By DEXTER DUGGAN
You want Russian collusion? Why settle for Donald Trump allegedly doing that when you can tremblingly visualize collusion with old, iron-fisted USSR totalitarianism?
Today’s Vladimir Putin may be a strongman, but if U.S. voters are supposed to recoil from discovering subservience toward tough guys tramping through Red Square, how about recalling when Soviet government-run food stores had nothing on the shelves while secret-police basements were well-stocked with prisoners condemned to despair if not death?
Oh, here’s why thinking of this not-so-distant history is a bad idea. That would remind us that the Soviet fist was lovingly kissed by aging U.S. left-wingers who today think they can get away with falsely denouncing Trump as a toady of post-post-Yuri Andropov Moscow.
The left’s late, fondly recalled Sen. Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) had reached out secretly to the Soviet dictatorship, hoping to undercut anti-Communist President Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984.
“Kennedy’s message was simple,” former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalled for Forbes magazine in 2009. “He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend (Soviet dictator Yuri) Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.”
And no less than current intrepid presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed socialist U.S. senator from Vermont, who caucuses at work in D.C. with Senate Democrats, went off to honeymoon in 1988 not only starry-eyed for his bride but also for the Soviet Union, their nuptial destination.
The following year Sanders admiringly visited murderous Communist dictator Fidel Castro’s miserably enslaved Cuba. The Vermont politician praised its “very profound and very deep revolution” that was providing “free health care, free education, free housing.”
Does that sound like the free stuff Sanders promises for the U.S. once voters install him as an executive-ordering president who can enact a revolution by finger-snapping?
Vanity Fair’s “Hive” feature on February 11 quoted admirer Joe Rogan, the wealthy libertarian podcast host, saying of Sanders: “He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.”
On September 5, 2019, Real Clear Politics posted a video of pro-abortion Sanders at a CNN “climate” town hall being asked about supposedly very necessary population control.
An audience member asked, in part, “Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?”
Sanders replied, “Well, Martha, the answer is yes. And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.” He went on to comment on what needs to be done with abortion and birth control to “poor countries.”
Sound like an echo of Communist China’s despicable forced-abortion campaign? But, hey, China being a Communist country, does Sanders think it has a lot to teach us on what he calls “reproductive decisions”?
On June 6, 2019, an article in the Washington Examiner recalled: “Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders warmly praised Cuba and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s after visiting each, dismissing ‘horrors’ in Cuba as right-wing propaganda and praising Soviet infrastructure even as dictatorship prevailed and the country was on the verge of collapse.”
If a hypothetical conservative presidential hopeful comparably had admiringly toured African countries that stocked slave ships bound for North America, then dominant U.S. media every day would assert that some act or the other of his was dog-whistling his longing for a new age of chained bondsmen. They’d daily demand that he forswear such sinful secret desires.
Yet where is dominant media’s overwhelming arched-eyebrow skepticism toward candidate Sanders’ decades-long love affair with radical political fixes to wrench fallible human nature into shape? He, to them, seems to be just curmudgeonly ole Bernie having the time of his life.
It’s an indulgence that the left-wing Sanderses, Schumers, and Pelosis enjoy with the media that is denied to the other side of the aisle.
It’d be hard to imagine the rather diffident former Republican speaker of the U.S. House, Paul Ryan, of Wisconsin, doing this, but give it a try, as a caller to the Rush Limbaugh program suggested on February 10:
Democrat President Barack Obama delivers his State of the Union address while Ryan, seated just behind him as befits the speaker, squirms, looks uncomfortably here and there, purses his lips and fiddles with the pages of his own copy of Obama’s text. Then, while Obama is still on the dais, Ryan methodically rips apart Obama’s pages.
Ryan would have been hounded into resigning the speakership if not his very seat as a member of Congress by howling media honchos by dawn if not sooner. Yet when Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) actually committed this defiance of Trump within reaching distance on the dais on February 4, indulgent media shrugged it off, if not in fact thinking that the Awful Orange Man deserved it.
In 2012 Obama had been caught on an open mic asking that Putin get the message and give him “space” to defeat the GOP so Obama could be more flexible after being reelected president. Couldn’t be much bolder about colluding with Russia, right over a microphone, but hey, why should Obama-adoring media give a hooty-hoot?
If that had been Trump thus caught colluding, Dems would have impeached him within a week.
Such is the dominant-media-created environment that U.S. politicians have had to maneuver in for decades. It helps leftists and hurts conservatives. The fact that Trump belligerently challenges it is why dominant media hate, and fear, him so. All he touches becomes suspect.
There’s a potential executive order to make federal buildings’ architecture beautiful again? The only motivation must be more racism and fascism, the cry actually rises.
Trump has emboldened other conservatives, but dominant media still write the headlines and hold the microphones.
Into this landscape came the Democratic presidential hopefuls as caucus and primary season began. None of them receives the clouds of dominant-media derision that guaranteed GOP nominee Trump gets.
The hopefuls may favor federal control of everything, they may advocate “abortion” even after birth, they may call for everyone to have 147 different genders. They might as well shout to the skies, imploring flying saucers either to carry us away from Trump’s dictatorship or to carry him away to exile on Pluto, and dominant media would think none of this deplorable.
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg may say it’s completely reasonable to “trust parents” to decide how hard to beat their children and — oops, that’s Buttigieg’s mind-numbing excuse for late-abortion brutality, not for three-year-olds. (Hat tip: Elizabeth Bauer, writing at The Federalist site on February 12.)
Dominant media being in the tank for leftists doesn’t guarantee that Sanders gets the Dem nomination, though. Both media and Democratic Party thought is that Trump must be defeated at all costs, and if another candidate seems to have more winning ways than Sanders, that could be the way to go.
One might have thought a few months ago that Sanders and socialist-inclined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) would be scooping up 95 percent of caucus and primary voters, but that definitely hasn’t been so in early going. Not for the first time, dominant media’s own imposed passions and prejudices could be more deforming than informing about what they cover.
How different the last half-century could have been if Democratic Party policies, abortion law and a host of other issues had been freed from media policymaking posing as impartial reporting.
Maybe a lot of Democratic voters wouldn’t be so different from Republicans if the heavy media thumb hadn’t been shoving down on scales, with “social transformation” as the goal.
There’ll be conflicting interests at work as the weeks roll forward. After New Hampshire’s results, The Wall Street Journal’s online Page One posted: “Democrats in search of a centrist nominee to challenge President Trump are worried after contests in Iowa and New Hampshire consolidated liberal support behind Bernie Sanders. That has divided the larger moderate vote among several candidates, who have vowed to stay in the race.”
Coming up soon are the February 22 Nevada Democratic caucuses. Opinion columnist Victor Joecks at the Las Vegas Review-Journal told The Wanderer on February 12:
“Bernie Sanders looks like Donald Trump circa 2016. He has a passionate, albeit limited, base of support. His rivals represent a larger proportion of the party, but the field is unlikely to narrow in time to avoid Sanders’ winning a plurality of delegates.
“After Iowa and New Hampshire, several ‘moderate’ candidates — who are still very liberal — now have a reasonable case to stay in through South Carolina and maybe Super Tuesday. It is ironic that Nevada’s Culinary Union is opposed to a socialist, but unless the union picks one Sanders alternative, expect Sanders to win Nevada, too,” Joecks said.
National Review had posted on February 12: “Health care is considered an important issue for the (Nevada) union, after years of hard-fought negotiations. Last week, the union began circulating leaflets advocating against (Sanders-supported) Medicare for All, arguing that ‘presidential candidates suggesting forcing millions of hard-working people to give up their health care creates unnecessary division between workers, and will give us four more years of Trump’.”
One Of The Three B’s
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on February 12: “Going into the contest, I thought one of the three B’s would win the nomination (Bernie, Buttigieg, or Bloomberg) and I still think that way. Bernie is the favorite and I don’t see Warren making it past Super Tuesday, assuming she lasts that long. Many of her supporters will go Bernie’s way.
“Biden simply must win South Carolina and his losses are to Bloomberg’s benefit, except that Bloomberg’s rise as ‘the moderate alternative’ is blocked if Klobuchar continues to gain strength,” Querard said.
“He was recently a Republican and she satisfies Democrat primary voters’ desire to nominate a woman. So her strong performance actually helps Bernie Sanders in the meantime, meaning he won the night, and the next few weeks to come as well!”
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