Portrait of a loser
I first posted this one back when it originally appeared in 2016. As something of a counterpoint to my gloomy take below, and with the CF archives remaining hosed for the foreseeable future, I think it’s time to trot it out again.
Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”
One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.
Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”
Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.
The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”
So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.
He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt.
And then, a mere four years on, hey presto! Bernie The Klown somehow finds himself the nouveau-wealthy owner of three (count ’em, 3) palatial mansions. The TeeWee ad fairly writes itself: Are you a shiftless, talentless bum who is completely bereft of any useful skill, incapable of earning an honest living for yourself and your family? Are you nonetheless unshakably convinced that you’re destined for greatness—your ego inflated beyond reason, your sense of self-regard and worth wildly out of whack with your negligible real-life capabilities? Do you believe that your comprehensive failure to contribute anything to society in no way negates your presumed right to dictate how others conduct their lives? Then the career-politician grift just might be the racket for you, my friend…
The choice in this election is shaping up to be a very clear one. It will likely boil down to a battle between those who create and produce wealth, and those who take it and redistribute it.
All our elections come down to that. They have for a good while now, actually.
The Founders were appalled at the awful prospect of the eventual rise of a parasitic professional politician class to plague their carefully-crafted new nation. The sordid tale of how a grubby, toxic little insect like Red Bernie flailed about his entire life with pluperfect futility—a failure, a nullity, a waste of skin without redeeming quality or virtue—until falling assbackwards into the political cesspool, where he prospered far beyond his due, explains why they felt that way…and confirms the wisdom of their opinion, too.
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