Is Bernie Sanders out of his mind?

I thought I hated Bernie before, but this...

Sanders’ new plan would allow school districts to use federal money for busing, drawing a sharp contrast with Joe Biden, who fought against efforts to use busing to desegregate schools in the 1970s.

The plan would try to revive the force of the federal government’s efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to end the separation of students by race, help school districts that are trying to desegregate their own schools, and address funding disparities that mean students of color often end up in schools that have less money and more inexperienced teachers.

I'm all for white and black kids going to schools together. But busing? Doesn't Sanders comprehend how thoroughly busing was hated when it was tried in the 1970s?

Democrats destroyed their own brand when they became linked in the public consciousness with mandatory busing. Remember, this was a time when Watergate and other scandals had the GOP on life support. It can fairly be said that, without mandatory busing, there would have been no Reagan revolution. Busing kept the Republican party alive. Busing created the monster that is modern conservatism.

If the issue of forced busing had not revitalized the Republican brand, this country would have instituted some sort of "single payer" health insurance overhaul in the 1980s. (That topic was widely discussed in the 1970s; the talk ended when Reagan took over.) The busing experiment extracted a heavy price.

Back in the 1970s, I was a high school student in Los Angeles. Freeways were not quite so crowded as today, but they still resembled parking lots during peak travel times. (Last time I drove the Hollywood Freeway, traffic slowed to a complete stop at 1 A.M. -- and no, there had not been an accident. That's just the way L.A. is.) Mandatory busing presented kids with the prospect of rising well before dawn in order to sit through a two-hour ride -- and at the end of the school day there would be a return trip of similar length. After school programs, including athletic events, could be nightmarish.

White parents who objected to this plan were called racist. Reflexively. Constantly.

The parents would say: "We have no problem with black kids coming to our local school. We have no problem with people of different races learning together and socializing. In fact, we like that idea. But we refuse to make our kid spend four hours a day in traffic."

Racist racist racist! came the response.

And that's when the word "racist" lost its sting.

That's when the accusation stopped triggering an automatic guilt complex. That's when life-long liberals -- working class liberals in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood liberals living "south of the Boulevard" -- warmed to the idea of voting Republican.

If a candidate said "I'm against forced busing," my mom (a JFK-loving liberal) was ready to cast a ballot for that person, even if the candidate was otherwise an odious reactionary creep.

Honestly, I had no problem whatsoever attending a high school alongside youths bused in from Watts and East L.A. They were fine. God knows that our basketball team -- otherwise composed of short Jewish guys -- needed all the help it could get. (The previous sentence may prompt some of you to cry "Racist racist racist!" but it's the absolute goddamned truth.) But I would rather have moved to the USSR than get on that bus, particularly at that time of morning. Even then, I lived like a vampire; the idea of rising at 5 a.m. or earlier evoked true horror. I was never a party animal; I just think better at night. Night was when I read books, made art and listened to classical music. Sunrise has always been my idea of a good time to hit the hay.

Throughout the 1970s, the proponents of forced busing kept referencing Brown vs. The Board of Education, continually pretending that there is no legal difference between de facto and de jure segregation. Guess what? They're still trying to pull off that smarmy trick.

Joe Biden was wiser than an army of owls when he tried to distance the Democratic party from the concept of busing. The party was bleeding from a massive self-inflicted wound; he tried to staunch the flow.

And now Sanders seeks to re-open that wound. He has to be working for Putin. He has to be trying to destroy the Democratic brand. No other explanation will do.

I'm tempted to say the same thing about Buzzfeed. Look at how they've covered this story:

Sanders’ blueprint — called the Thurgood Marshall Education Plan, after the lawyer who argued the Brown case before becoming the first black Supreme Court justice — draws a stark contrast to former Vice President Joe Biden, who fought against desegregating schools in the 1970s. Biden, who is leading Sanders in Democratic polls, sought the support of segregationists in a bitter battle against court-ordered “busing,” or the transportation of students to other schools and districts in order to end racial separation.

"Sought the support of segregationists"? Bullshit. Biden is from Delaware, not Dixie. Busing was unpopular everywhere.

An equation had taken hold in the public's mind -- Democrats equal forced busing -- and Biden sought to erase that perception. Why? Because forced busing advocates kept losing elections.

Democracy is a popularity contest. When will progressives learn that simple lesson?

De jure segregation was and is an absolute evil, one which the federal government ended, and thank God it did. But the only way to combat de facto segregation in our school systems is to combat de facto segregation in the rest of our society. Legislation cannot cure a purely cultural malady.

By the way: Fleets of new buses will pump a lot of extra smog into the air. Aren't we supposed to be concerned about climate change?

Let me add another "by the way": Sanders' proposal comes at a time when "progressive" colleges are instituting segregated dorms, to insure that black students won't have to intermingle with the irredeemable evil known as the white male. See here and here.

You should check out those links. That's the kind of heinous, separatist bullshit that the apostles of Identity politics have foisted on academia: You go over there, and you go over there. Based purely on skin color. Segregation for adults; busing for children. In the postmodernist mind, that kind of insanity is considered woke. Perhaps the progs hope to solve our energy problems by making Martin Luther King spin rapidly enough in his grave to power a city...?

And now these same pomo punks support Sanders, who wants the Democratic party to hop on the bus to SuicideLand.