FDR, Bernie and Obama (Added note)

Added note: I've just read that deranged Bernie fans at the Nevada convention booed Barbara Boxer.

Seriously? Is this what we've come to -- assailing a fine woman like Barbara Boxer? If they had jeered DiFi, that I could understand. But Boxer...? Do the BernieBots really think that they can win in November by adopting a position to Barbara Boxer's left? Are they that delusional?

BernieBots make me want to vomit. At this point, I despise Bernie Sanders even more than I despise Trump.

And on that note, here's my original post:

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I'm sick of hearing people place Bernie Sanders in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. Nothing could be further from the truth. In FDR's time, socialists of all stripes despised the President.

While scuttling about the library at UCLA, I've seen some of the literature produced by socialists during the 1930s. They were scathing. They thought that Roosevelt was a racist -- after all, he did have to keep the south Democratic. They thought he was a warmonger. Most of all, they considered him the ultimate tool of Big Capitalism, the preserver of a despised system. What socialists of that era said about FDR was pretty much what so many disillusioned lefties later said about Obama.

And their assessment became mainstream. From a 1999 Los Angeles Times piece: "Roosevelt saved capitalism and the principles of privately owned business for the U.S. economy."

Bernie Sanders does not want such things said of him. He does not belong to a tradition in which "saved capitalism" would be considered a desirable item on one's resume.

He also does not belong to a tradition in which it is considered desirable to attain actual power. The great aim of the American "democratic socialist" is to view the political process from an Olympian remove and to offer a critique. It is considered bad taste to get oneself into a position in which one may get things done.

I've known lefties of Sanders' stripe; I've met 'em in college and elsewhere. If they succeed at anything, their jealous colleagues routinely charge: "You've sold out." Unless you are an academic or an artist, you are supposed to do only the humblest forms of labor -- pushing a broom, working behind the counter. If you are good enough at your job to become the store manager, you've sold out. If you're an academic who gains tenure, you've sold out. If you're an artist who earns a decent living, you've sold out.

The only way to avoid the "you've sold out" accusation is to fail. The romantic appeal of Grand Failure is part of the American socialist psychology.

That's why American socialists think so fondly of Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign: He failed. If he had become governor, if he had made the compromises necessary to that position, the left would have despised Upton Sinclair. (Lefties kind of disliked him anyways. His books sold well. Too successful; very unbecoming.)

Bernie Sanders does not want to be president. Not really. He wants to prevent a Democrat from becoming president. That's his job: Elect Trump. From Bernie's point of view, the rationale would be: The worse things get, the better things get. Crisis begets revolution.

Personally, I distrust revolutions, which usually go wrong. Only young idiots find allure in crisis.

Was I right, or was I right? In 2008, I disparaged Obama, who was then the darling of all good progressives. Today, I disparage Sanders, the darling of all good progressives. The difference between the two men is that Obama was always meant to win office (and to disappoint the left), while the manipulators who have pumped millions into the Sanders campaign -- and who have assured his good press -- do not intend for him to attain actual power. (He doesn't really want power anyways.) 

The NYT offers an uncharacteristically candid assessment of what Obama has wrought:

Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln.

Granted, Mr. Obama is leaving far fewer soldiers in harm’s way — at least 4,087 in Iraq and 9,800 in Afghanistan — than the 200,000 troops he inherited from Mr. Bush in the two countries. But Mr. Obama has also approved strikes against terrorist groups in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, for a total of seven countries where his administration has taken military action.

“No president wants to be a war president,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian at Johns Hopkins University who backed the war in Iraq and whose son served there twice. “Obama thinks of war as an instrument he has to use very reluctantly. But we’re waging these long, rather strange wars. We’re killing lots of people. We’re taking casualties.”

His closest advisers say he has relied so heavily on limited covert operations and drone strikes because he is mindful of the dangers of escalation and has long been skeptical that American military interventions work.

It's as I've said for a while: Obama is a CIA guy, not a DOD guy. He favors the secret dagger, not the massive explosion. I reluctantly supported him in 2012 because the secret dagger seemed less horrible than the massive explosions that Romney clearly wanted to set off.

Are these our only choices -- an Obama or a Romney, in various guises, under new names, election after election? Must it ever be so? No. We had peace, once, and not that long ago.

Under Bill Clinton.

I know you don't want to admit it. You will resort to casuistry, verbal trickery and historical revisionism to avoid making a hated admission. But it's true: Under Bill Clinton we had peace and prosperity.

That's why the Establishment has always hated the Clintons.