“I think there’s a lot of hypocrisy behind his actions and I think in a place like New York people see right through it,” said Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat.20 “Early on there was an imperiousness,” added Neal Kwatra, a Democrat operative.21
I wish I could say his outlandish policies were the root of his problems, but de Blasio’s presidential hopes were dead on arrival mostly because nobody seems to like the guy, now that they’re really getting to know him. He doesn’t even have the good sense to keep quiet about rooting for the Red Sox while he’s mayor of New York City. So, his announcement for president back in May was met mostly with ridicule.
Even his hometown paper, the New York Post, reported his candidacy with a cover featuring the headline, “De Blasio Runs for President” superimposed over a picture of a crowd of people laughing hysterically.22
For most Democrats who have declared for president, though, appeasing the far Left is easy; they mostly agree with them. But they can’t present themselves to the voting public at large as the radical socialists they are, so they try to obscure their radical positions any way they can. And it’s already looking like any indication of moderation or centrism will be fatal to a Democrat’s nomination hopes.
Front-runner Joe Biden is already learning this. With the first Democrat presidential debate just concluded, as of this writing, Biden is already showing signs of weakness. Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders remains in second place, with Fauxahontas Elizabeth Warren and small-town mayor Pete Buttigieg beginning to close the gap. The rest of the candidate Clown Car desperately struggles to attract attention with unintentionally funny attempts to appear to be the down-home, hardworking Americans they despise.
Elizabeth Warren was the first to go down this cringe-worthy road with her “get me a beer” video tweet back in January.23 Warren seems obsessed with being somebody she’s not. First, she wanted to be a Native American and now she wants to be a beer-drinking, blue collar American, despite her ill-gotten Harvard degree and finger-wagging, schoolmarm personality. Or maybe in this case Liz just doesn’t want voters to know who she really is: a far-Left radical bent on fundamentally changing everything that makes America the greatest country in the world.
The rest of the Democlowns stuffed themselves into this perennially embarrassing car, except for Cory Booker, who at least had the dignity to admit he doesn’t drink beer, despite his myriad other problems.24 Kirsten Gillibrand was a little more honest. She posed dancing in a gay bar while sipping whiskey in a “Love Is Brave” T-shirt, yelling, “Gay rights!”25 It didn’t help. She’s still a firmly entrenched member of the 1 percent—in the polls—and she’s probably sitting in the trunk of the clown car.
It’s far too early to even predict who the Democrat Party nominee might be. This year, the Democrats and their media allies don’t seem to have decided in advance who is going to win, as they did in 2016. But you can bet that whoever it is, he or she will be far to the left even of Barack Obama. Many of the Democrat candidates are trying to differentiate themselves by claiming to oppose outright socialism, with some even maintaining they are “capitalists” out of one side of their mouths while supporting Medicare for All or the Green New Deal out of the other. But they all share one thing in common: they want to remake America into something other than what our founding documents say it is supposed to be.
Let’s look at the front-runners as of this writing and some of their horrible highlights. This is by no means an exhaustive study, but rather a taste of what these radicals are selling. You might want to hold your nose and have some strong mouthwash handy, or a bottle of bourbon.
Creepy, Simple Joe
As Donald Trump stays strong and laser-focused on his strengths and the rocking economy with opportunity for all Americans to be part of the American dream, the Democrat Clown Car, overloaded with twenty-four candidates, bumbles down the path to nowhere. Like cannibals, their plan is not so much to promote themselves, as it is to eat each other alive.
Just look at how they’ve treated their current front-runner, Joe Biden, who has enough problems already. Past plagiarisms illustrate his lack of depth on important subjects. He earned his “Creepy” nickname from his penchant for sticking his nose in women’s necks. I still haven’t figured out what the man is sniffing for. Other than my dogs, I don’t know any warm-blooded mammals who sniff like Creepy Joe.
But don’t take it from me. You’ve heard what his own pals say about his flip-flopping on the Hyde Amendment.26 One day the government should not pay for abortions; the next day, it should. Or consider the latest mess where his fellow Democrats savaged him on segregation.
Biden tried to use late senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who were staunch opponents of desegregation, as examples of people he “didn’t agree on much of anything” with, but with whom he was able to get things done in the Senate.27 Prudent or not, Joe’s point was obviously to say he can work with anyone. There was nothing complimentary about the senators’ segregationist views in anything Biden said. But suddenly, he’s a racist to his far-Left, eat-them-alive Democrat colleagues.
“But let’s be very clear,” said Kamala Harris. “The senators that he is speaking of with such adoration are individuals who made and built their reputations on segregation. The Ku Klux Klan celebrated the election of one of them. So, this is a very serious matter.”
When Democrat senator and presidential primary rival Cory Booker suggested Biden should apologize for his remarks, Biden hit back, saying “Apologize for what? Cory [Booker] should apologize. He knows better.”28 To which Booker replied, “For his posture to be to me, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. You should apologize; I’m not a racist’ is so insulting and so missing the larger point that he should have not have to have explained to him.”29
On one hand, Creepy Joe is right. No matter how little one thinks of Joe’s record, or lack thereof, his personal attributes, or the prospect of him being president, no reasonable person believes he is a racist. On the other, how many more decades in politics does Biden need to learn it’s not a good idea to first proudly cite your record working with segregationists to make a point and then to demand an apology from an African American opponent when he calls you on it?
Let’s be honest. Joe isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. This is a guy who not only finished seventy-sixth in his law school class of eighty-five but wasn’t smart enough to keep his mouth shut about it when he first ran for president thirty-two years ago. He claimed he finished in the top half of his class and then released the transcripts himself proving that this wasn’t remotely true!30 Now, less than two months after announcing his bid for the presidency in 2020, he’s already nullified the whole theme he launched his campaign on with this one gaffe, before even taking the stage for the first debate.
Of course I’m talking about the three-minute-thirty-second melodramatic plea to help save America from… a straw man.31 That’s right. With an opportunity to tell the whole country why he should be president, Creepy Joe rambled on about Donald Trump supposedly referring to white supremacists and neo-Nazis as “very fine people,” something that is demonstrably untrue.
Basing his campaign solely on the accusation of hate against the president is a winner for a certain segment of the voters, who just can’t articulate why they don’t like President Trump. It’s something they can grab on to. They can just say “This is why I hate him. He’s a racist. That’s the box I want to check.” And that’s a winner for a certain percentage of the electorate.
Now, when you press any of these people on the president’s comments after the Charlottesville, Virginia, incident, they can’t really back up their position. All they have is, “He thinks racists are fine people, because he said there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’” Any honest person can listen to the president’s comments themselves and hear him clearly say, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should b
e condemned totally.”32
Nevertheless, Biden hoped this was going to be the issue that would help him win, before he managed to get himself tangled up in his own unwarranted racism scandal. It’s the position of a simpleton, taken by a simpleton, quite frankly.
Calling Donald Trump a racist didn’t work in 2016 and it’s not going to work in 2020, because it isn’t true. This president has done more for the African American community, Hispanics, and Asians than any other president. He has appointed more women as top advisers than presidents Obama, Bush, or Clinton.33
The problem for Creepy, Simple Joe is that the racist card is the only one he has. He’s not just holding a weak hand; he’s holding an empty one. This is a man with no record of achievement but one who was part of the disastrous Obama-Biden economy. Remember those “shovel-ready jobs”?
Biden not only has major problems; he doesn’t seem to be able to learn from his mistakes. He had a plagiarism scandal during his failed bid for the 1988 Democrat nomination and this year he seems to have plagiarized parts of his $1.7 trillion climate plan.34 That helped distract from the specifics of the plan itself, which are terrible. Joe’s pitching the same disastrous Democrat policies that gave us Solyndra and a decimated coal industry: subsidizing so-called green energy sources that don’t produce enough energy at a price average people can afford, and attacking fossil fuels, which do.
Creepy Joe still hasn’t learned the boundaries of personal space or personal contact when dealing with women, either. Even after the president and millions of others lampooned his infamous 2015 shoulder-grab-neck-nuzzle moment with then defense secretary Ashton Carter’s wife, Stephanie,35 and multiple women came forward to accuse him of inappropriate contact,36 Creepy Joe just keeps on creeping. In yet another cringe-worthy moment at a campaign event in May, Biden called a ten-year-old girl “good-looking.”37
All this tends to obscure how terrible Biden is on the issues. He wants to be a “centrist” who can win back the votes Donald Trump took from the Democrats in 2016. But Creepy Joe is only a centrist if Barack Obama—the most far-Left president since at least Lyndon Johnson, if not in all US history—was centrist. And now the Democrat Party has moved far to the left of Obama, making his former vice president seem almost moderate—until you look beyond his personal failings and examine his positions.
Just as Biden’s climate plan only looks reasonable compared to AOC’s Green New Deal, his health care position (remember “the big fucking deal”?) similarly departs from the virtually communist Medicare for All policy only by degree. Biden says he doesn’t support Medicare for All, but does support a “public option,” meaning the government would run a health insurance plan that would compete with private plans. “If the insurance company isn’t doing the right thing by you, you should have another choice,” according to Biden.38
This sounds very moderate and reasonable if you’re Joe’s target voter—virulently anti-Trump and not too bright. But it’s not moderate or reasonable. It’s a rather sinister plan to eventually destroy the private insurance market so the government can completely take over health care. There is no way private competition against a government program can ever be fair.
The government has the power to tax, which private companies don’t. You can bet any public option program would end up being subsidized when it lost money, not to mention given regulatory advantages over its private competitors. Prices to the consumer would be set politically, rather than by the market, which means those using the program would pay a lower price and taxpayers who never agreed to join would pay the difference when the plan lost money.
The public option is based on a fantasy repeated often by the Left, including President Obama, that government-run enterprises can deliver products to consumers at a lower cost because they don’t need to make a profit.39 If that were true, the Soviet Union would still be around, Cubans wouldn’t be driving cars made in the 1950s, and Venezuelans wouldn’t be eating their pets and zoo animals.40 It’s the profit motive that fuels competition, lowers prices, and drives innovation. That’s why virtually everything the market provides increases in quality and decreases in price, relative to inflation, while everything the government provides does exactly the opposite.
In another attempt to appear moderate, Biden has announced that he supports the federal government guaranteeing two years of “free” community college, as opposed to candidates like Bernie Sanders who would make four-year colleges and universities free.41 Joe seems to think offering only half the freebies Bernie offers makes him only half a socialist, but you can’t be a little bit socialist any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Once you’ve started handing out other people’s money, you’ve surrendered 100 percent of the principle.
Free community college is just another Obama-era retread policy that will satisfy neither the radical Left nor the swing voters he is looking to lure back to his party’s ticket. It’s hard to make the case that the American people aren’t educated enough when the American economy is leading the world, unemployment is at record lows, and wages are finally rising again.42
And what’s with Joe’s son? Now, I’m usually the first one to say that a family member’s behavior is totally irrelevant to the candidate. But you just cannot here. Joe Biden admits that when his son Hunter was working for an energy company in Ukraine, he—Vice President Biden—threatened the president of Ukraine that he would withhold $1 billion in US aid if the prosecutor investigating the energy company where his son worked was not fired.43 Biden is so stupid he proudly admits that after his threat the prosecutor was fired. It’s shades of the Clinton Democrats, where foreign policy is shaped to benefit the family pocketbook. Curiously, his son had no background in energy and was making $50,000 a month from that company.44
Even Joe’s best pal, Barack, is uncharacteristically silent these days. Joe once had to remind him that they are besties with a best friends forever bracelet.45
Joe, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for your BFF, Barack, to endorse you. Who knows? Maybe he’s waiting for the perfect day when the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the planets are aligned to signal “Joe, you’re the one.” Regardless, Joe, you would probably make a pretty lousy president. So, stick to making your friendship bracelets and wishing and hoping.
America doesn’t need a best friend. America doesn’t need a sniffer or a plagiarist, or someone so dumb he admits threatening to withhold government money to end an investigation involving a company where a family member is working. So, I suspect the Clown Car will be dropping off Creepy Joe, as the other clowns continue to fight each other for the front seat.
Comrade Bernie
Bernie Sanders came out of the gate in the same place he left off in 2016—second—and I honestly think that’s his ceiling. It’s ironic that the party whose loudest voices regularly use the words white guy as a pejorative is being led by two “old white guys” who are also lifelong Washington, DC insiders. But Bernie is doing quite poorly considering his name recognition is almost as high as Biden’s and most of his competition is completely unknown to large swaths of voters.46
Still, just as Creepy Joe has a pocket of low-information voters for whom calling the president a racist is enough to win their support, so, too, does Bernie have his core followers ready to follow him to the barricades when the “workers of the world unite.” The problem for Bernie is he’s no longer unique. When he ran in 2016, openly calling himself a socialist was exciting and new to the lunatic Left. In post-AOC 2019, with socialists winning elections in Congress and at the state level,47 Bernie is yesterday’s news. He’s just another “old white guy” who is weak on guns—from the Left’s perspective—and whose own ex-staffers say “struggles with women’s issues.”48
Whether he can break out above also-ran status to contend as he did in 2016 or not, Bernie is still talking loud and drawing a crowd. Just a glance at the “Issues” page on his campaign website tells you everything you need to know about this con man.49 The first
two links are titled, “Health Care for All” and “College for All and Cancel All Student Debt.”
Bernie isn’t talking about getting the government less involved or out of the way completely so the market can adjust prices to their natural, affordable level. He wants to make “public colleges, universities, and trade schools tuition-free” and establish a “Medicare-for-all, single-payer program” in place of private health insurance plans.
You don’t need a PhD in economics to know there really is something quite insane about the idea that education and health care should be paid for by everyone other than the people consuming education and health care. This appeals not only to low-information voters but also to the worst aspects of human nature. “Consume all you want, and the government will force someone else to pick up the tab” fits my definition of greed better than anything I see the corporations who employ millions of people and give billions to charity doing.
Sanders wants to fundamentally change Social Security into a full-blown welfare program, with expanded benefits for Bernie’s target voters. Right now, Americans only pay a percentage of income up to $132,900 toward Social Security. That’s because it’s not supposed to be a wealth-transfer program. You pay a tax up to a certain amount of income and you get a limited benefit that is supposed to supplement—not replace—your retirement savings.
Bernie’s plan completely changes that. Instead of a supplement funded at least partially by one’s own contributions, Bernie wants to make it a transfer program where “the rich” pay and Bernie’s voters get higher benefits across the board, a higher minimum benefit, higher cost-of-living adjustments, and more disability benefits.
Bernie has a lot to say about the supposed greed of “the rich” and their supposed disregard for the environment, while owning three homes himself and spending almost $300,000 on airfare in October 2018 alone.50 A large part of the $1 million-plus income he earned in 2017 came from a book pitching his horrible, un-American ideas, which I’d have no qualm with if Bernie would simply allow everyone else to keep the fruits of their labor as Bernie has. But like most self-described socialists, Bernie believes it’s “capitalism for me, not for thee.”
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