0000.00.00 Bernies Early Years

You could not find a more left leaning candidate: he's extreme as they come. A member of the Young Socialists League, he never met an individual liberty that he cared about (at least more than the collectives power). In Denmark they have a concept called the Law of Jante — which is basically that the individual isn't worth shit, and those that try to achieve and stand out are arrogant pricks. While he isn’t world-wise or well versed enough to comment on that, it sums up his philosophy in a nutshell. As someone joked, he'd make a good President... of Sweden: but that's not true, since they are much more pro-Business than he thinks (lower Corporate taxes than the U.S. for example), even they don't believe in killing the Golden Goose of business like he does.

• As a College kid he was involved or had associations with the Young People’s Socialist League. I don't think the dumbest thing you did in College is relevant to who you are 50 or 100 years later, but the Democrats seem to think that what Romney did in Prep School was attack worthy. And the issue is more whether people denounce or have grown since the mistakes of youth. Bernie has shown zero evidence of maturing as he ages. He matures more like rotting meat than a fine wine.
• Sanders was asked to leave a hippie commune for being too lazy
• Sanders joined the Vermont Liberty Union Party in 1971, which describes themselves as "a nonviolent socialist party" (and ran for Governor twice on their ticket 1972, 1976, and failed, with never more than single digit support), then he was their chairperson for a few years after that.
• He wrote in an op-ed that Congress should “institute public ownership, with worker control, of the major means of production" and told the Bennington Banner that a “sane society” required that “capital has to be controlled by the people.”
• He backed backed Benjamin Spock (Socialist Workers Party) as a presidential candidate: calling for a maximum income of $55,000.
• By 1980 he served as a presidential elector for the Socialist Workers’ Party (Trotskyists, whose platform was the total abolition of capitalism and economic freedom). And he still labels himself a Democratic Socialist (an oxymoron). Reagan said, "government is not the solution to our problem, government IS the problem". Sanders is no Reagan, he's the anti-Reagan.
• In 1988 he Honeymooned in the USSR, because that's where his heart was.
• Bernie plays the poor kid with "my family lived in three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn" -- but they sent him to the University of Chicago, where he got a B.A. in Political Science. Then proceeded to do nothing but be a radical and agitator, driving around in his bondo covered VW bug.
• His first wife divorced him quickly, he had a kid out of wedlock with another woman
• He tried to be an carpenter before failing at that
• He tried his hand freelance writing for far left rags like the Vermont Freeman with such gems as "Man and Woman" where he said that while having sex, every woman fantasizes about being raped by 3 men simultaneously. But he failed at that.
• Then he tried his hand at creating documentaries for public television... but even they have standards. So he failed again.
• He was and is a hippie, and according to his friends, "The only thing he was every good at, is talking non-stop about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off", and he found an audience in the Hippie Enclaves of Vermont, but that's a long ways from being a competent or qualified Presidential Candidate.
• He got his first real job at the age of 40 as mayor of Burlington (by a margin of 10 votes). If you call government politician a "real job".
• To this day, despite a $200K Senator's Salary, all he has to his name is over $65K in credit card debt (virtually everything is in his wife's name). But he has managed to buy himself a multi-million home (or three) off his book deals, while he cries poor. Never since Truman have we had a Presidential Candidate that achieved less in his life.

NOTE: I don't hate hippies. But there are a few kinds of hippies. The hard working kind, that wanted to be in a commune, free love, get stoned, but also could hold a job, help out around the farm, and fund their own lifestyle. Or the ones that liked parts of the lifestyle, but could admit/learn some of the shortcomings and grow. I love and respect those kinds, and don't judge their choices in life, even if they aren't mine. Then there's stoner living in his mom's basement, railing about the bitch that won't raise his allowance, and who steals other kids bikes:the hippie-ocrites that want to fix the problems with tyranny, by becoming the tyrants. Bernie isn't the adorable former kind of hippie.

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