Over at Slate, Scots-Irish hillbilly for a day Reihan Salam thumps his chest with pride at his sly affection for Donald Trump, who is speaking up for the common man, or at least the common white man: “he is speaking for millions of Americans who’ve lost faith in the political process.”
Well, yes. He is speaking for millions of Americans who believe our country is awash with millions of rape- and welfare-loving brown-skin criminals who should be shipped off in box cars, Americans who also applaud the idea of torturing the relatives of people who look like they might be terrorists, or at least foreign.
Salam’s tag line is “I hate Trump far less than I hate the Republicans who’ve paved his way.” Paver-in-chief Charles Krauthammer finds the fearful symmetry of Donald and Bernie an irresistible subject for moralizing: “Sanders is careful never to blame President Obama directly, but his description of the America Obama leaves behind is devastating — a wasteland of stagnant wages, rising inequality, a sinking middle class, young people crushed by debt, the American Dream dying.”
You’d never know from Charlie’s mendacious collection of half truths and lies that President Obama led the United States through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression to the point that we have both the largest and the strongest economy in the world today, despite being undermined and stabbed in the back at every turn by Charlie and his pals. If Charlie bothered to look at the numbers, he’d see unemployment under 5%, a middle class “shrinking” because people are getting richer rather than poorer, and the “American Dream” far healthier than George Bush left it. And for a Republican to accuse a Democratic president of promoting inequality, Charlie, inequality is your middle name.
Well, enough of that shit. I guess I must be drunk or senile, because I’m about to get even-handed on your ass, something I hate, but Peter Beinart, writing for the Atlantic, forces my hand. I’m often a fan of Pete’s rap, but I’m afraid that Bernie’s talk of giving the big shots and high hats on Wall Street a swift kick in the ass has made Pete all weak in the knees. Not a few liberals still dream, in their heart of hearts, of “socialism”, of guys like us running the world, and, clearly, Pete’s got the fever, enough to lie about Sanders’ fantasy of going back to blue-collar America circa 1970, when we built our own shit and didn’t have no fancy cell phones. As I’ve said before (frequently), 1) Sanders’ vision of a “no imports” economy is ridiculous and 2) life today is much better than it was in 1970—a time when, after all, young Bernie Sanders was preaching “revolution.” Beinart “explains” that Sanders really isn’t an economic nationalist: ‘if you look at Sanders’s ultimate vision for the global economy, it’s not separatist at all. He doesn’t oppose international trade; he just wants to regulate it. He supports “a progressive alternative to corporate globalism-based on global labor rights, environmental protections, sustainable development, democratization and international institutions to counter uncontrolled deflations and the race to the bottom.”’
Well, if you believe that, you’re dumb. In the most recent Democratic debate, after justly kicking Henry “War Crimes” Kissinger’s ass for his complicity in many deceits and disasters, Bernie went off on a tangent, blaming Kissinger for opening diplomatic relations with China and thus leading to imports and the loss of American jobs! Sounds pretty goddamn “separatist” to me! Bernie Sanders is a guy who thinks it’s an outrage that the “bobblehead’ dolls sold in the souvenir shop of the U.S. Senate are made in China. He is not a serious man.
