Sharing Their Votes With Other Candidates?. . . That’s Not Part Of Dem Hopefuls’ Socialist Vision
By DEXTER DUGGAN
The best test of Bernie Sanders’ self-proclaimed socialism is how ready he is to share his trove of votes from the first three presidential contests with needier Democrat candidates.
Does millionaire Sanders really need, for instance, his high-calorie 41,000-plus votes from the Nevada caucuses where impoverished, famished billionaire Tom Steyer was practically a sidewalk beggar, with a bit more than 4,000 votes?
Or how about vote-starved, gaunt multimillionaire Elizabeth Warren, whose tattered purse held fewer than 12,000 votes from Nevada? In the name of equality and the sort of justice that means you get to grab some of someone else’s possessions, how could Bernie possibly deny Warren, say, 15,000 of his bloated winnings?
You say that the candidates all started off equal, although Sanders had a sharper strategy and appeal to know what won over left-wing voters, but nevertheless he needs to surrender some of his haul to those less canny, with fewer cans in the electoral cupboard?
That may not be how politicians — even socialist ones — operate who want to crow over their totals, but somehow it’s supposed to be how society operates financially when some people are billionaires and some scrape by.
True, votes aren’t the same as food and drink to the physically starving. But votes are the very life of someone who has chosen a political career. Without them, his hopes are dead-ended. Can you be so cruel as to say he deserves only the votes he personally won?
Socialist politicians come up wanting when their theory is applied directly. No politician should be allowed to own three homes when other people live in tents — or even tentless — on the streets of San Francisco, Sanders likely would say — except for the fact that Sanders himself owns three homes.
Have we seen him selling even one of those excess domiciles and handing over the cash to a long line of beggars? Of course not. Socialism is good theory only for those lower on Elizabeth Warren’s totem pole, the middle class who get their taxes raised in the name of fairness. Even though a lot of that eagle’s-nest feathering ends up as golden eggs for bureaucrats who can theorize on handing out largesse.
The Bible leaves no doubt about helping the less fortunate. But it has no mandate to vote in leftist politicians whose failed notions take precedence about remaking social structure.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity on February 24 that Sanders, as the political leader after three states’ vote contests, would be taking a lot of critical fire from other hopefuls now, and he may not last so long holding first place.
Aha, we say, if the votes had been more evenly distributed after they were cast, there’d be less need for vicious attacks and more amity among the candidates. Isn’t it, after all, only selfishness to stuff their pockets with ballots when tallies instead could be rearranged to deposit about the same number of votes in each of their sacks?
But what good is a no-win race to a pol who wants to be the clear leader?
With the South Carolina Democratic primary coming up on February 29, after this hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press on February 27, vote-famished bad Catholic Joe Biden faced perhaps his final test of whether he could start recovering with voters.
CBS News posted on February 24: “In South Carolina, up to this point, Joe Biden has been leading, though his margins have been shrinking. A CBS News poll released Sunday (February 23) shows Biden ahead of Sanders by just five points, a dramatic drop from the double-digit lead he held before the voting in other states began.”
Some older Democrat media pundits like President Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville and House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s Chief of Staff Chris Matthews are seasoned enough to remember the ravages of real Communist totalitarianism that foolish, flirty Vermont socialist Sanders made goo-goo eyes at when he visited the USSR and Castro Cuba in the late 1980s.
Sanders was every bit as much an adult in age as Carville and Matthews back then, and he certainly should have known better than to kiss blood-stained fists. But, even like today, his fantasies ruled his mind.
Both Carville and Matthews recently openly voiced their fears of what Sanders in official command of the Democratic Party could do to deal it irreparable harm.
But why would Sanders’ young followers these days with huge college debt look askance at a politician who says taking other people’s money to serve “equality” and “justice” is just the ticket?
Nevada’s powerful culinary workers’ union, a Democrat heavy-hitter, took a blow to its reputation when its warnings against Sanders because of his “Medicare for All” plan were mostly unheeded.
Even though President Trump’s great economic success for the U.S. is considered to give him a strong edge for reelection in November, there may be undeniable Democratic appeal if enough voters believe government exists to give them billowing billions of free stuff, a signature Sanders pitch.
And just never mind millionaire Sanders’ own untouchable private homes and bank accounts. And forget the hypocrisy as he rails at the wealth of multibillionaire Dem candidate Michael Bloomberg.
The first $2 million in Sanders’ own pockets doesn’t really count, ya know; it’s only other millionaires and those billionaires who merit his outrage.
Nor does there seem to be much of a creature as only a “fiscal liberal.” Frantic leftists these days want to take not only your money but also your morals. Imposing tax-paid permissive abortion throughout pregnancy is one of their fiercest dreams, although everyone else’s nightmare.
“Moderate” old Barack Obama even championed denying medical care to babies who survived abortion, even before he was elected president — though of course adoring dominant media hushed this. If Obama could do that, think of the left-wing frontiers yet to be blazed against unwanted infants.
Sanders is hardly alone among today’s Democratic presidential aspirants who roll up their sleeves against resistant traditional moralists. Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigieg would be just as uncompromising. And how about bad Catholic Biden? After years of supporting permissive abortion, cowering “moderate” Joe in the 2020 presidential race decided that he dare not oppose even taxpayer funding of it.
And having men invade women’s sports teams and restrooms is only a matter of civil rights these leering days. Forcing everyone else to pretend that “transitioning” back and forth between genders is not only normal but legally protected is part of their catechism of disorder.
Punishing people who won’t say “he” about a female and “she” about a male may, before you know it, mean sentenced to years in prison.
Moreover, the Bernie Bros aren’t quite synonymous with gentleness. If the day comes when a Sanders administration or some kindred left-wing government tells its tough enforcers to, say, get recalcitrant Christians in line, the knock at your door is unlikely to be soft.
You expect dominant media will raise an alarm when federally authorized enforcers in a few years start auctioning off your private property after you insisted that your daughter is a girl? Good luck with that, old-timer.
Ann Howard, a retired Arizona attorney, told The Wanderer on February 24 that Bernie backers who equate socialism with life in Sweden are inaccurate.
“The young voters and new immigrants and some liberals tend to be Bernie’s base,” Howard said. “They are supportive of, or at least not opposed to, socialism. They point to Sweden as the best example of socialism, pointing out often that all failed socialist systems were flawed in the implementation, whereas Sweden’s was not.
“What the above voting bloc does not hear is that socialism worked in Sweden at first because Sweden was economically strong,” she said, “but with socialism growth slowed, incomes declined, ennui infiltrated the populace, and money for socialist programs declined.
“So Sweden had to scrap a lot of the socialist programs and enact more free-market, capitalist policies to prevent disaster,” she added. “Sweden therefore never fell to disastrous levels of Venezuela and other South American countries, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and others.
“If Bernie gets elected president, socialism is here,” Howard said. “If Bernie keeps rising, it is imperative that the lost understanding of socialism be remedied. But it will have to be done by grassroots efforts, Trump tweets, and social media. The MSM and educational institutions will not help.
“We need a huge conversation about socialism,” Howard said. “Perhaps a Bernie train will end our ignorance with such a public conversation.”
Massively Insignificant
The Wanderer asked a Tea Party leader in Phoenix, Ron Ludders, of the Arizona Project, for his reaction to early presidential contests.
“The Democrats are in total disarray and the dominant media plays citizens as fools,” Ludders said. In Nevada, he said, “we hear about the Sanders ‘blowout.’ Really? There are 153 million voters in the United States and, with 96.23 percent of the Nevada vote counted, Bernie had a whopping 41,075 votes — his 46.84 percent blowout vote. In New Hampshire he got 76,324 votes….Hardly impressive and, in the big scheme of things, massively insignificant.”
In comparison, in New Hampshire, Ludders said, “while Bernie was getting his 76,324 votes, President Trump received a record-setting 129,696 votes in a virtual no-contest primary. As a former auditor, I can tell you that when percentages are used to inform about winners and losers, they are meaningless without the base number.”
That is, he said, “if someone got two-thirds or 66.6 percent of all votes cast, you would say they won by a landslide, but if you were aware the base number is only three votes, would you be so bold as to report a 66.6 percent landslide? With such a small showing, the political world once again reports, ‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling!’
“Truth is, we have a very long way to go before…Bernie becomes president,” Ludders said. “The great American Declaration of Independence declares: ‘All men are created equal’ — not a guide for socialism but rather a statement that all should have equal access to opportunity but not equality of results, as is only obtained by the hard work and efforts of the individual.
“Socialism and Communism have never worked in the history of the world, and Bernie is no exception to that lesson of history,” he said.
