The Democrats are ready and rarin’ to go with the 2020 presidential race, and so it’s out with the old and in with, well, the older. While the Left takes pains today to rail against “old white men,” that’s precisely what some of those currently sucking up the White House-hopeful oxygen are. Moreover, the new Democrat policy push, socialism, is far older than they.
Just about a week after announcing his run, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has raised $10 million. Ex-vice president Joe Biden, who’s polling high among possible 2020 contenders, just got “rock star treatment” at a Fort Lauderdale gig that earned him personally $150,000. Then there’s former New York City mayor Little Big Gulp (a.k.a. Michael Bloomberg), the billionaire who often teases presidential runs. He just captured the unofficial endorsement of fellow billionaire Warren Buffet.
Oh, on inauguration day 2020, Bernie would be 79 years old, and Biden and Little Big Gulp (LBG) would be 78. Thus would any of them easily be the oldest man ever elected to the presidency; President Trump was 70 when taking the oath in 2016, and Ronald Reagan was 73 at his second term’s start.
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We can add to this that, according to a former Hillary Clinton pollster, there are scenarios under which his ex-boss could run for a third time. Clinton would be 73 on Inauguration Day 2020, although she may as well be 93 given her apparent health woes.
Lest I be misunderstood, I actually favor older people, which is why seeing an 80-year-old doctor recently pleased me greatly (he’s closer to my age — not chronologically — but soul-wise. I’m sort of like Mayberry meets the Middle Ages). But, first, while I don’t know if 80 is the new 60 or just the new 79, it is interesting how no one bats much of an eye anymore at septuagenarian presidency seekers.
Though “only” 69 at his first swearing in, Reagan had to deftly use humor to deflect concerns Democrats raised about his age. In fact, his quip during the second debate with Democrat nominee Walter Mondale (55 at the time) in 1984 “put the issue [to] rest,” reported the Washington Times in 2011. “‘I am not going to, for political purposes,’ he said, with mock seriousness, ‘exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience.’”
The problem, though, is that today’s Democrat gray-fox contenders are wizened but not wise, aged but not ageless, in the sense of professing the ever and eternally correct: Truth.
LBG’s political claim to fame (shame?) is that he outlawed large soft drinks in New York City and has spent millions opposing Second Amendment rights. What a misfire.
It’s hard to know what sets Biden apart today; he represents yesterday’s Democrat Party and, like LBG, is actually viewed as too “conservative” by the contemporary cutting-edge Cortez crew. In vogue now is the Green Leap Forward, abolishing ICE, tearing down border walls, identity politics, and intersectionality. But if Biden can copy the designers of Democrat 10.0 the way he plagiarized British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, he perhaps has hope.
But Sanders is the real interesting case here. With socialism becoming fashionable, one could say that the longtime self-described socialist’s time has come — except that he’s the wrong age, sex, and race. Yet more significant is that he’s a leader very, very wrong for any time.
While Sanders is reputed to be more honest than other leftists, as a rule, politicians are power seekers who know well why late comedian Lenny Bruce said, “We’re all as honest as we can afford to be”: Marketability takes precedence over honesty. So we should pay more attention to what politicians have done, and said behind the scenes, than what they profess publicly.
By this measure, the grandfatherly Sanders appears a rather dangerous man. Note that after he and his wife returned from a 1988 trip to the Soviet Union — which was known for gulags and having murdered at least 20 million of its own citizens — he praised the evil empire in a speech. This prompted even a former prime minister of Sweden, one of the world’s most liberal nations, to mock the senator in a tweet (below).
Praising Marxist systems, which killed approximately 100 million people during the 20th century and traded in misery and despair, wasn’t unusual for Sanders, though. In fact, the senator is “facing renewed scrutiny over a catalog of comments he made in the 1980s praising the Soviet Union, offering advice to Nicaragua’s socialist government — and even saying breadlines in communist countries are a ‘good thing,’” Fox News tells us. Just consider the following tweet.
As the above video and Fox News also inform, Sanders praised the brutal Cuban Marxist regime of Fidel Castro as well, saying that the dictator “educated their [the Cubans’] kids, gave their kids healthcare, totally transformed the society.”
Clearly, Sanders may slickly market his socialist vision now, but seldom asked is: What is that vision? Is it at all troubling that Sanders never saw a Marxist regime he wouldn’t praise?
This is especially relevant since the senator just penned an op-ed entitled “It’s time to complete the revolution we started.” In it, he again is careful with marketing, spouting standard left-wing criticisms of President Trump and “inequality.” But since “revolution” is standard Marxist talk and since those preaching revolution generally birth devolution, a mainstream media that actually sought truth (a fantasy, I know) would ask some pressing questions. To wit:
Senator, what is your ultimate vision for a “socialist” United States? I’m not asking here what your short-term or intermediate goals would be (for the next few years, let’s say) if you became president. Rather, how do you define “socialism”? What’s the end game? Does your socialism involve government ownership of the means of production?
“Wait, Duke!” critics may exclaim. “That’s not socialism — that’s communism!” Well, not really.
Socialism has been around since the early 19th century, and there have been different conceptions of it. Note, however, that under the doctrine that popularized it, the Marxist one, socialism is the transitional phase between capitalism and communism, where the government owns the means of production. Digest that for a moment.
“Communism,” on the other hand, is the fanciful and ever-elusive culmination of the socialist revolution, the stage where government just melts away and people, voluntarily and harmoniously, live forever after in a state of economic equality and bliss. That’s the theory, anyway.
In other words, there can be a big con here. Whether Sanders, a past Soviet leader, Castro, or Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro or late Hugo Chavez, anyone who intends the above could have said or can say — without lying and with a straight face — that he’s merely a “socialist.” He’ll mean one thing; the listeners may infer another.
Note here, the brutal USSR stood for what?
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its leaders called their program socialism — just as ol’ Bernie labels his own.
Sanders’ supporters also emphasize that he’s a democratic socialist. But know that the name of North Korea, a bizarre and savage regime, is the DPRK.
That stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“Democratic” sometimes just means two lions and one lamb will vote on what to have for dinner.
So ignore the marketing, my friends, and try to find the ingredients label. Also know that besides youth and inexperience, people such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) only differ from Sanders in that they weren’t around in the ’80s to praise the left-wing tyrants du jour. But they all embrace hoary and horrible ideas that, ironically, were birthed by men not only old and white, but who are as dead as their doctrine is deadly.
Image: ANNECORDON / iStock / Getty Images Plus
