J Robert Smith
- Jan. 25, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan. 28, 2021
Bernie Sanders, the self-avowed “Democratic” socialist, and not really independent from Vermont, has something half right.
From Chris Enloe at The Blaze, January 23, 2020:
“Given all that we face, now is not the time to think small. It is time to think big, very big,” Sanders said on Thursday, according to McClatchy reporter Francesca Chambers.
“With Joe Biden as president and Democrats controlling the House and Senate for the first time since 2010, we will be judged on what we deliver for the American people in their time of need. The people want action, not excuses,” Sanders explained.
“And let me be very clear. I have zero doubt that unless we significantly improve the lives of the American people this year, Democrats will get wiped out in the 2022 midterm elections,” Sanders predicted. “That is what happened when Democrats had the House, the Senate and the presidency under Bill Clinton in 1994 and that is what happened under Barack Obama in 2010.” [italics added]
Bernie instinctively gets that the Biden regime leading with thuggish – dare we say, fascist inspired – threatened crackdowns on free speech and vilification of half the nation as “domestic terrorist” wannabes, racists, and people who just don’t care to get with the required goose-stepping, is dumb politics. The sham impeachment of Trump is also repugnant to millions. Not that Bernie is unsympathetic to his side’s aims. He just doesn’t think that it’s smart to race out of the gate cracking whips.
Sanders saying that Democrats must deliver for the American people and his box-checking compassion are typical boilerplate, but he’s not wrong. Where Bernie stumbles badly is on his prescriptions. For starters, checkout the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations.
You see, progressivism doesn’t work. The Obama years were marked by a poor economic recovery from the 2008-09 slump.
What really doesn’t work is socialism, which is Bernie’s god. There’s over a century now of socialism’s well chronicled failures – across the globe. But never let facts get in the way of leftist gospel.
What Bernie and other pious socialists would never acknowledge is that for four magnificent years the nation had a president who delivered for the American people. Donald J. Trump brought the nation’s economy – as of February 2020 – to heights it hadn’t experienced in 50 years. Trump made good on his pledges, and Americans across the board benefited enormously.
That was particularly true for “people of color,” who Democrats claim to champion. Actually, Democrats boost minorities when they’re receiving a government paycheck or on the dole and vote as instructed. Otherwise, minorities who dare show an ounce of “uppitiness” are, in Orwellian fashion, branded “nonminorities” or whatever the newspeak is. Go ask Candace Owens.
We wonder what Sanders thinks delivering for the American people means “in their time of need” when one of the first executive orders signed by a seemingly clueless Joe Biden killed jobs? Not a cross word has come from Sanders’ old, blanched lips about Biden’s executive order to scuttle the Keystone pipeline.
In a stroke of the pen, Biden trashed 11,000 jobs and billions of dollars in revenues. That doesn’t count the ancillary businesses and 60,000 other jobs indirectly impacted. It also puts the hurt on Canadians up Alberta way. That province’s premier, Jason Kenney, denounced the move. Canada is America’s largest energy trading partner. Cross-border economic cooperation is critical.
But the cabal pulling Joe’s strings is just warming up. The mortal sin among progressives and the left is “manmade climate change.” The radical and destructive Green New Deal is Bernie’s Ten Commandments cure for the wickedness.
Why, if we don’t impose the most draconian policies to stop all-powerful humans from despoiling the climate, the world will be rendered uninhabitable, a veritable wasteland. So, let’s really put the screws to the conventional energy industry – you know, start getting all that nasty carbon out of the air. In short order, we’ll tax and regulate the industry out of existence. Wind and solar energy and “clean” batteries will deliver us. And who can’t benefit from walking and biking around?
Or not. Conventional energy (i.e., fossil fuel) is the lifeblood of the American economy. Overtax and overregulate it and what are the consequences? Higher costs that lead to higher prices for consumers – for every product and service. Gas pump prices will rise significantly, but so will prices for groceries, clothing, home heating and cooling (how’s that sound Vegas and Orlando?) – you name it. Can working and middle-class families afford the hits to their already strapped budgets?
“Saving the planet” is tops on Bernie’s list. It’s Item #1 in the aforementioned Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations. How that squares with Bernie’s tender concerns for improving the lives of working Americans is a mystery only to the Vermont senator. Because we know his side’s climate obsession, enacted into polices, will drag the economy down, taking with it more jobs and businesses than we’d care to count.
Bernie may have prophesized rightly, in part, though: If Biden’s team keeps groveling to the crazy environmentalists and leftists in his party, 2022 might be a big blowout for Democrats in congressional midterms – provided they’re honest and fair contests. But we’ll have Bernie address that another day.
J. Robert Smith can be found on Parler @JRobertSmith, when Parler returns, and is new to Gab, again @JRobertSmith.
