Bernie Sanders Deludes Himself
April 6, 2018
by William P. Meyers

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Do we really need a Democratic version of Trump?

Bernie Sanders is back on the campaign trail.

According to the New York Times "Bernie Sanders Courts Black Voters Anew. But an Obama Reference Stings,"

"Senator Bernie Sanders insists he hasn’t decided whether to run again for president, but a 14-hour sprint across the Deep South on Wednesday made clear that he is not only thinking about it but is already trying to remedy his most significant vulnerability in 2016: his lack of support from black voters."

According to his leftish supporters, Sanders is a paragon of honesty who has never wavered in his progressive politics and who has always run as an Independent because he is left of Democrat.

Why do they think that? Because it is what he says in his speeches.

Why don't I believe that? Because I knew about Sanders long before he ran for President, when he was an obscure Representative and then Senator from Vermont. I had heard how he parried the various progressive groups I worked with, refusing to co-sponsor bills.

More important, I looked up his record on the internet before he geared up his propaganda machine. When I looked, a lot of the articles, those within the first few hundred articles on Google search, were relatively old and written by local bloggers and news people, many of them written by the leftists Bernie claims to front for. By the first primary they were buried under an avalanche of propaganda.

What I learned was that Bernie could be as forked-tongued as any politician, that he often sold out his progressive friends on specific issues, and that he ran as an independent because when he started running Vermont had a Republican majority, so being an independent, outside of a few small urban areas, was the only way to climb to a more powerful, better paying job.

Also, I looked at his voting record, and it was mixed, and about as progressive as Hillary's. I would argue that because she was a prime mover in getting federal medical insurance for America's children, her record was more progressive. Both were too pro-military for my taste.

While I agree with BS on some issues, I also see him as Trump-like in too many ways.

He is against trade. He wanted to kill the TPP (trans-pacific partnership), and Trump killed it. Bernie is essentially a white nationalist, like Trump, who does not see that white American workers are not entitled above other workers. The genuine grievances of white American workers are against the American ruling class, not workers in other nations. I do agree with Bernie that trade agreements should, when possible, provide for environmental and labor protections for all nations signing the agreement (which the TPP had).

Like Trump, Bernie does not like to compromise, even when a compromise would improve things. That is not how American politics works. Refusing to compromise usually gets you nothing.

Bernie does not believe women are as competent as men. I won't go into the history of this in Vermont, but I will point out that Bernie could support and mentor a younger, progressive woman candidate for President in 2020, but so far he is not doing that.

Finally, Bernie was not really vetted in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton was very gentle in her criticisms of him because she assumed she would win the nomination and did not want to alienate him or his supporters. The Republicans and Russians did not attack him, and in some cases supported him, because they wanted to weaken Hillary.

Hopefully Democratic primary voters will show more sense in 2020, but humans in general have erratic learning curves. As a political scientist, I would not count Sanders out of the race until the beans are counted.

I have not chosen a horse in this race yet, but I hope we have another female nominee. If Trump runs again, I want a woman to kick the ass. And Jail Him.