By Joe Darby
Okay, let’s get this straight.
The person who has won the first two Democratic Party primary elections is an aging socialist who thinks that people living under left-wing dictators in South America are really better off than us Americans.
You think I’m making that up? Well, hear this. Dear old lovable Bernie Sanders (lovable at least to his comrades) has posted on his website an editorial marked “Must Read” saying that Venezuela, along with Ecuador and Argentina, is where “the American dream is more apt to be realized than in America.”
Now that’s rather an astounding statement given that Venezuela is a completely failed left-wing dictatorship that oppresses its people and has trouble even providing food and medical basics for them. And, by the way, Bernie has also praised Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega and the Communist Castro regime in Cuba.
So, I’m wondering what this says about the Democratic Party, which has given Sanders, a Vermont senator, victory in this week’s New Hampshire primary as well as in last week’s fiasco of a caucus in Iowa.
To be sure, the young former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigies, finished a very close second to Sanders in both contests. And Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota finished a strong third in New Hampshire Both of those contenders are labeled as “moderates” although by recent standards of American politics, they would have been called very liberal just a few years ago.
There is perhaps one bit of good news coming out of New Hampshire. Elizabeth Warren, the erratic and hard leftist senator from Massachusetts finished a poor fourth, although she is herself a New Englander and was leading in polls in New Hampshire not so long ago. I tell you, that woman scares me as much as, if not more so, than Bernie.
Then, there’s poor old Joe Biden, long-time leader in national polls but who has crashed in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s looking forward to the upcoming South Carolina primary, in which a high percentage of African-American voters are expected to participate. The former vice-president is popular in the black community, but many pundits are already writing him off after his disastrous showing in Iowa and New Hampshire.
So what does old Bernie, the admirer of left-wing dictators, have in mind for the United States if he’s elected president? I won’t go into great detail about his plans, but he wants to make your private health insurance illegal and to embark on a mad spending spree that would cost $100 trillion (yes, that’s trillion with a T) over the next 10 years.
He also, although he’s a billionaire himself, will go after all those evil rich people and make them pay, as he says, their fair share of taxes. Well, actually, they already do. The top 1 percent of earners pay 37 percent of federal taxes and the bottom 90 percent pay 30 percent, leaving the remaining 9 percent of the wealthy, but not the super billionaires, to pay the remaining 33 percent. That seems like a fairly equitable distribution to me.
It is my belief that if the Democrats do in fact nominate Sanders for president, they are guaranteeing the reelection of Donald Trump, the man they love to hate. Politics in this modern day and age is a very strange phenomenon, I think. Why would a voter support a candidate who almost certainly cannot win, leaving the victory to a despised opponent?
I truly cannot understand the lurch to the left of the modern Democratic Party. I suppose it just goes to show the extent to which ideological thinking has taken over in US. It seems there few moderates any more. At least, there’s not nearly enough of them. And there’s far too many radical left wingers and right wing extremists. What a choice we would have in November. Trump or Sanders. Woe is us.
