Bernie and I are Jewish. Our history has a lesson for this campaign
In Judaism, the “bible” Christians use is just a collection of our history books.
My Christian friends should go back and read about our Judges and Kings. Read also about the נביאים .. the prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Samuel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, and Malachi. These men were not great at running anything. The prophets of the bible were shrill voices in the desert, telling the judges and kings what they should do. The one exception, Ezra. turns out to have been a plant of the Emperor Cyrus. Ezra’s job was to assure that the new Kingdom in Jerusalem served his empire’s interests. Maybe Ezra can teach us lessons about Putin?
So Bernie is a great prophet and obviously not an Ezra. But Bernie, like Isaiah, would be a terrible ruler. The Senator even reminds me of Ayatollah Khomeini .. as a prophet, Khomeini called down the forces of Allah on the Shah and overthrew that evil man. Was Khamaini a good ruler of Iran? Think about the other prophets of out r time … If I were to list the prophets of today, I would include Bernie along with MLK, Chavez, Piketty, Orwell, Turing .. pretty heft stuff but I would never want to see MLK as POTUS, would you?
My critics get angry that I refer to the prophet Bernie as a Bolshevik I have used that term in its proper, Russian sense. In 1917 Lenin, another of the נביאים, overturned the nascent Kerensky government by claiming that because the Lenin fraction of the Russian Social Democrat Party was a majority. Other views in that party did not matter. Trotsky, then a rival הנבי, was expelled from the Party. Prophet Lenin (הנביא לנין) called this principle ” Bolshevism (большинство) and used this idea .. rule by plurality .. to take over the nascent Russian Parliament.. Lenin failed as a ruler and Trotsky ended up in Mexico , assassinated with an ice ax.
We do not know what kind of ruler Bernie Sanders would be. He would be a very different kind of ruler than the kings of ancient Israel. In fact as the Democrats have as a talking point of late the President is not a King.
Bernie Sanders unlike Lenin and these prophets has served in Congress for two or three decades. So he is an insider outsider. He knows the system, and he has not spent those decades out in he desert. Only people who have spent time in Europe and/or studied European politics can really understand what he means when he says what kind of socialist he is. He clearly is not a fascist or NAZI and yes those folks are socialists. They have a lot in common with Leninism/Communism and that may be why the two hate each other so much. Bernie is not a communist. I don’t think honeymooning in the former Soviet union makes you one. What we do miss is that the communists in the Soviet Union were doing some things right or making progress otherwise they would have been out on their collective ears decades before that occurred. The Cuban government does some good things for the Cuban people, and it comes with a price. Of course the US government policies has kept the communists in power for far longer than if we had adopted a more open policy toward Cuba in 1968 or so after experimenting with the failed containment policy. heck maybe even returning Guantanamo, but how could Cuba resist having Hiltons on those beaches and how about new Buicks, and we do really like your sugar, how about using some capitalism to get Cuba’s rightful share of our sugar market.
Bernie is clearly not the kind of socialist that wants the government to own all or even most of the means of production. Maybe a few monopolistic government enterprises such as health care, and the phone system. The phone system before the break up was really the best in the world. And the digital revolution is not always nice to the consumer or necessarily what consumers want.