Yesterday, Bernie Sanders officially announced his 2020 presidential bid. He promptly raked in 6 million dollars in campaign donations within 24 hours of the announcement. He obviously remains an immensely popular figure on the Left. Even those on the Right tend to attribute certain positive qualities to Sanders, like authenticity and honesty. I’ve heard some Republicans describe him as the least repulsive Democrat on the national stage. Hardly a high honor, but I’m not sure he deserves even that much credit. Let’s not be fooled by the eccentric grandpa routine. Sanders is, in fact, an arrogant, power-hungry, hypocritical, cowardly, morally-deranged, communist. Let’s go through each of those carefully-chosen adjectives, point by point.
Arrogant and power hungry. Sanders is 77 years old. If he were to be elected president, heaven help us, he’d be 79 on inauguration day. There is nothing wrong with being elderly. We will all be elderly one day, should we be fortunate enough to live so long. But the presidency is an enormously stressful, physically-taxing, mentally-draining job. There’s a reason why Obama and Bush went into office as relatively young men and came out looking like they had the life-force sucked out of them by the Vulture from Spider-Man. Presidents age in dog years. Every year in office is like seven in civilian life. You have to be extraordinarily arrogant to think that you can effectively take on that kind of physical and mental stress at the age of 80. You have to be extraordinarily power-hungry to want it.
The problem with presidents is that they want so badly to be president. There hasn’t been a reluctant leader in the White House since at least Coolidge. All of them since that point, and most of them before it, have desperately desired to be the most powerful men on Earth. A few of them have been pretty good at the job in spite of the character flaw that prompted them to pursue it. It is understandable, though, for a younger man to have such blind ambition. But a man (or woman) who is still grasping for the throne even in his final years of life? Someone who will pursue power even if it literally kills him? We should be very suspicious of such a person.
Hypocritical. Sanders has been living on the public dime for 40 years. During his time as a “public servant,” he has managed to amass a fortune and a seven-figure income that puts him firmly in the same “1 percenter” camp he has spent decades decrying. He hasn’t cashed in on his political career to the same extent as, say, Hillary Clinton, but he is no middle-class champion. While lamenting “income inequality” and railing against the evils of capitalism, Sanders has done quite a bit of capitalizing himself. Indeed, he just bought his third house recently — a modest little $600,000 lakefront property in Vermont.
I believe Americans are entitled to buy as many homes as they can afford and make as much money as the market allows. But I also believe in consistency. Someone who lectures others about “greed” and deliberately fosters hatred and suspicion toward the wealthy with overheated class warfare rhetoric, cannot buy three homes and collect millions in book royalties without being guilty of rank hypocrisy. Most Americans can barely afford one home. Sanders has three, and his third is three times more expensive than the national average. Why doesn’t he sell it and use the money to pay off a bunch of student loans? Why doesn’t he donate all of his book royalties to poor families who need it more than he does? As a matter of fact, why does he charge money for his books at all? Surely, Bernie’s fans must see the irony of a man making millions on a book advocating a socialist revolution.
Cowardly. Sanders has earned a reputation as a scrappy freedom fighter who stands up against the dark and powerful forces in our country. He is about as convincing in this role as in the blue collar hero role. It takes no courage for a Democrat to pump his fists and shout about Wall Street or “corporations.” He risks nothing with this kind of sloganeering. But there are dark and powerful forces in his own party. He should know about those forces since they rigged the primaries against him in 2016. Yet, in the end, Sanders still bowed to the Clinton Machine, kissed the ring, and played nice.
Morally deranged. I could provide many examples here, but none more pertinent than his pro-abortion extremism. Sanders supports abortion at every stage of pregnancy for any reason. When asked, he could not name one single scenario or circumstance, at any point in pregnancy, where he thought any form of restriction should apply. Sanders not only tolerates but advocates for the legal execution of fully-formed, perfectly healthy, third-trimester babies. This view is mainstream in the modern Democratic Party, but no less abominable. No one who holds such a view is fit to serve in any public office, in any capacity whatsoever.
But wait — there’s more. Sanders is also, as mentioned at the beginning, a lifelong communist. He is on tape heaping praise on Fidel Castro and admitting that he provided advice to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Sanders’ communism is more than a mere personality quirk. He has been providing PR cover to murderous communist regimes for years.
As we’ve already established, Sanders is no spring chicken. He is not some stupid college student who champions communism because he has no idea what happened in the world prior to 2005. He lived through much of the 1900s and very well knows that it was a century bathed in the blood shed by communist governments. He knows that communism very recently killed 100 million people, and that it continues to add to the body count even today. Yet he advocates for communist policies and wishes to see the great evil of the 20th century reborn in the 21st. What else can we call this but morally deranged?
The ideas Bernie Sanders espouses aren’t just wrong but wicked. And he espouses them in a hypocritical fashion, steeped in cowardice and arrogance. He is not suited for the Senate, much less the White House. God help us if he ever gets there.
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