A recent bio sketch on Bernie Sanders by Investors Business Daily brings some clarity to how the socialist senator arrived at his government-is-all worldview. In short, he spent most of his life a down-and-out loser, bombing at everything he tried, failing to keep the electricity on, and at times living off the public dime. The only thing those who knew him said he ever seemed good at was ranting about the moral imperative of taking other people’s money.
A side-by-side comparison of the life achievements of Republican presidential candidates and that of the Democrats is rather stunning. On the Republican side: a billionaire business mogul and successful television star, a Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer, a neurosurgeon, and multiple successful state governors (oh yeah, and a pretty well-liked junior senator). On the other side: a scandal-plagued lawyer turned politician-for-life and Bernie Sanders, who’s “achievements” prior to somehow winning election in Vermont were, well, easy to count.
Though Sanders grew up in a family that struggled to make it, they were able to send him to the University of Chicago. Despite earning his degree, he failed to make much use of his education for the next FOUR DECADES, as IBD explains, “Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check.”
One of Sanders’ first jobs out of college: signing people up for food stamps. His first home for his first wife: a “maple sugar shack with a dirt floor.” The marriage didn’t last long.
After she left him, Sanders went on unemployment, then had a child out of wedlock, and then tried his hand at carpentry, which his friend told Politico he was “shi**y” at. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t,” said his friend.
His next unsteady job was “freelancing for leftist rags, writing about ‘masturbation and rape’ and other crudities for $50 a story.”
Unsurprisingly, his friends said he was chronically out of money, the only apparent talent of the ne’er-do-well was ranting about socialism:
Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.
The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,”” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”
Having failed at everything else, he tried to make a career out of his political rants, running for office four times in Vermont and losing “badly” each time, failing to even earn more than single-digit support. Maybe it was the press’s fault:
In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ”
Not exactly the description of a “winner.”
In 1980, he finally got his big break, running as an open socialist for mayor of Burlington. He was elected with the help of radical groups and served several terms. After a failed run at the governorship, he became the first socialist elected to the House of Representatives, serving from 1991 till 2007 when he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Despite a few decades earning steady paychecks, Sanders hasn’t managed to make much of his salary yet. Not only is he famously one of the poorest members of Congress, he has zero assets and reportedly owes over $60,000 in credit-card debt.
H/t Allen B. West.