I think that John Hickenlooper, among other, have just stunned Taibbi with his stupidity than Thomas “The Mustache of Idiocy” Friedman ever did.
It appears that the former Colorado Governor, and avid supporter of the fracking industry, is now implying that the Vermont Senator will invoke Stalin type purges and another Holodomor.
In any case, the result has seen Tabbi at his best:
Bernie Sanders has accomplished something no one in American politics has managed for decades: He’s uniting Democrats and Republicans.
It’s early yet, but talking points for the 2020 campaign season are emerging on both sides of the aisle. Republicans and Democrats both have been trying to sell the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and others as stalking horses for the overthrow of capitalism.
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This is absurd to the point of being funny: First of all, the press has been dumping on Sanders almost recreationally for years now. Meanwhile, fear of litigation has kept the press away from business exposés for decades. Whole genres of corruption go uncovered, from child labor that makes your consumer goods (enjoy that child-mined cobalt ore in your cellphone!) to war profiteering to pollution to industrial accidents. Few news organizations have even one labor reporter anymore. The last collective bargaining session that made a front page probably involved the NFL.
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Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Colorado-governor-turned-presidential-candidate John Hickenlooper — who sells himself as a “pragmatic progressive” — went after Sanders in New Hampshire, though not by name.
“You have to hand it to the GOP for achieving the near-impossible,” Hickenlooper said in early May. “Just years after the collapse of the Soviet Union…who would have imagined the Koch brothers and Donald Trump could help resuscitate the discredited ideas of Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin?”
Of course, Hickenlooper went on to say, he wasn’t trying to cast aspersions on Sanders as a human being by comparing him to Stalin, who murdered 20 million people. “Do I respect him?” Hickenlooper said. “Absolutely. Do I respect his supporters? Absolutely.” However, he said, he thinks Sanders is wrongly “demonizing the private sector” with ideas that will “hurt working people.”
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The irony of all of this is that Sanders, who is painted as a sort of extremist menace and El Coco-style monster from whom we should hide the children, would have been considered a tepid Republican back in the Fifties, when the original red scare was at its peak.
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Bernie Sanders may not be the answer, but he isn’t Stalin, and voter attitudes aren’t changing because people are romanticizing the Great Terror. We’ve just had awful leadership for so long that demanding fairness and competence from politicians has started to seem like a radical idea. It isn’t, but get used to being told it is, until the next election at least.
Read the whole thing.
It is a truly trenchant indictment of the whole “Socialism” hysteria that the pundits are trying to convince the rest of us means something.