Roger Simon: I was too easy on her. She’s an awful human being. And yes:
After all all this–although, as most readers know, I favor Trump–I still very much want Schultz to run, and not just for the benefit of Donald. Call me an old timer who is sentimental about the two-party system, but I don’t want to see the Democrats turn into an American version of the Labor Party of Albania with a soupçon of anti-Semitism thrown in, as they now seem hellbent on doing. Even if they careen off a cliff from their left-wing lurch, it’s bad for all of us. And if they don’t, it’s worse.
The one thing we don’t need (nobody does) is socialism–quasi or otherwise. How many more lessons do we have to have? Weren’t the tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of deaths ascribed to that system in China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia enough? There’s nothing remotely like it in human history. But no. Students–indoctrinated in socialism by their professors who pay no attention to what’s happening in front of their noses in Venezuela–are being turned out of our schools by the millions. What that’s going to do to our society in the future, no one knows. But it doesn’t look good.
It’s frightening.
[Update a couple minutes later]
How far left will the Democrats lurch next year?
I hope far enough that they get blown out. Make it 1972 again.
Any of the Senators running for president who were on the Judiciary Committee are disqualified from that office for not being serious persons, and I don’t just mean Senator Kirk Douglas from New Jersey.
It’s usually a good assumption that candidates will try to outflank each other playing to the base during the primaries, and then tack back to the center for the general. But the Democrats have let their fringe’s ideas take over, so I don’t think their candidate will pull it off this time. Everyone who is running, perhaps with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard and maybe Corey Booker, who have little or no chance in the primaries, have for years been playing to the hard left socialist wing.
There’s a real threat that Howard Schultz (Starbucks) or Bloomberg will run as independents in the center, where the real battle is. There is always a leftist fringe candidate (like Jill Stein) siphoning off the farthest end, and if the polls aren’t favorable for the Democrat’s candidate, more will be inclined to “send a message” of dissatisfaction with the party’s choice by splitting off.
Biden will be forced to embrace the new Democratic agenda if he wants to have a chance of winning.
Bah. I think Biden is wily enough to resist showing his actual political cards before he’s elected, even if the Democratic platform trends to the hard left. It worked for Obama and I think he’ll run the same plays. His destruction of Ryan in the vice vs vice debate shows he’d be a match for Trump.
Wily isn’t a word that I’d associate with Biden. Slimy maybe. It’s not as if any of them have any real convictions.
Venezuela and communism and its evils uh? It was not that long ago that Indonesia fell flat on its face in the late 1990s. Remember the Asian Financial Crisis? Indonesia went from being a major oil exporter to an economy where the oil price had crashed after the Gulf War was long gone and their production capacity fizzled out.
Suharto was your boy.
What twaddle.
Indonesian oil production has far from “fizzled out.” What happened is that, under Suharto, Indonesia went from an economy so primitive it exported nearly all the petroleum it produced to a far richer and more modern economy that used increasing amounts domestically and now must import petroleum in consequence. These general trends have continued under Suharto’s successors. It might also have been useful to note that Suharto left office in 1998 and died in 2008.
Alleging an Indonesian collapse that didn’t happen as a defense of the Venezuelan socialist regime that did induce a collapse in that country not only doesn’t wash, it doesn’t do anything by way of demonstrating the wonderfulness of socialism – which I gather was your general aim here.
It sure looks like a downwards gray (oil production) slope to me.
I guess you never heard of how much money Suharto and his cronies siphoned off from Indonesia either.
With regards to any famine in Venezuela it is due to two things.
Maduro’s nonsense about not letting his currency float, fixing prices, which means that as soon as things get manufactured in Venezuela they get smuggled out of there or hoarded.
The USA’s sanctions regime which does not allow Venezuela’s government to use their own oil revenue to buy food and medicine and ration it.
We have had Western democracies with rationing in economic crises. It is crap and suboptimal but at least people don’t starve.
Things in Venezuela were bad and getting worse long before the U.S. imposed any sanctions. Here’s the text of the first such sanctions bill S.2142, that passed and was signed into law in 2014. U.S. sanctions have gotten more severe as the situation in Venezuela has gotten more dire. Sanctions are a consequence of increasingly brutal state offenses against the lives and liberty of its unfortunate citizens and the national economy in Venezuela and the growing poverty and want thus engendered, not the reverse.
This is on a par with the decades-old whine of Cuba and its apologists about Cuba’s grinding poverty being due to the U.S. embargo. The rest of the world wasn’t, and isn’t, embargoing Cuba by law, like the U.S., but few nations or individual people saw any useful basis for either trade with or even tourism into Cuba. The only people who seem to enjoy touring dirt-poor socialist hellholes are ideological socialists who nonetheless choose to live in free and prosperous nations. There don’t seem to be enough of these folks to make much of an impact on the overall Cuban economy.
Ah. Bullshit. What about the head choppers at Saudi Arabia?
Or the death squads in Brazil during the military dictatorship?
Or the murders done by Pinochet after his military coup sponsored by the CIA in the 1970s?
Maduro has done squat in comparison. The police uses tear gas and water cannons on violent demonstrators. Just like in any other country. One of his political opponents tried to get him murdered. He was sentenced, jailed, then put under house arrest. Yes. A really evil regime for sure.
What happened in Brazil just last year? The President was declared to be involved in a corruption scandal, which she was never proven to be involved with, and dismissed in a highly unusual manner. Then her predecessor wanted to run for elections and was put into jail just so he could not run for elections. One elected congress person in Brazil (a woman) from the same party was shot dead after being elected. Now you have a guy leading Brazil from a party which did not even register on the map before, who put the equivalent of a military junta into power with all his army buddies. One of the first things he does once he gets into power is to approve the purchase of Embraer (leading world regional jet manufacturer) by Boeing for less than it cost Japan to design a single regional jet. Democracy at work.
We know well how US embargoes work. The US does not just embargo US companies. It embargoes foreign companies who also do business in the US. Just look at the Huawei case. You jail their CFO because it sold cellphone base stations to Iran. Yes. Iran isn’t supposed to have cellphones. ZTE also got fined for having the audacity of selling smartphones to Iran. How evil.
A UN special envoy to Venezuela compared what the USA was doing to Venezuela to medieval siege warfare. He made explicit references to cases where the Venezuelan government bought medicine from the USA, cash paid upfront, only to get delayed for months by the USA in transit. That was before the latest sanctions.
I bet someone sold to Trump the notion that the USA would be getting all the Venezuelan oil. The dimwit probably thought it was a good idea. Venezuela has heavy oil. If the USA wanted that crap there is plenty of it both in the USA and in Canada. Most of the reserves are locked up and it will take years to put the operations in place. I remember reading about proposals for those fields back when oil was at ~$150 USD a barrel. Even then few wanted to explore the Orinoco Belt reserves. Most US companies who looked at the deals walked out.
My bet is on Harris being the nominee. Tough to say who her vp candidate will be, Booker, Beto, or whatever ethic group they are trying to appeal to. It could be some white person, like with Obama/Biden, because they think certain Democrats need a white person to vote for.
Gabbard is the dark horse. She will appeal to both the extreme marxists and the useful sheep marxists. She is the biggest threat to the crazy SJW’s.
Marxism is ascending, so who ever the Presidential candidate is will be pretty flaming and they might try to moderate that with the VP pick. But the 2024 cycle will be the one to watch. Republicans will have another strong field of candidates and we will likely see the end of the media giving special treatment to female and minority candidates lest they help the GOP.