Or, "the delegate apple don't fall far from the candidate tree":
Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders, who enjoys a double-digit lead over former [Commissar] of State Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary battle, has sought to reinvent himself as a "Democratic Socialist," but his past — including his serving as elector — or delegate — on behalf of the radical Socialist Workers Party in 1980, may prove troublesome.
"May". Not "will," but "may".
This is where one of our major political parties is now, folks. Fully "fundamentally transformed".
On Monday, the Atlantic reported that Sanders began his political career "on the revolutionary left," adding: "In 1980, he served as an elector for the Socialist Workers' Party."
In October, the Washington Post reported that Sanders had "served as an elector for the 1980 Socialist Worker Party nominee, Andrew Pulley."
The Socialist Workers Party, or SWP, traces its roots to the Communist League of America, a pro-Marxist group that supported Leon Trotsky in his 1927 split with Joseph Stalin....
Among the positions Sanders' candidate, Pulley, advocated on behalf of the SWP in 1980:
Pulley called for "solidarity" with the revolutionary governments of Iran and Cuba, according to the New York Times. His remarks appeared to suggest America should join forces with revolutionary regimes that he imagined to be beneficent actors on the global stage.
Barack Obama has already checked off those two boxes, by the way.
At the time Iran was holding U.S. hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran. In an April 1980 Associated Press report, Pulley called the possibility of U.S. military action in reaction to the Iranian hostage crisis "an ominous danger to world peace." He urged then-President Carter to hand America's deposed ally, Shah Reva Pahlavi, over to the revolutionary mullahs.
Kind of like Barack Obama has handed the revolutionary mullahs nuclear weapons.
The SWP sought to eliminate all U.S. defense and CIA spending. The $150 billion saved would be spent on public-works projects. Of course, this would amount to unilateral U.S. disarmament in the midst of the Cold War, and Western Europe's subjugation to Soviet hegemony.
O chose to homosexualize and Islamicize the U.S. military instead of abolishing it. But otherwise, these boxes have been checked off as well. Which leaves military abolition to President Sanders, I guess.
The Times reported that Pulley favored nationalizing virtually all private industry "especially oil, automobiles, and the railroads." In other words, Sanders' preferred candidate sought to end private enterprise as we know it — a system that New York Times columnist David Brooks has credited with "the greatest reduction in poverty in human history," citing the recent, rapid advance of economic conditions in India, [Red] China [???], and other developing nations.
Pulley voiced strong support for the Nicaraguan revolution of Daniel Ortega. Pulley told the Associated Press in August 1979 that America should send food and medicine, rather than Marines, to Nicaragua. Pulley added that Anastasio Somoza's overthrow had "inspired the exploited masses the world over."
According to a September 1980 Times report, the SWP platform also proposed cutting the work week to thirty hours. But it would force companies to pay workers as if they were still working forty.
A creative minimum wage increase, that would be in today's Obamaconomy.
Cutting workers' hours without cutting their pay, it maintained, would reduce unemployment because companies would be forced to hire additional workers.
Without being able to control labor costs. Sure - bankruptcy is always a job-creating economic stimulus, is it not?
The likelihood the policy would touch off massive inflation, while also incentivizing companies to automate production and eliminate workers altogether, went unmentioned however.
Reads like today's headlines, doesn't it?
Now let me ask you all a very basic, straightforward question: Is there any reason, any at all, to believe that the above isn't also Bernie Sanders' 2016 platform, down to the last jot and tittle? Because while the man has definitely aged, he has not changed at all:
But they make plain that Sanders was in fact a self-styled 1960s-era revolutionary.
"When he came to Vermont in the late 1960s to help plan the upending of the old social order," wrote the Times' Sarah Lyall in July, "the future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought with him the belief that the United States was starkly divided into two groups: the establishment and the revolutionaries. He was a revolutionary."
Sanders self-conception as someone who would overturn the established order was apparently quite sincere.
In an article for the Vermont Freeman, an "alternative" newspaper, Sanders described the United States as "a dying society" whose economy was based on "useless" goods that were "designed to break down or [are] used for the slaughter of people."....
"Ready to start a political revolution?" his campaign web site provocatively asks.
And here is the punchline you've all been waiting for:
The irony of Sanders' status as a potential Democrat standard-bearer claiming the mantle of democratic socialism is that many [Democrat]s reject him as too mainstream.
"Bernie Sanders isn't socialist enough for many [Democrat]s," Bloomberg's David Freedlander has observed. [emphases added]
This of the same man that plans to impose a $2.5 trillion PER YEAR single-payer health care gulag in ObamaCare's place.
And remember, folks: Current polls show Bernie Sanders would defeat Donald Trump this November....by a wide margin.
Still think this country is "still conservative," my Tea Party friends? Even if General Secretary Sanders wouldn't have all that much "fundamental transforming" left to do.
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