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Friday, July 24, 2015

Of all places, Sanders' presidential bid has growing support in Montana By Troy Carter Chronicle Staff Writer

From the Bozeman Chronicle. Reproduced here for fair use and discussion purposes. My comments in bold.
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(I find it hard to account for the enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders. He's an aged, withered-up socialist fossil advocating treadworn, failed ideas derived from an ideology that has killed millions. 

He has accomplished absolutely nothing in Congress, he has strange ideas about rape and women's orgasms. He represents a bygone era, where armed invaders rounded up and executed farmers and university professors. he cannot point to any success of his ideas. 

Yet, local businessman Andy Boyd likes him. It makes no sense.

Read on:
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Independent Vermont U.S Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination has sparked several grassroots groups in Montana, the largest here in Bozeman.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have paid staff in all 50 states, but Sanders has volunteers like Andy Boyd.

Boyd, 38, is a small business owner in Bozeman. He describes himself as an independent voter who’s never really been into politics, until this year. In May, he started supporting Sanders on Facebook. (In other words, a political newbie with no particular understanding of politics is the Chonicle's benchmark of a Sanders supporter.)

“He’s the first politician to get me off my butt,” Boyd said, before launching into a breathless explanation of why he started two groups, Bozeman for Bernie and Montana for Bernie. (If he is elected, he will be yet another politician who will go after your wallet. And you, sir, will wish you had stayed seated on it.)

“Bernie voted against the Iraq War in 2002 and he is anti-(Trans-Pacific Partnership) and Hillary is undecided on TPP,” Boyd said. “Hillary has been bought out by corporate America, unfortunately. Her biggest donors are the banks we bailed out and his biggest donors are the unions.” (Damned if you do, damned if you don't I guess.)

The hopeful supporter is mostly correct. Sanders voted against the war, while Clinton voted to authorize it, and, with some caveats, she does support the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement. The Center for Responsive Politics also supports the claim on campaign donations.

Unlike Clinton, Sanders isn’t a liberal, but rather a democratic socialist (A distinction without a difference. It would be helpful if the writer of the article would point out some substantial differences between Hillary and Bernie's political stances, but of course he cannot because there are none.)

— an ideology that seeks economic equality in a classless society, but, unlike communism, pursues its goal gradually, through a peaceful, democratic process. (A benign description of a heinous process. However, there's little difference between conquering and infiltration if the goal is the same.)  

Socialists see failures in liberalism’s ability to provide freedom and equality because of liberals’ adherence to free market economics. (The author states this matter-of-factly, but it is simply an opinion. And this is supposed to be a news piece.

In fact, it is indisputable that liberals do not adhere to free market economics. They criticize and denigrate capitalism at every turn. This is an astonishing assertion.)

The socialist remedy is to create welfare states like those in western Europe, where taxes are substantially higher. (How, exactly, is that any different than a liberal?)

Boyd understands this. (Is the author saying that Boyd agrees with the author's assessment, or that Boyd told the author this and the author agreed? Because it is clear that Boyd understands nothing. No thinking person believes that giving the power to government to decide how much of your own money you may keep is a good idea.) 

He’s learned a lot about economic inequality, and it’s another reason he supports the senator from Vermont. (I doubt he's learned the basic fact that economic inequality is the product of the schemes liberals and socialists have implemented in this country.)

“Bernie Sanders is not taking any money from billionaires or super PACs,” he said. “His donors are we the people.” (Which is seen as a qualification, but if Bernie is a bad candidate, so this means nothing. 

And make no mistake, a Bernie presidency would be a disaster. He represents a continuation of the big-government philosophy which has devastated this country. He is a threat to the prosperity of this political newbie and every other business owner. 

We have had decades of this kind of government interventionism. More of it will not make things better.

And by the way, eliminating economic inequality simply means everyone will be equally miserable.)

And to top Sanders’ economic populism, he supports a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court ruling that gave corporations the same free speech rights as individuals, which the American left, and to a lesser degree the right, sees as the cementing of corporate control over Congress and the federal government. (Which is a spectacularly false characterization of the Court's ruling.)

Boyd isn’t alone. He recently teamed up with Marshall Mayer of Helena, who also started a Sanders Facebook group, to merge their pages and continue recruiting more to the Sanders’ campaign.

“We both started our own Facebook pages and then we combined them,” Boyd said. “It’s been going great ever since then.”

The combined page now has 4,786 likes. While Clinton supporters could be following a national page, for Sanders supporters, the fact that the Montana page for Clinton has just 786 likes is meaningful.

And their efforts are extending past social media into what looks like a nascent field campaign. Sanders supporters have held meetings, marched in a Butte parade, and distributed literature at the Gallatin County Fair and Bozeman’s Community Food Co-op.

“We’ve had three meetups here in Bozeman, each had 25 to 30 people,” Boyd said. He also listed a slew of coming events, including a live webcast with the senator Wednesday at Bar IX, which Boyd already has 30 RSVPs for. (30 people? That represents .075% of the population of Bozeman.)

On Wednesday, Boyd and six other volunteers met at a coffee house on campus to discuss the mundane but necessary details of a political campaign: buttons, bumper stickers, banners and events. Two students and a faculty member at the meeting said they planned to form a student club in August.

Their efforts still face the established forces in the Democratic Party. Anecdotally, many Democratic lawmakers, delegates to the state party and county central committee diehards are already leaning toward Clinton, enchanted by the idea of electing the first woman to the White House and backed by cold calculus — Clinton has more name recognition, which is exactly what Sanders’ supporters are trying to change. (One thing that never dissuades the Left is failure. And they will fail. But they keep coming back, doing exactly what the author describes. They will infiltrate, they will invade, they will take over, bit by bit. What they cannot get by conquering, they will get by incrementalism. What they can't get that way they will get by by court decree. 

They actually don't care about democracy or inequality, they care about power and taking down the ones deemed too rich. It's a politics of envy and greed. the result is oppression, loss of liberty, and silencing dissent. I can't imagine that Mr. Boyd has considered any of this. But that is the nature of newbies.)

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