We were four minutes in, somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who I crossed at The Spectator that I’m asked to watch these damn Democrat debates each month.
Just 19 days before the Iowa caucuses, we finally reached the inevitable: Andrew Yang getting the boot, as the white savior party shed the last of its racial minority aspirants, having decided that none was qualified to take the helm this cycle. Better luck in 2024, blacks. The Democratic frontrunners remain, in order, a doddering septuagenarian who can’t reliably remember what state he’s in, a hectoring schoolmarm, a 78-year-old communist who has never accomplished anything in 30 years in Congress, and a weird, hairy child from South Bend whose eyebrow waxing gets more meticulous with each passing debate.
That, of course, is Mayor Pete (he/him) who, when asked about damage caused to local farms and factories due to seasonal flooding in Iowa, pivoted to discussing ‘fire tornados’ in Australia. He blamed both on climate change. As this gay, 37-year-old Rhodes scholar, Oxford alum, and son of a communist professor lectured Dan and Roseanne Conner about their carbon emissions, he reminded everyone that he understands the struggles of the working class because he’s also from a bombed-out Rust Belt state. Well, just because Nancy Pelosi lives in San Francisco, doesn’t mean she understands the plight of the opioid-addicted street pooping hoards who live beyond her mansion walls. It’s the same for Mayor Pete and the other five candidates who continue to exhibit the shocking ignorance, arrogance, and detachment from the very Americans they need to vote for them.
Your farm might be under water, the Democrats told Iowans, but we’ve got a carbon tax that’s going to reverse this in about three hundred years. Sanders also completely blew it, starting off strong in his defense of economic nationalism, blasting NAFTA and various deals with China for sacrificing good American jobs for starvation wages abroad. It was exactly the sort of fiery position on trade Americans want to hear. He admitted the new deal with Mexico and Canada, the USMCA, was good for American blue-collar workers, a vast improvement on the reviled and crippling NAFTA, but still he absolutely refuses to support it. Why, you ask?
‘Because it doesn’t mention the phrase “climate change” once’, Sanders told the audience, without a hint of guilt. ‘Climate change and trade are the same’, he said, again with a straight face. Easy for a lifelong government employee with three houses to say but might be a bit off-putting to some laid-off Iowans who will be turning up to caucus next month. It was a perfect example of what people mean when they say socialism is an innately evil system: one through which the maniacal whimsies of romantics and academics dictate whether people live or die. Bernie might be kooky and charming, but when he’s in charge, your family isn’t eating until Greta says so.
Sanders may be the most radical, and most prone to genocide, but he’s also the least fearsome. His entire political movement is based on trying to relive one, merry drunken night in the Soviet Union while on holiday in the 1980s. Does anyone think this man will be able to pass a single law if elected president? We won’t even need to worry about obstruction from Congress. Sanders will spend four years fussing over the language of his healthcare bill only to wake up and realize he’s no longer in office.
Viewers who tuned in anticipating a showdown between Sanders and Warren were disappointed. This week, Warren revealed exactly the sort of underhanded, vagina-baiting, neo-Hillary slime ball she truly is when her campaign hand-delivered a smear against Sanders, claiming he privately told Warren a woman could never be president. No one thinks Sanders said that and it was confirmed Tuesday when Warren immediately backtracked when asked, then changed the subject to Generalized Misogyny. That pivot resulted in the entire stage collapsing into a ten-minute discussion on whether a woman could be elected president.
Who knows the answer to that question? But the fact a major party continues to waste everyone’s time with this inane virtue-signaling about a candidates genitals raises a much more important and interesting question regarding women in politics: should they even be allowed to vote?