If you blinked, you might have missed it. One day before Tulsi Gabbard made waves on Oct. 11 with her fiery resignation from the Democratic Party, fellow 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) issued a bland and tired rehash of themes he once expressed with earnest passion in an alleged scolding of blue midterm elections messaging.
“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party,” Gabbard robustly exclaimed in a series of Twitter posts echoing her podcast:
“It’s now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoking anti-white racism – who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution, and who are hostile to people of faith and spirituality, who demonize the police, who protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, who believe in open borders, who weaponize the national security state to go after their political opponents and, above all, who are dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.”
Contrast this blistering statement, rife with specifics, to the soggy marshmallow pie Sanders served up Oct. 10 in an op-ed for The Guardian. The limp missive shows just how cowed the one-time progressive Great Hope has become as the Democrat establishment controls the White House.
Stale Sanders
Sanders lazily used Democrats’ obsession with abortion following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade to strike a pose of chastisement that was peppered with comfort-food clichés for the blue voter base. “In my view, while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered,” Sanders wrote. “Now is the time for Democrats to take the fight to the reactionary Republican party and expose their anti-worker views on the most important issues facing ordinary Americans.”
At a time when runaway inflation under President Biden’s watch has Americans suffering sticker shock with every retail transaction, Sanders trotted out well-worn bromides about prescription drug costs, repealing the estate tax, and paid family leave.
Gabbard’s words resonated so strongly because the Biden administration exhibits all the classic signs of ruthless establishment machine politics. By regurgitating old arguments about minimum wage increases at a time when the Justice Department is targeting concerned parents at school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists, Sanders is reinforcing his absolute refusal to challenge this machine. “While global food prices soared by over 33% last year and are expected to go up another 23% this year, billionaires in the global food and agri-business industry became $382 [billion] richer during the [coronavirus] pandemic,” Sanders opined.
Berning the Working Class
Sanders would have you believe he is a fearless opponent of these forces of bigness. The next paragraph following his Big Ag attack reads: “While we continue to pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, 3 of the largest pharmaceutical companies in America – Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and AbbVie – increased their profits by 90% last year to $54 [billion].”
Bernie Sanders (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
How about that? Big Pharma got richer during the pandemic. Guess which senator helped make that happen?
As recently as March of this year, when most Americans had long put the pandemic social hysteria behind them, Sanders voted against lifting mask and vaccine mandates on federal workers. In July 2020 he introduced the Masks for All Act, which sought to “use the United States Postal Service to distribute three free, reusable masks to every person in the country.”
If you’re doing the math, that’s just shy of one billion masks for 332 million Americans.
Sanders reintroduced the legislation this past January. Think of the enormous taxpayer waste involved – at great profit to medical product manufacturers – if this bill had passed in 2022.
Support American workers by opposing massive illegal immigration? During his 2020 presidential run, Sanders fully discarded his former views against open borders decried by Gabbard. A policy statement on his official website, which dates to that election but is still up, could not be more radical. Sanders calls for a “moratorium on deportations,” vows to “[s]top all construction of the racist and ineffective wall on the U.S.-Mexico Border” and promises he will “break up” the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection agencies.
“You can’t win elections unless you have the support of the working class of this country,” Sanders wrote in his anemic op-ed. But his willful blindness to the Biden administration’s ceaseless assault on these very Americans via the myriad of ways listed by Gabbard only confirms that he is not an oppositional political figure in any meaningful way.
Bernie is a spent force, Tulsi Gabbard has departed, and The Squad, in all its ineptitude, has failed to emerge as a check. One has to ask if there are any significant dissenting voices to the Democrat establishment machine operating inside the party today.
