Bernie sanders

Bernie devours Warren

Just four months ago, Elizabeth Warren seemed poised to storm the Democratic nomination. In the first days of October, she briefly eclipsed Joe Biden atop the polls. Her supposed rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, had just suffered a heart attack. His candidacy appeared to be fading. Suddenly, Warren was all the rage: she was a woman, which matters a lot to the Democratic media. She talked like a radical leftie, but she didn’t frighten the establishment horses in the way Bernie did. The bookmakers made her strong favorite to win: everybody assumed Warren would hoover up Sanders’s votes as his presidential aspirations vanished once again. Well, the opposite has happened. Bernie Sanders’s campaign has ended up devouring Warren’s.

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Hillary Clinton tells the truth

After all the fakery of the 2016 election, the hot sauce in her bag, the ‘chillin’ in Cedar Rapids’, Hillary Clinton has finally told, ahem, her truth. And that truth is that she really hates Bernie Sanders. It’s a truth clear to anyone who had watched them during their last go-round. She bristled when she spoke to him. This nothing socialist from some state with three electors was trying to defeat her, Hillary Clinton, whose turn it was to be president. It was obvious. But then suddenly, when the 2016 primary was over, she needed him. His voters were angry. He had lost and it seemed like the fix was in. Hillary needed them to show up for her, so she put on her best smile and made nice with Bernie Sanders.

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Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to win

Why is Bernie Sanders running for president? The 70-some-year-old pop culture curmudgeon has gone through all the motions of showing up, dancing on Ellen and alongside Larry David on Saturday Night Live and the Today Show. He got a multimillion-dollar book deal and a new house out of his last presidential run, which was launched with the blessing of the DNC establishment as little more than a tune-up for Hillary Clinton. But something went amiss. Bernie caught fire, particularly with the loudest online contingent of the left, on college campuses and dirtbag alternative-media podcasters.

My evening with the Bernie Bros

The stench of beer and cheap deodorant filled the bar in which the ‘Bernie Bros’ were meeting. The scene looked straight out of Fight Club except that the young men assembled there were hairier and none of them had abs.Your humble correspondent watched as the barman prepared a cocktail that combined Jack Daniel’s and Monster Energy.‘What's that?’‘Our speciality,’ he said, ‘It's called “Hillary Clinton's Tears”.’‘I'll have a Coke,’ I said. (I was driving.)‘What are you?’ he sneered, ‘some kind of woman?’I surveyed the crowd. Most of the men were bearded. About half of them were bespectacled. They were all either obese or rail thin. Some of them were gaming. Some of them were podcasting.

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Stephen King and the warped morality of identity politics

As per longstanding annual tradition, Hollywood yesterday woke up early to announce the 2020 Academy Awards nominees — and Twitter, as per slightly more recent annual tradition, woke up to be annoyed when the list of Oscar-worthy actors, writers, directors, and other filmmaking professionals was, as always, not particularly diverse. That this year's nominees could still be so overwhelmingly white and male was a particular slap in the face, especially since the Academy made a highly public move in 2019 to avoid exactly this outcome. July of last year saw the introduction of 842 new members, half of them women, into the Academy's voting ranks, with many spectators anticipating a wave of awards-season recognition for female and minority-led films as a result.

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Warren’s dirty trick against Bernie proves she’s the new Hillary

The next time Elizabeth Warren offers you a beer, be sure not to turn your back on her lest she crack you across the back of the head with it. That's the message the Warren camp has sent out with the latest Liz-Bernie spat — just in time for the seventh (I know!) Democratic debate in Iowa tonight. Pulling a dirty trick worthy of Roger Stone, Warren's associates briefed CNN about a December 2018 meeting between the two senators, during which Sanders allegedly said 'he did not believe a woman could win.' Saagar Enjeti of The Hill lays out the apparent Warren strategy nicely: 'Progressives. Allow me introduce you to the media ecosystem that has bedeviled conservatives in the Trump age: Step 1) Leak a bullshit smear sans any real confirmation to CNN.

Progressives should now admit their outrage about ‘money in politics’ is confected

There’s a funny silence where the complaints about ‘money in politics’ used to be. The latest numbers on amounts spent on TV ads have billionaires Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer at $153.1 million and $116.5 million, respectively. Yet no viral pieces have been written, no passionate speeches given about their corrupting influence. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have given lip service to them, sure, but it’s been very muted. Warren told Rachel Maddow that Bloomberg is ‘skipping the democracy part of this’ because his lack of fundraising means he can’t participate in the debates. Of course, anyone who tells you they believe Warren actually would want Bloomberg in the debates is lying to you.

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Bernie Sanders is no anti-Semite, but his best friends are

Like Britain’s disgraced Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders panders to anti-Semites. Bernie isn’t one himself. He supports the existence of a Jewish state and has even acknowledged that anti-Zionism can overlap with anti-Semitism. He comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and spent a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. But in his presidential bid, Bernie is mainstreaming radical anti-Semitism.Last week, four Americans were murdered in an anti-Semitic shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City whose intended target may have been a Jewish school. At first, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Sanders ally, thought there might be political gains in this attack.

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Bernie Sanders leans into anti-Semitism

Just as Hollywood's racist liberals love a Magical Negro, so young socialists love a Magic Grandpa who promises to shake the money tree, annul student debt and hand out free subsidies to the kulaks. Not all socialism is the same, though, and not just because some of it is national socialism. The Chinese communists under Deng Xiaoping declared ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. America's Magic Grandpa, Bernie Sanders, is a socialist with American characteristics, a millionaire whose life was recently saved by the insertion of an ingeniously capitalist heart stent into his clogged arteries. Being rich, Bernie could, if he needed it, expect to receive a replacement kidney without it first being cut out of a tax defaulter.

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The Democrats’ open mic night in Atlanta

Fear not everyone — there are only seven Democratic debates left this cycle. As if the prospect of a fifth in six months wasn't exhausting enough, the Atlanta bonanza kicked off after 11 hours of impeachment hearings. No wonder the spin room was more muted than usual. Host Rachel Maddow opened proceedings with an impeachment question, making the huge assumption that most viewers had watched them (they hadn't). Of the senators running, only Bernie Sanders didn't take the bait. 'We should not be consumed by Donald Trump', he said, 'we can deal with Trump's corruption, but we also have to stand up for the working families of this country.' Much of the night appeared like business as usual.

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2020 Democrats shapeshift into moderates in Ohio

Tuesday night’s presidential debates reminded Americans of the opposition party’s greatest superpower, shapeshifting, as the candidates we’ve come to know for race-baiting, fear-mongering, open borders and other Squad-inspired talking points took a dramatic turn toward discussing actual policy. It was the most pragmatic, and therefore least entertaining, of the four Democratic National Committee-sponsored debates so far and seemed to further prove the party’s absolute cluelessness in getting a foothold in this brand new style of wartime politics invented by Donald Trump.

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Joe Biden: victim of the cult of youth

Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack, but Joe Biden’s campaign may be the casualty. The 78-year-old Sanders’s physical condition renewed concerns about the 76-year-old Biden’s mental acuity, which had been temporarily scuppered by President Trump’s phone etiquette. Before the Ukrainian controversy, even former president Jimmy Carter hinted Biden had passed his expiration date. Biden’s rivals openly questioned whether his inexact grasp of facts, stilted speech, and apparent memory issues stemmed from his status as a mid-septuagenarian. As with most politicians’ analyses, they properly identify the problems but misjudge their cause and cure. Biden’s hazy habits are not products of senility; they stem from his status as a former idol of America's cult of youth worship.

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The eve of the Bernie-Warren online battle

The great ‘Bernie vs. Warren’ online wars have yet to fully commence, and the current state of affairs resembles something like an uneasy pre-conflict standoff. No tentative pact between the candidates themselves can last forever and early shots have already been fired from their respective squadrons: small skirmishes or drills that precede the outright warfare. Political prognosticators tend to lump Bernie and Warren into the same generic ‘progressive’ category, but for their most committed backers — the ones who will be in the online trenches — the differences are vast and unbridgeable. For the devout socialists, Bernie represents a once-in-a-generation (or even lifetime) opportunity.

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In Houston, Biden got his teeth into Sanders

To the extent Joe Biden is capable of actually formulating coherent sentences – a questionable proposition – he delivered an attack last night that Bernie Sanders has never really been forced to contend with during either of his presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton was not in a position in 2016 where she had to aggressively attack Bernie. Had she been, she would have almost certainly brought up the fact that he is a self-described 'socialist'. Of course, that’s common knowledge by now. But it's a salient point for Bernie's rivals to press him on, especially considering the overriding concern for Democratic voters at present is 'electability'.

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What if Elizabeth Warren blows it in Houston?

Get your skates on! The Democrats on Ice roadshow rolls into Houston this evening, and the media are poised for a slip-up. Tonight is the night Brooklyn-based content creators have been yearning for: when Joe Biden finally lines up alongside the Anointed One, Elizabeth Warren. Surely it's here, they speculate, that Uncle Joe will commit one blunder too many and the era of Elizabeth will be ushered in. How's he gonna mess it up? Will he call Cory Booker 'Barack'? Maybe both eyeballs will explode this time? Gosh I can't wait! Liberals online are so fixated on the narrative of 'Biden gaffe-Warren competent', that they're not considering a series of other possibilities.

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Bernie monsters the moderates

Did someone give Bernie Sanders a hit of speed or was he just especially animated? Last night's debate performance was among the most adept he’s ever delivered. CNN, in its infinite objective wisdom, chose to structure the debate such that he was 'pitted' against the 'moderates', and Bernie parried off the ensuing 'moderate' attacks with unusual gusto. Large segments of the population are by now safely accustomed to Bernie’s stump speech, but they’re perhaps less accustomed to him vigorously defending his positions amid a wave of naysayers. He demonstrated that he has the mental and logical acuity to do this more than capably.

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stillborn revolution

The Democrats’ stillborn revolution

Like some Hobbit or Harry Potter film from 10 years ago, the Democratic debates this summer are so epic in length they must be divided into two parts, each an hours-long endurance test subjecting viewers to candidates 10 at a time, only two or three of whom per night have ever been heard of before. Tuesday’s most familiar faces were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the most left-wing of the serious contenders for the nomination. Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke were the almost-famous figures, the second-tier actors you know you’ve seen before but can’t quite place.

The Democrats’ Catch-22 in the primaries

'Folks, this is not that hard to figure out,' as Joe Biden might put it. The Democrats’ activist base has moved so far left that winning their support imperils the party in the general election.That perverse logic was on full display in Miami this week. The debates over two nights showed a party that has changed significantly since Hillary Clinton won the nomination in 2016. Back then, Bernie Sanders’s socialist positions were insurgent, outsider stances. Now, they are mainstream positions among top-tier Democratic candidates. That’s certainly true for Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. Joe Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar have tried to resist, but they, too, are being pulled left by party activists, where all the energy and campaign donations lie.

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Sure, cancel student debt. Then cancel college

I agree with Bernie Sanders, at least to a point. It is lamentable how students are expected to pay back an average of almost $40,000 in debt after they graduate from college. Frankly, it might be a good idea to cancel it, and if the money can be raised from Wall Street, well, so much the better. Yes, I know the conservative arguments against this move. Does it not penalize people who have paid off their debts? It makes no difference to them. Should conservatives oppose the cutting of regressive taxes because people have already been paying them? A more challenging argument was made in a blunt form by Matt Walsh: 'I guess I'm meant to cry tears of sympathy for all of these college grads with student loan debt. Somehow I just can't muster a single tear.

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The Bernie Sanders paradox

Anton Gunn was holding court at the South Carolina Democratic Convention this weekend, eager to regale journalists with tales of the vaunted Barack Obama primary campaign in 2008. Obama’s landslide victory in South Carolina over Hillary Clinton that year propelled him to indomitable front-runner status, and Gunn, per his own telling, was the very first person Obama hired in the state. 'The first time he landed in South Carolina, I picked him up in my car and I drove him to his first event,' Gunn said.

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