At 'Debate' Dem Politicians Can’t Help But Stray From Facts, From The Constitution, and Individual Rights

P. Gardner Goldsmith | February 26, 2020
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They seem to be unable to help themselves.

From the first minute of the February 25 non-debate in Charlottesville, SC, the seven Democrats on the stage appeared genetically designed to skirt economic facts, avoid the supposed rules of the US Constitution, and to be contemptuous of individual rights.

Straight out of the gate, socialist Bernie Sanders told the crowd that he thinks Chinese Communist President Xi Jinping is an “authoritarian leader”, yet, as Peter Schweizer notes on page 179 of his book, “Profiles in Corruption”:

After college, Sanders drifted around before heading to Israel to work on a kibbutz in 1963. The kibbutz movement was wide and varied, and for years, Sanders refused to reveal the exact kibbutz to which he was connected.

One wonders why…

During the 2016 presidential campaign, intrepid journalists discovered that he spent his time at a settlement connected to an Israeli political party called Mapam. This was a particularly political settlement, Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim, connected to a ‘Soviet-affiliated political faction.’ Kibbutz members admired Joseph Stalin until his death, calling him, ‘Sun of Nations.’ They would celebrate May Day with red flags.

But remember, Bernie’s not a fan of “authoritarians.”

And forget he ever praised Hugo Chavez, the corrupt, authoritarian former “President” of Venezuela, that he has praised authoritarian Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba, and, that, in 1988, Bernie spent his honeymoon in the authoritarian USSR just prior to its economic collapse (great economic insight, there, Bernie).

Bernie also fired-up the “debate” by claiming that, “Last year, real wage increases for the average worker were less than one percent.”

Sorry, Bernie. First, you haven’t defined “average worker”, and it’s not particularly wise to trust the government on anything, but, since Bernie is such a fan of government, lets turn to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which, just last year, noted wage growth was at the highest rate in a decade, due to the demand for labor and the low unemployment rate.

As Jeffry Bartash wrote for MarketWatch in March of last year:

Hourly pay earned by the typical employee rose sharply in February, pushing the increase in wages over the past year to a 10-year high of 3.4%... The last time wages grew that fast was in early 2009.

Whoops. Not an auspicious way to start a televised debate. But everything was cool, since this was being carried on CBS, and the “news people” handling things never bothered to ask the Bernmeister to back up his claim with anything resembling a fact.

And, just to be fair, there are many reasons to dig into the earnings info and the employment info. Anytime I talk to students about “employment stats” and “earnings”, I try to stress to them that there are myriad underlying positives (productivity gains) and negatives (fiat currency inflation of the money supply) that could account for said increases.

But that would require conversing with folks who are interested in economics, and I couldn’t find any on the “debate” stage.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Brigadoon, time seemed to pass much more quickly for the debate participants than for this viewer.

What might have been just a few minutes after Bernie stood strong against “authoritarians”, but which seemed like days on this side of the screen, Massachusetts' famous non-Indian, Liz Warren, claimed that people “cannot trust” Mike Bloomberg, which might be true, but many of us were wondering why “Fauxahontas” didn’t use her ancestral American Indian tribal word for “trust”.

And, mere moments later, she offered a rephrasing of her debunked claim that she lost her job as a teacher back in the Paleolithic because she was “visibly pregnant.”

Yeah, Liz has shown that you can definitely trust her.

And then there was the mighty Tom Steyer, who proclaimed:

"I don’t believe that a government takeover of large parts of the economy makes any sense for working people or for families."

This coming from the guy who, on his own website, says he wants to:

Eliminate fossil fuel pollution from all sectors to achieve a 100% clean energy economy and net-zero global warming pollution by no later than 2045. This means massive and immediate mobilization to decarbonize every sector in an equitable way, including transitioning to clean electricity, setting strong standards for new buildings, retrofitting existing buildings to improve indoor air quality and energy efficiency, accelerating electric vehicle deployment and charging infrastructure, eliminating the use and production of global warming super-pollutants, and efforts to expand new development while meeting pollution reduction goals.

He also states on the same page that he would use Executive Orders (you know, those charmingly unconstitutional authoritarian Presidential moves) to get it done.

All this while he plans on doubling minimum wage rate mandates, as well as pushing unionism.

But remember, folks, he doesn’t think a “government takeover” of the private sector is a good idea.

So we got insults to truth, and heard insults to economics within the first five minutes.

But to cap it off, we needed one of the biggest insults to the US Constitution and individual rights to have been pushed in years.

Have no fear, Bloomberg is here…

Yes. When asked about his apology for “Stop and Frisk” in New York City, Bloomy said, “We let it get out of control. And, uh, when I realized that, I cut it back by 95 percent. And I’ve apologized and asked for forgiveness. I’ve met with ‘black leaders’…”

Feel free to define what a “black leader” is without feeling prejudiced, but the term rarely seems to bother race-baiting, identity-politics-fueled “news” figures or politicians.

And this is one of the big takeaways from the night of splendid nothingness.

The entire theatrical presentation seemed to be about image, identity, and superficiality.

Evidently, Bloomy’s wildly invasive “Stop and Frisk” policy – something the Red Coats in Boston would have applauded and against which the Founders fought – is only deemed bad by the pop media and the leftist politicians when one racial cadre experiences it.

How about the principle of private property and self-ownership for ALL? The fact that this policy was adopted at all is the issue, not that it targeted one “group” or another. That’s a different matter, and is subsumed by the larger point that the principle of self-ownership is colorblind, and breaching it is an offense to a principle, an offense that could be perpetrated against anyone, from a black man, to a Jew, to a Japanese man, to a blue-collar laborer in South Boston, to a white guy going to work in Arizona.

Bloomberg never came close to: “You know, when I realized that ‘Stop and Frisk’ was a massive infringement of the Fourth Amendment -- when I realized that the government is supposed to get a warrant from a judge before searching someone – I stopped the rights-destroying policy.”

And neither did anyone else on the stage.

Because, seemingly, "stage" is the operative word.

Their statements appeared offered for show, not substance.

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