“…Sanders will ask Democrats if they really believe their party’s nomination should be for sale, and he can fairly argue that if Bloomberg had spent only $5 million so far, no one would be discussing him as a serious contender for the nomination.
Bloomberg isn’t just a billionaire; he is, by some measures, the eighth-richest man in America. At one point he owned 14 properties of various levels of lavishness, including three Hamptons estates simultaneously. He considers himself a climate-change activist, but he has a personal fleet of private jets and helicopters. Everything about Bloomberg screams “Manhattan elite.” He co-hosted lavish parties with Harvey Weinstein. He says of his girlfriend, “We’ve only been living together for 19 years.”
Bloomberg doesn’t practice what he preaches; the man who crusaded to ban large sodas and trans fats “dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot. And his snack of choice?Cheez-Its.” His ego is simply Trumpian, declaring, “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven, I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”(Au contraire, mon Michael!)
…People don’t tell billionaires “no” often, and while any mayor of New York City has to develop a thick skin, there are some stories that suggest Bloomberg can get short-tempered and prickly. In 2008, the New York Times noted that once the mayor stopped needing favors from people, his temper flared more openly: “Suddenly, as he enters the twilight of his term, he is openly dressing down commissioners, taking obvious shots at officials who disagree with him and invoking the royal ‘we’ while refusing to answer questions whose topics or phrasing he finds distasteful.”
…Democrats see themselves as the party of the poor and middle class, the party of minorities, and the party of women. Bloomberg’s record offers land mines for all of these groups.Just wait until the Trump campaign learns about the 1990 pamphlet, The Portable Bloomberg: The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Bloomberg, where the future mayor is quoted as saying, “I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who walks past a construction site, doesn’t get a whistle, will turn around and walk past again and again until she does get one,” “If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they’d go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale’s,” and calling a woman a “horsey-faced lesbian.”My, what a contrast with Donald Trump!
In other words, there’s a lot of evidence that Bloomberg is something of an entitled jerk.Upondiscovering the pamphlet way back in 2001, Michael Wolff wrotethat voters shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the “bottom-line, my-way-or-the-highway charismatic CEO is as likely to be the most emotionally stunted, attention-craving, socially maladroit, casually cruel, spectacular boor in the room.”
By contrast, a lot of Democrats (and even some Republicans) who don’t necessarily agree with Bernie Sanders think he’s principled, consistent, and sort of amiably cantankerous. He knows socialism is controversial and wears the label anyway because it’s what he actually believes.
…Bernie Sanders would attempt a form of political jujitsu, turning every Bloomberg ad into another shameless attempt to buy support that could not otherwise be earned. He would turn Bloomberg’s towering strength — a money bin to rival Scrooge McDuck’s — into a giant symbol of everything Democrats can’t stand about politics and the current state of the country.
As a candidate, (orasahuman being) what is Mike Bloomberg without his personal fortune? Nothing.“
To be more specific…
Turning from the man who would be king to the a*s-clown watching his chance for the throne once more slip through his increasingly enfeebled fingers, writing at NRO, David Harsanyi infers it matters not when the Dimocrats’ crazed uncle in the attic lost it, only that he undeniably has:
“Struggling Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden unleashed another incoherent rant about gun rights in front of a group of New Hampshire residents this weekend. While offering lots of the usual misinformation — Biden stands firmly against “20, 30, 40, 50 clips in a weapon,” for instance — things really fell apart when he started quoting Thomas Jefferson.
This has to be the first time in history that a serious presidential contender has publicly gamed-out how a modern American military — armed with F-15s and air-to-surface missiles — would crush an imaginary citizen-led insurgency…
…Biden cuts off Jefferson’s hyperbole about revolutions at a very convenient spot. The quote, which was given in the context of a centuries-long fight for liberty, is: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. One suspects that Jefferson — granted, far too animated by the violence of the French Revolution for my taste — was more interested in spilling the latter’s blood.Lots of it. But Biden skips that part and stakes out an authoritarian position, not only because he doesn’t believe in the core rationale for the Second Amendment but also because he doesn’t believe in the core rationale for the Founding. The American citizenry is conferred rights by God, not by the power of a missile. What Biden said is tantamount to claiming that we don’t need to protect our First Amendment rights because they can always be crushed by the power of an M-1 tank.
There’s a good case to be made that we no longer have to take Biden seriously. But this risible argument seems to be increasingly popular amongSecond Amendment antagonists. I’ll give them this: “You don’t need your guns because we can annihilate you with advanced military weaponry” is a hell of an electoral sales pitch.“
It’s scary to think for eight long years Biden was a mere 2.27 – 5.8 grams of copper-jacketed lead away from running this country.
Meanwhile, in an “Earth to Bernie” moment, as Jim Freeman notes at Best of the Web…
“…Even socialism’s leading practitioner in the country now acknowledges that private investment is the only way to save a critical industry. Anatoly Kurmanaev and Clifford Krauss report in the New York Times:
After decades of dominating its oil industry, the Venezuelan government is quietly surrendering control to foreign companies in a desperate bid to keep the economy afloat and hold on to power…
The government’s power and legitimacy have always rested on its ability to control its oil fields — the backbone of the country’s economy — and use their profits for the benefit of its people. (No, they’ve used their profits for their own personal benefit! The Times can’t even admit the truth when it’s as plain as the ears on The Obamao’s head.)
But the nation’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, in his struggle to retain his grip over a country in its seventh year of a crippling economic crisis, is giving up policies that once were central to its socialist-inspired revolution.
Not that encouraging private investment will be easy after the socialists have spent two decades turning one of Latin America’s richest countries into a land of hunger and misery. It may be especially challenging to attract foreign executives given the treatment they came to expect when working for state-owned Citgo Petroleum Corp The Journal’s Jessica Donati recently reported:
Venezuelan authorities rounded up U.S. oil executives held under house arrest in Caracas Wednesday night and moved them to a prison, the top U.S. envoy to Venezuela told reporters on Thursday…
Top U.S. envoy Elliott Abrams said the six Citgo employees, who have been detained since 2017 without trial, were believed to have been transferred to Helicoide prison in Caracas.
If questioned on the horror that is now Venezuela, Mr. Sanders will surely claim that it does not represent his kind of “democratic socialism.” But how will he explain the support he provided to the strongmen of Caracas as they went about trashing Venezuelan democracy and prosperity?…”
Sanders obviously hasn’t gotten the word. But at least he’s consistent…
…which is more than we can say for Mitt…or the rest of the Dimocratic field.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Finally, in the spirit of February 14th, there’s this timely cartoon courtesy of The Penguin…
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