At the beginning of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, my preference was for Bernie Sanders. I liked how progressive he seemed. Then I vetted him (as well as Hillary Clinton), like we should all be vetting all the candidates we are thinking of supporting. Vetting doesn’t mean nitpicking, because no candidate can pass all the purity tests. Vetting means looking at overall patterns. That’s what I did, looked closely at the candidates’ overall patterns of behavior. And what I found caused me to exit that primary not only supporting Clinton but believing that Senator Bernard Sanders should never hold national office. At that time, I wanted to be done with him. I STILL want to be done with him. But I can’t be. Not yet.
Because although he hasn’t yet announced, all signs point to Bernie Sanders trying yet again to ensconce himself in the White House. And now Bernie is officially running for president. Once again, his dedicated supporters and their companion bots are swarming social media, attacking anyone in opposition to him. This post isn’t for them, however, so with few exceptions, I am not going to talk about or to them. I’m writing this for the following people:
- Those of us who have vetted Bernie, found him wanting, already know most if not all of the details, and want to be able to refer to something that explains why without getting into a long back-and-forth or spending hours researching someone you don’t even support, and
- Those of you who are awake to his basic nature but want to see the receipts for yourself, and
- Those of you beginning to question his fitness for office, and
- Those of you who still kinda like him and don’t fully understand and perhaps are mystified by the blowback he gets.
This post is the first in a series and will function as an overview. It’s basically going to be a list. Each point can and will be shown to be true in subsequent posts. Trust that I will bring the receipts. It will take some time, though, because Bernie has gotten such unearned good press/lack of bad press in the mainstream media for so many years that those sources are often more obscure than a CNN article. And I’ve never seen them collected in one place, which is what I’m attempting to do here. So. Let’s get started with the basics.
- Sanders not only isn’t a Democrat, he has worked for decades to tear down the Democratic party while at the same time using its machinery to advance his own career.
- Sanders has this great wish list of talking points, but that’s all they are. They’re not achievable plans.
- He has had three decades in Congress to make at least some of those ideas come to fruition, and he has very little to show for it.
- And even if he could make those plans happen, they center his core supporters, working class white men. They do nothing to address racial or gender-based disparity.
- Sanders’ history with brown and black people is problematic. (This is maybe my biggest issue with him. Check out this excellent Medium post by Bianca Delarosa that delves into it further.)
- Sanders’ history with women is problematic.
- Sanders’ history with LGBTQ persons is problematic.
- Sanders (like Trump and Jill Stein) was helped by Russia during the 2016 election, something he refuses to address. Since 2012, he has voted against or missed votes on sanctions against Russia/Russian oligarchs FIVE times. Russia helps him. He helps Russia. Why?
- Sanders’ personal economic history is disturbingly opaque. He refuses to fully release his taxes or to account for contributions to his 2016 campaign.
- The ethics and practices of his 2016 campaign were problematic, and he has given no assurances that the 2020 campaign will be any better.
- Last but not least, his hardcore supporters—Bernie bros, Berners, or whatever you want to call them—are often abusive to people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons. More to the point, Sanders refuses to address that even though he absolutely has the power to do so.
If you read through that list and thought immediately of objections (“but remember that time he marched/said a nice thing/etc.”), remember that in the beginning of this post I mentioned patterns. When you want to figure out how someone is going to act going forward, you examine their patterns of behavior, or how they usually behave. Not just what they say, but what they DO. And not what they do once or twice, but what they do repeatedly. In the coming weeks, I will be examining each of those bullet points in its own post. If you want to be notified as I write these posts, you can subscribe by email (most reliable method), follow on FB, or follow on Twitter using the icons below.
Thanks for reading. Comments are encouraged.
