act with impunity, effectively condoning her rhetoric and behavior by refusing to censure her by name for her comments, specifically regarding the so-called Israel lobby, and her invocation of other antisemitic tropes.
Omar’s symbolic and substantive significance is summarized simply in the reality that a vote for Sanders is a vote for Omar and their shared agenda of socialism at home and submission abroad. Yet she has faced almost zero media scrutiny. She and her supporters attack as bigots the few who dare pursue her story. But it would be bigoted to treat her differently from any other politician on the basis of her identity traits.
In writing “American Ingrate,” I sought answers to some of the most vexing yet basic issues about Omar’s background, positions, and associations. I delivered a list of questions via email first to Omar’s chief communications staffer in September 2019, then to her general press account in December 2019, and again in February 2020 following the release of “American Ingrate.” Neither Omar nor her office ever responded.
Omar Should Answer These Questions
https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/27/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-ilhan-omar/
Ben Weingarten’s new book ‘American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of The Democratic Party,’ makes a compelling argument that Democrats’ sharp leftward turn threatens both American ideals and national security.
There is always a temptation in politics, and indeed in all human life, to reduce people to symbolic representations. Storytelling — or, if you prefer the D.C. swamp lingo, “the narrative” — remains the evolutionarily prescribed way to relay complex information to large groups of people and ensure they retain the core message. Narratives need heroes and villains, someone who will embody within himself the key ideas being transmitted.
Understanding this is important to getting to the heart of Ben Weingarten’s American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of The Democratic Party. While ostensibly it is a book about Ilhan Omar and her sordid history – allegations of immigration fraud, long-standing ties to anti-American regimes and terror-linked groups, her long train of antisemitic remarks – this is not Weingarten’s real focus.
Weingarten has not really written a book about Omar so much as a book about how it is that a person with Omar’s baggage became a battle standard to which all the left now repairs. They do not defend her in spite of her foibles, but because of them.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/how-can-bernie-sanders-happen-in-america/
There are many good reasons not to normalize socialism here.
A number of pundits have recently argued that younger voters, especially those under 30, are less inclined to be bothered when they hear the word “socialism,” since they have no firsthand memory of the Cold War.
To some extent, this must be true. Those who weren’t alive during socialism’s cruelest catastrophes — or even its many banal failures — will be less put off by the idea. Then again, if a presidential candidate were praising the excellent public transportation system of the Third Reich or going on about the some alleged benefit to American slavery, they would rightly be chased from the public square forever even though the vast majority of voters have no firsthand knowledge of the Holocaust or slavery. Anti-Semitism and racism haven’t disappeared, and neither has Marx, sadly.
For that matter, many Americans — including Bernie — lived through Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao and they still champion the idea of socialism. It’s completely unsurprising that Bernie once defended the Viet Cong. Because many of us over 40 immediately recognize who Bernie is. I grew up with people like him. In those days, though, adults generally didn’t take their crazy disheveled Commie uncles who taught economics at the local commuter college very seriously. Maybe that’s the problem.
It’s true that Bernie’s fans aren’t acquainted with socialism (and, incidentally, this is true only if we ignore the existence of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, China, etc.), but the fact is that most Bernie supporters don’t seem to have a rudimentary grasp of basic economics much less the “socialism” they think exists in Scandinavian nations. What they do have are lots of feelings. And, like millions of other saps over the past century-plus, they’ve been enticed by the collectivist “ethic” — its revolutionary appeal, its religiosity, and its quixotic promises.
“Fascism is remembered as a crime,” John Hayward correctly points out. “Communism is treated like a mistake.” I’d add that capitalism is judged by its few failures and socialism by its few successes. Sanders will never praise the “literary programs” of any non-tyranny. But if I’ve learned anything from Twitter — or perhaps, more accurately, if Twitter has solidified any of my existing suspicions — it’s that academia is teeming with hard-left apologists. There are plenty of fantastic historians out there, of course, but many of loudest academics, the ones media often relies on, are either apologists for socialism or socialists themselves.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/bernie_sanders_wins_the_nevada_caucuses_democrats_hardest_hit.html
That Bernie Sanders has won the Nevada caucuses is a one-line story: Bernie won in Nevada.
The real story is the absolute horror that establishment Democrats are experiencing as they realize that Bernie momentum leaves them with only two choices at the Democrat party convention in July: Yield to the passionate base and anoint Bernie as their candidate, despite the probability (although, sadly, not the certainty) that he will lose spectacularly; or they can override the passionate base and, in a backroom deal, give the nomination to someone else, yielding to an equally spectacular schism in the party as the Bernie Bros get angry.
Here’s the straight news portion of this post: As of this writing, Bernie Sanders is the undisputed winner of the Nevada caucuses. Although counting is going slowly, his lead in the districts counted is so complete that Bernie is already declaring victory, as are most in the media:
It’s unlikely that this will change when all of the precincts have reported. Not all is rosy, though, because Bernie’s win was apparently unaided by the minority voters who are essential to a Democrat victory in November:
Now to the fun part of this post, which is seeing establishment Democrats (all leftists but none as left as Bernie) terrified that they’re watching their party implode. And no, this is not a re-hash of Republican concerns in 2016. Back then, while the establishment disliked Trump’s style, his message was mainstream and consistent with American values through the end of the 20th century. Bernie, on the other hand, is charting an entirely new direction for America.
Zac Petkanas worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and worked for Harry Reid. In a tweet he later deleted, he stated “We are watching Trump win re-election in real time. Just a disaster.” He deleted that tweet after pushback, but continued to worry.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/open_borders_bernie_sanders_wants_full_government_benefits_for_illegal_aliens.html
In his Nevada victory speech, Bernie promised that all Americans will pay for Democrat mistakes, subsidizing not only citizens but also illegal aliens.
Milton Friedman, who was so focused on economics that he forgot that nations need a shared culture to function, believed open borders represented the free flow of both financial and human capital. Friedman, however, drew a single bright line when it came to open borders –no welfare:
Immigration is a particularly difficult subject. There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite. Your proposal that someone only be able to come for employment is a good one but it would not solve the problem completely. The real hitch is in denying social benefits to the immigrants who are here. That is very hard to do, much harder than you would think as we have found out in California.
Bernie Sanders has no time for that economic reality:
Today we got 500,000 people sleeping out on the streets of America. Today we have 18 million families paying 50% of their limited incomes for housing. Today we have hundreds of thousands of bright young people who cannot afford to get a higher education. Today we have 45 million paying a student debt that many of them cannot afford to pay.
