I give Fake News until Thursday or Friday to stop congratulating Joe for the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and start hitting him again for his ‘failed’ Presidency. After all, if a media outlet has spent the last 20 months telling everyone that Joe is no good, why should they change their tune just because this legislation – his fourth big bill in two years – just managed to sneak through?
And this bill, by the way, isn’t much to crow about. It won’t really reduce inflation, the so-called drug-price reduction is a phony mess, the green energy provisions are all bullshit, and the tax break that lower-income people should have been given doesn’t exist.
Who said all this? Who else but Bernie Sanders in a 40-minute speech on the Senate floor before the voting began. Of course, Bern ended up voting for the bill because if he hadn’t, the bill would have failed. In which case I would have started an effort one way or another to get Bernie thrown out of the Democratic Senate caucus which frankly, he doesn’t really belong anyway.
That’s right. I don’t like Bernie. I don’t like him at all. I didn’t like him in 2016 because I thought the campaign he ran against Hillary was nothing other than some warmed-over cuchifritos from the Occupy Wall Street movement and had he been a little less concerned with his own media promotion and a little more concerned with actually running a winning primary campaign – who knows? – he might have actually been the nominee and he could have easily kicked Orange Shithead’s ass in.
If anything pissed me off more than anything during 2016, it’s how goddamn polite Hillary was to that shithead who made it clear right from the get-go that he was going to run a nasty, racist, and thoroughly disgusting campaign. We had to wait until 2020 for someone to look Orange Shithead in the face and tell him to ‘shut up’ during a campaign debate. I watched every minute of the 2016 Presidential debates, and I felt that if Bernie had been our candidate, he would have told the shithead to shut up right then.
But he didn’t because he wasn’t the candidate. And now he’s not the President but I don’t think a week has gone by when he hasn’t opened his yap and found something about Joe’s tenure that he doesn’t like.
And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. When I got into politics during college the word ‘socialist’ didn’t mean that you wanted me to be able to go to college for free. The word ‘socialist’ didn’t mean that you wanted single-payer health care. The word ‘socialist’ didn’t mean that you wanted to shift from gasoline -powered cars to the electric ones.
The word ‘socialist’ meant you were against private property, as Grandpa would say ‘prust und prushit,’ (read: that’s that.) And maybe I’m just old-fashioned, maybe I don’t understand the way kids think today, but if socialism as an economic system contrary to capitalism was good enough for Lenin when he got off the train at the Finland Station, it’s good enough for me.
It turns out that Sanders is another one of these Democrats who won’t come out and say he’s thinking of running for President again in 2024 but he also won’t come out a declare himself fully committed to Joe.
In my memory, the last time that ‘progressive’ Democrats decided they wouldn’t support an incumbent President of their party was when LBJ dithered around and then finally announced that he wouldn’t run again in 1968. Now in that case, LBJ was responsible for sending thousands of young kids to get killed in Nam, along with God knows how many Vietnamese peasants who got torched.
Be that as it may, what did we get for dumping LBJ? We got Nixon, a widening of the war and a lot more American boys and Asian peasants getting killed.
What will we get if Joe decides that he’s tired of listening to Bernie and the other so-called progressive members of the blue team and hangs it up after one term? We’ll get some jerk like DeSantis or worse, Ted Cruz.
But maybe if we’re lucky, the Senate will recess, Bernie will go back to Vermont and shut the fu*k up until at least Labor Day.
We should be so lucky, okay?