The Bernie Sanders boomlet has reached its limit.

I know that the above reality check will send Comrade Sanders’ fanboys and -girls into a three-foot hover of knickers-twisting indignation, but there it is. Despite all the jabber about “fairness,” “income inequality,” “democratic socialism,” etc., despite Hillary R. Clinton’s repulsive personality and documented mendacity, political realities are beginning to assert themselves. And the dominant reality is this: The Democratic Party has been bought and paid for by Clintons, Inc. Now they want the party’s presidential nomination for HRC, and they will not be denied.

The whole purpose of the Clinton Foundation, its mission in life, is to perpetuate the power and influence of the Clintons by putting the Pants-Suited One in the White House. The Foundation was used to build political support, grant favors that could be called in later, provide employment for the Clinton cabal and, not least, amass money. Only a small percentage of the lucre that flows into the Foundation flows out again in the form of charitable contributions. The rest is payola.

Supporters of Sanders couldn’t see this. They thought that their man’s leftie blather, his promise to shower the “struggling middle class” and the poor with goodies paid for by plundering “greedy corporations” and “the rich,” would magically boost him over that stooge of the crony capitalists, HRC. And I must say, I enjoyed the display of bitter hatred with which HRC is regarded in progressive circles. The thought that the Vanguards of the Proletariat are going to have to hold their noses and vote for her makes me smile.

So too does the evidence of their limitless ability to delude themselves. It was obvious from the beginning that Comrade Sanders had no chance against the Clinton machine. Every major interest group critical to the Democratic Party was and remains on HRC’s side. There were no major defections to Sanders; he received no high-profile endorsements of a kind that would have been damaging to HRC. The party is in the Clintons’ pocket and nothing less than a major scandal can change that. Sanders must now be regretting his grant of a server scandal pass to HRC during the Democratic debate; certainly he’s been whistling a different tune recently. But it doesn’t matter.

Recent polls show that HRC is beginning to recover from the slump that afflicted her a couple of months ago. She’s way ahead, both in Iowa and nationally. Her high-eighties favorability rating among black Americans, a crucial Democratic voting bloc, is twice that of Sanders. There’s just no place for the latter to go for the additional support he needs to overcome the Pants-Suited One’s commanding lead.

Bernie Sanders isn’t a total fool and I suspect that he’s read and understood the writing on the wall. Of course he won’t suspend his campaign immediately. Both ego and a quite understandable desire not to disappoint his loyal supporters will keep him in there swinging for some time yet. But the truth is that it’s over. So sorry, Occupy Wall Street veterans, there will be no revolution in 2016.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:31 AM EST

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Election season always bring on the political clichés and three that are particularly nails-down-the-chalkboard annoying are getting a real workout this time around: “struggling middle class,” disappearing middle class” and “strong middle class.” They are, it must be admitted, nonpartisan in usage: I find them just as off-putting coming from Jeb Bush as when they come from Bernie Sanders.

The middle class had been “struggling” and “disappearing” for a long time—for quite as long as our “crumbling infrastructure” has been tottering on the brink of the abyss. And as we know—because our politicians never stop telling us—a “strong middle class” is the nation’s backbone. Take that, all you non-performing poor people and rich, greedy plutocrats!

Now it’s true of course that the masses in the middle face challenges: stagnant incomes, burgeoning higher education costs, underwater home mortgages, etc. and so forth. Young people coming out of college find that the high-end jobs they were expecting are not necessarily there. Women find that contrary to the promises of feminists they can’t really have it all. The litany of laments goes on and on—you’d think, indeed, that we were all living in Venezuelan conditions. Thankfully, though, no shortage of toilet paper has yet been reported from Middle America.

But simply clear one’s ears of the election-season clamor, take a look around and you’ll find that life is actually pretty soft here in the Land of E Pluribus Unum. Yes, I know, the male life expectancy in Switzerland is .85 years higher than in the US while in Finland teachers get paid as much as physicians. These crying injustices will no doubt cause Bernie Sanders to stroke out before Election Day but personally I’m not too concerned about them. What does bother me, though, is this political focus on the middle class.

Politicians constantly insist to us that their policies will benefit said middle class. But there’s no free lunch, is there? Everything in politics and in life involves a trade-off. So an advantage conferred on the middle class implies a disadvantage imposed on some other class. Leftie politicians like Comrade Sanders are explicit in their desire to plunder “the rich” on behalf of the struggling/disappearing middle. Moderates and some conservatives, with much throat clearing, fudge this “who, whom?” question. Well, here’s a question for the whole mob, left, right and center: Why should the federal government favor the middle class, even rhetorically?

I ask this question because, let’s face it, what the politicians are promising the middle class can only be paid for by the middle class. The extreme example is the cornucopia of goodies promised by Bernie Sanders. He claims that he can pay for them by squeezing more tax receipts out of corporations and “the rich.” If Sanders really believes this then he’s a fool, a liar or both. Confiscating the total net worth of “the rich” would pay for about three months of the Sanders New Great Society Deal. No, if the middle class wants free college & etc., well, the middle class will have to pay for it.

And the poor will have to pay for it as well, because Sandersnomics guarantees that they’ll stay poor, albeit snuggled in the warm embrace of the Nanny State. Sanders is uninterested in economic growth. He’s much more concerned with those ill-defined, plastic concepts, “fairness” and “equality.” A moribund economy in which the available funds are shuffled around by incompetent bureaucrats (redundancy alert!) does not translate into a society distinguished by upward mobility.

I pick on Bernie Sanders because he represents the extreme when it comes to middle-class demagoguery. But they all do it, don’t they? Everybody wants to be the middle class’s best friend. Since most American like to think of themselves as middle class this makes a certain amount sense as a matter of political positioning. What about the national interest, though? What about the welfare of the country as a whole? E Pluribus Unum, remember?

But perhaps that idea is out of date and we should all get used to being members of classes that are, collectively, clients of the government, presenting their bowls with a simpering “Please, sir, I want more.” Perhaps the political rhetoric of the middle class is merely a symptom of the terminal moral cancer that grips our republic. Corrupt rhetoric begets corruption of thought, however, so a first step along the path to salvation may be taken by suppressing such miserable clichés as “struggling middle class.”

Posted by tmg110 at 8:13 AM EST

Updated: Tuesday, 3 November 2015 8:15 AM EST

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It is an unshakable doctrine of the progressive faith that a “public option” would be great for the cost and quality of American healthcare. Competition from an efficient, high-quality, government-run, nonprofit health insurance system would, it is alleged, force private insurers to hold premiums down while offering more benefits. Everybody wins! Well, those evil private insurance companies lose—but everybody else wins! 

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was originally intended to embody a public option. But to the loudly expressed dismay of progressives the p.o. was deleted from the final bill. All was not lost, however, for in its place the ACA laid the groundwork for a system of state-based, nonprofit consumer operated and orientated (co-op) health insurance organizations. Financed by startup loans from the federal government, these co-ops were expected to offer excellent coverage with low premiums. How could this be possible? As President Obama himself explained it, the co-ops would have much lower per-patient administrative costs. Nor would they be grubbing for profits. As ever, the appellation “nonprofit” thrilled the hearts of progressives. 

Sounds swell, doesn’t it? Now of course, the co-ops were still expected to operate in the green. But the positive balance on the bottom line would go for service enhancements and continuing low premiums instead of being distributed to greedy shareholders. But you know how this story turns out, right? Yes, indeed, all the promises and guarantees made by progressives on behalf of the co-op concept have crashed and burned. 

Twenty-three co-ops commenced operations in 2014, the federal government providing $2 billion in the form of start-up loans. Many of them were run by political activists with a particular interest in healthcare issues, e.g. Sarah Horowitz, who worked with Barack Obama when he was a state senator in Illinois. She received seed money to establish no less than three co-ops, in New York, New Jersey and Oregon. But in September the largest of them, New York’s Health Republic, announced that it was closing down. Over 150,000 customers were left high and dry, their health insurance abruptly cancelled. 

New York’s Department of Financial Services had previously ranked Health Republic as the worst health insurance provider in the state. According to the DFS, Health Republic had the most customer complaints of the twelve health insurers operating in New York.  The co-op was excoriated for high rates and premiums,  slow payment of claims and reimbursements, and the generally low quality of coverage. The co-op ran through $355 million in low-cost loans including a $91 million emergency infusion in late 2014 before the DFS called a halt, ordering Health Republic to stop writing new policies. 

Nor is the sorry saga of Health Republic an outlier. In total, nine co-ops have closed down and six or seven more are in decidedly shaky condition. State insurance regulators are increasingly concerned that the entire co-op concept is unworkable. Many are pressuring the co-ops to raise their plan premiums, arguing that artificially low prices supported by federal loan guarantees are unsustainable. 

So what went wrong? The short answer is that the co-op program was amateur hour for health insurance. The ACA specifically bars co-ops from hiring health insurance professionals, i.e. anyone with a career background in the private health insurance market. After all, those wicked and greedy health insurance company execs must not be allowed to pollute the purity of the co-op concept! Thus deprived of adult supervision the boys and girls in charge made a number of fundamental errors. To attract customers the co-ops set their premiums low. And customers were certainly attracted, but there was one little problem: The average co-op customer turned out to be older and in poorer health than expected. The co-ops thus found themselves shoveling money out the door much faster than anticipated. Revenue from those low premiums didn’t begin to cover costs and to make matters worse the promise of low administrative expenses proved illusionary. Indeed, the administrative costs of some co-ops have proved to be five or ten times higher than those of private insurance companies. Fourteen of them have per-member-per-year administrative costs in excess of $1,000, versus an average $150 for private insurers. 

Into this maw of incompetence and inefficiency has disappeared almost $1 billion in federally guaranteed loan money—an expensive but valuable lesson. As Peter Suderman noted recently in an article for Reason magazine, the co-op debacle shows what would have happened if the public option had in fact been adopted: a much larger, much more expensive debacle. A government-operated health insurance system would be too big to fail no matter how dismal its performance, leaving taxpayers to cover its gargantuan losses. Obamacare as it is may be bad for American healthcare—but with a public option it could have been a whole lot worse.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:22 AM EDT

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The news that Cuban troops, sponsored by Russia, have appeared in Syria would be funny if it weren’t so alarming. Here we have one more rotten fruit of the Obama Administration’s sorry apology for a foreign policy. This is what we get for pursuing a policy of rapprochement with Communist Cuba. 

The sad fact that the rivals and enemies of the United States view Barack Obama with utter contempt becomes more obvious by the day. And why shouldn’t they view him so? Hasn’t he earned their contempt? From the earliest days of the Obama Administration US foreign policy has been characterized by frivolity (the Russian reset button), hubris (Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo), self-delusion (engagement with the Islamic Republic of Iran), incompetence (the skedaddle out of Iraq; the Libyan intervention), empty threats (the Syrian red line) and general idiocy (just about every word out of John Kerry’s mouth). One measure of the uselessness of this week’s Democratic presidential debate is that when Hillary Clinton touted Libya (now the violent, lawless playground of warring factions and Islamofascist militias) as a great foreign-policy success no one of her rivals called her out. 

Every day or so the hapless Josh Earnest trudges to the podium in the White House press room to assure the nation that everything is going according to plan. In a recent interview the President insisted that V. Putin’s move into Syria is actually a symptom of “weakness” while he, Obama, is showing true leadership by bloviating about climate change. The Administration spent half a billion dollars to arm and train antigovernment rebels in Syria—with no result. When questioned about this Obama had the gall to say that well, he never really thought the program would work. Sorry about that! And things are going so well in Afghanistan that Obama has had to reverse course on his plan to withdraw all US forces within the year. He now plans to leave some 5,500 troops in that country—not enough to turn the situation around but probably enough to ensure that a real mess is bequeathed to his successor. 

I didn’t expect to approve of Obama’s foreign policy but I never anticipated such a display of sheer ineptitude. The President—and therefore his administration—seems unable to come to a decision about anything, except perhaps the timing of a retreat, an about-face or a cave-in. The nuclear agreement that he and John Kerry negotiated with Iran is the product of one concession after another by the US to the Islamic Republic. In effect, Obama and Kerry conceded to Iran the right to become a nuclear power, just pleading with them not to rush the process. And even this sweet deal the ayatollahs have treated with disdain, stating that they, not the Great Satan, will decide how its terms should be interpreted. 

Since 1938 Neville Chamberlain has represented the gold standard of appeasement. But compared to Barack Obama his profile is almost Bismarckian. After Munich, when it became clear to him what Hitler intended, Chamberlain honestly admitted his mistake and changed course. It’s impossible to imagine Barack Obama doing anything like that. Instead of blaming himself for ignoring reality our Community Organizer-in-Chief is more likely to criticize reality for its failure to live up to his vision. Why can’t V. Putin understand that what he’s doing just isn’t done any more? In that postmodern lament is encapsulated all the foolishness of our postmodern president.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:08 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 15 October 2015 1:09 PM EDT

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Though it should, last night’s Democratic Party presidential debate probably won’t put a lid on Bernie Sanders’ creepy White House bid. His fans having already demonstrated their imperviousness to reality, there’s no reason to think that their hero’s dismal showing on the debate stage will make an impression. The more Sanders yells, the loonier he looks, the more they love the guy. While media pundits and the political establishment gave the win to Hillary Clinton, focus groups around the country agreed that Sanders came out on top. 

In one sense it’s true that Hillary did win, or at least checked a couple of important boxes. She was by far the most polished performer on the debate stage, which will no doubt reassure nervous Democrats who’ve been wondering if she has what it takes to prevail in 2016. And maybe, just maybe, her performance will persuade Vice President Joe Biden to stay out of the race. But the opinion of the pundits should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. After all, they poured scorn on Donald Trump, predicting that he’d quickly crash and burn. After the first GOP presidential debate, they declared him a dead duck. But lo and behold, there he is today, still leading in the polls. So when many of the same prognosticators say that Hillary triumphed last night, I for one am not convinced. 

So what is it that makes a seemingly fringe candidate like Sanders viable? In two words, fear and hate. The candidate’s supporters supply the former; he supplies the latter. Sanders’ supporters fear Wall Street, banks, crony capitalism, free trade, China, Mexico, unemployment, vanishing entitlements, global warming, the militarization of the police, the national security state. Meanwhile Sanders himself hates Wall Street, banks, crony capitalism, free trade, China, Mexico, climate-change deniers, conservatives, Republicans Fox News. The present political environment is congenial to demagoguery—and Comrade Sanders is the very model of a modern demagogue. 

Anyone who’s been paying attention will notice two things right away. First, there’s considerable overlap between the fears of Sanders supporters and those of Trump supporters. And what generates this fear is a loss of faith in the promise of American life. Most of the fearful are not destitute. Some, indeed, like the nurses whose union has endorsed Sanders, are doing quite well, thank you. But they’re afraid that somehow, someday, all they have could be snatched away by greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or grasping foreign countries or illegal immigrants. Second, both Sanders and his followers contradict themselves at every turn. They want jobs, but they’re dubious about economic growth. They revile trade but they embrace the most costly import of all: illegal immigration. They want gain, but no pain. 

A similar climate of fear and entitlement breathed life into German National Socialism. Sanders’ rants against Wall Street are eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s denunciations of “Jewish capital.” His rants against the political class echo Hitler’s condemnation of the “November criminals” of the Weimar Republic. His paeans to the virtues of the poor and middle class are reminiscent of Hitler’s praise of the Volk. And of course, he supplies an Enemy, one not very different in profile in fact than that supplied to Germans by their Führer. Indeed Sanders preaches a variant of national socialism, albeit translated from the major to a minor key. That the college students who are among his most fervent disciples cannot see this is a telling commentary on the decline of American higher education. Only people who dwell in the present moment, largely ignorant of the past, can fail to perceive what Sanders is and what he’s really saying. 

The ascent of Bernie Sanders is a worrying sign of the times. I catch myself reflecting that a sleazy political trimmer with no scruples or principles—you know who I mean, Hillary—would be preferable to a self-confessed democratic socialist, a fanatical true believer with a detailed enemies list, and I realize that American politics has taken a hard turn for the worse.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:47 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 15 October 2015 7:58 AM EDT

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The old man said, Yes, I’m headed there.

And when I asked him where,

He rolled a cigarette

And struck a kitchen match

And leaned back in his chair.

The old man drew on his cigarette.

There was a girl I met,

Long years ago, he said.

But then, you know, she died.

I saw his eyes were wet.

She departed for a better place,

And I with measured pace

Have followed down the years.

The old man shook his head.

That’s where I’m headed, son. But her face—

While he rolled another cigarette

I sat wondering of her face.

Supposing that he remembered it

Framed within her coffin, cold and pale.

But all he said was, God damn it, son—

I’ve quite forgotten what she looked like.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:15 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 5 November 2015 8:46 AM EST

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The other day GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson made this commonsense observation: “We have got to stop paying attention to the p.c. police who say every lifestyle is exactly of the same value,” Carson said “No, it’s not of the same value. It is very clear that intact, traditional families with traditional, intact values do much better in terms of raising children. So let’s stop pretending that everything is of equal value.”

Carson’s claim happens to be backed up by years and decades of research but that didn’t stop the Left from excoriating him for insensitivity, sexism, homophobia, etc. and so forth. His comment was “offensive,” you see. It was also true but who cares? People were offended! Feelings were hurt! Shame on you, Dr. Ben Carson!

I find this criticism pretty rich, coming as it does from people whose mode of political discourse consists largely of adolescent name-calling leavened with obscenity, e.g. the antiwar movement, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Cherry-picked extreme examples, you say? Well, each one has been praised and applauded by the media and big-name Democrats—even when they were calling for the assassination of George W. Bush, the murder of bankers or the killing of police officers.

But back to Dr. Carson. Why is what he said about the superiority of the traditional family so offensive to the Left? Because it’s so true. That is to say, that fact of life falsifies some of the Left’s deeply held beliefs: that the traditional family is an oppressive agent of the power structure, that men are optional if not evil, that social workers and welfare benefits can substitute for husbands and fathers. We have feminism to thank for the spread of this poisonous idea, the source of so much pain and misery. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” Gloria Steinem once quipped. Try telling that to an unwed teenaged mother in the Bronx.

I will criticize Carson on one point only: We really have no idea yet how children will do in same-sex families. That experiment is just beginning. I suspect they’ll do all right because their parents are likely to be well educated and well off. The old joke that human beings can be produced cheaply by unskilled labor is inapplicable to same-sex couples. Their decision to become parents necessarily involves third, fourth, fifth parties: adoption agencies, lawyers, sperm donors, surrogate mothers, etc., etc. In short, it’s expensive. So if Heather’s going to have two daddies, they’d better be one-percenters.

There’s no doubt, however, that single parenthood is bad for women and children. A girl who becomes an unwed mother age of sixteen can look forward to a lifetime of poverty. In many cases divorce is calamitous for women, abruptly thrusting them below the poverty line. And their children share in the misery. Pinched circumstances and the absence of a father translate into poor performance at school, substance abuse, criminality—a life forever impoverished both economically and spiritually.

As the good doctor’s story own attests, there’s nothing inevitable about this. By heroic effort and self-sacrifice many single mothers have salvaged their children’s lives. But the odds don’t favor such happy outcomes. For every Dr. Ben Carson there are scores and hundred of men and women whose potential was nipped in the bud by a miserable childhood. This is the inconvenient truth that the Left so furiously rejects.

For some reason—perhaps because he’s black, perhaps because he turns away their wrath with soft answers—the Left seems particularly bothered Carson. I’m not convinced that he’s the right man for the presidency but I do think that other Republican presidential candidates could benefit from his example. By saying what he thinks, by refusing to back downs when criticism comes his way, by responding to that criticism calmly and without rancor, Ben Carson executes a double play. He fames the debate by addressing issues in a way that makes sense to the American people while exposing the dishonesty, malice and plain bad manners of the Left. Not bad for a political novice.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:24 AM EDT

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What does Hillary R. Clinton really think of “everyday Americans,” as she’s pleased to call the proles? Let’s review. 

As Secretary of State the Pants-Suited One was a champion of the trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In 2012 she characterized it as the “gold standard” of trade agreements. In her book Hard Choices, published earlier this year, she listed the TPP as one of her greatest accomplishments. But that was B.S.—by which I mean Before Sanders. When the self-described socialist senator from Vermont first announced that he was running for president, Hillary the Inevitable smiled indulgently. Poor old Bernie! Whatever possessed him to think that he could crash the coronation? But then… 

Then Comrade Sanders began gaining ground on Hillary and now he’s ahead in New Hampshire. He’s attracting big raucous crowds of progressives and raising serious money. Meanwhile Hillary’s poll numbers are sinking to the accompaniment of whispers that maybe she’s not so inevitable after all. The party establishment, concerned about her vulnerability and regarding Sanders as an unelectable kook, is toying with the idea of a Joe Biden run for the nomination. Joe Biden! The party bigwigs must really be worried! 

Now it so happens that when it comes to trade Comrade Sanders is a leftie troglodyte. He thinks that the key to free pie and chips for the toiling masses is to wall off America from the global economy. So naturally he reviles all trade agreements, most emphatically including the TPP. That’s how extreme the man is: On economic issues, he makes Barack Obama look moderate and sensible. 

But this is all about Hillary, remember? Comrade Sanders may be a kook but he’s also a threat to the coronation. So what’s a formerly inevitable candidate to do? Tack to the left, of course—which the Pants-Suited One has been doing with all the lack of finesse that we’ve come to expect of her. 

Now when GOP presidential candidates are seen to be placating the Republican Party’s conservative base they’re denounced in the mainstream media as cowardly hypocrites, pandering to the stormtroopers of the “extreme right.” But Hillary R. Clinton has received no such criticism. Progressive pundits and Hillary fans like Julie Roginsky merely grimace and deploy the “everybody does it” dodge. (I’ve seen her do this more than once on FNC.) So don’t expect them to make a business of Hillary’s abandonment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yes, that’s right, yesterday she kicked her greatest accomplishment to the curb. “As of today,” she said, sounding as if she’d just recently gotten around to reading the text of the TPP, “I’m not in favor of what I have learned about it.” In the annals of flip-flopping there have been few clumsier performances.

Actually what Hillary Clinton has learned is that she’s in serious danger of having the crown snatched away from her—again. So in a desperate attempt to scotch the Sanders surge she’s cozying up to her party’s loony left wing. It’s a dismal spectacle but not a surprising one. Anybody who thinks that either Bill or Hillary Clinton harbors a single genuine conviction or possesses a shred of integrity hasn’t been paying attention to their long slog through public life. But the contempt in which the both hold “everyday Americans” might well be justified, for there remains a fair chance that despite her dishonesty, her lies, her corruption and her repellent personality, Hillary R. Clinton will be the next president of the United States.

Posted by tmg110 at 10:46 AM EDT

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Just a note to announce that my short story, "Take Back the Name," has been published in the latest issue of eFiction Magazine.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:10 AM EDT

Updated: Sunday, 4 October 2015 11:12 AM EDT

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