Looking for Putin, Pelosi, Schiff and Reid.
A pair of Bernie's, one running for president, the other a wealthy corporate executive and philanthropist, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as the cultural divide. One has made life better for many. The other wants to suck the life out as many as he can.
Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, now 90, recently said that Sen. Bernie Sanders, campaigning for president as a Democrat with a Socialist’s pedigree, is the “enemy of every entrepreneur.” Sanders, who represents Vermont, has made a public career out of vilifying corporations, free markets, and the wealthy.
Meet the creator. Fear the destroyer.Marcus, with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, started a company in 1978 that today has more than 2,200 stores across all 50 states and in Canada. When those men were putting long, grinding hours into their startup in the late 1970s, Sanders was “working” for the American People’s Historical Society. There he made a 30-minute documentary about Eugene Debs, the perpetual Socialist Party presidential candidate whom he called “the great American trade unionist, socialist and revolutionary.”
Home Depot currently employs more than 400,000. Since its inception, it has created millions of jobs. Home Depot also provided health care insurance for, again, millions of families whose husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers have worked for the company, now 27th on the Fortune 500 list, where it has been found every year for the last 25.
In addition to the jobs provided by Home Depot, vendors that depend on the company for much of their sales, many of them small businesses that have increased in value, have also created jobs as they have grown along with the chain.
Meanwhile, Sanders, who has never started a business, wants to guarantee a job to everyone through government fiat, and has overheated dreams about forcing the country into a Medicare for All system, an impossible-to-pay-for arrangement which no other nation in the world has, not even the Scandinavian countries he says are his models.
Marcus has also helped make Americans who never worked for Home Depot better off — and we’re talking about more than the millions of consumers who have eagerly patronized the chain, and contractors who buy material there. A share of Home Depot stock bought in March 1989 is now worth 200 times the purchase price. The company has created immense wealth for the millions who own and have owned stock directly and through institutions. In fact, Home Depot created as many as “20,000 millionaires overnight” when the company went public
Meanwhile, a share of Sanders, if there was such, bought in 1989 would certainly have brought a loss. Rather than create wealth, it’s Sanders’ aim to forcibly spread it around.
The pair is also far apart in philanthropical terms. While Bernie the Destroyer is fully committed to giving away other people’s money, Bernie the Creator, who understands the capitalism that Sanders hates “makes charitable-giving possible in the first place,” donates wealth that he produced. He recently said that he has given away more than $2 billion of his own money to roughly 300 different organizations. Sanders’ charitable contributions equal only 3.3% of his income, which is somewhat benevolent among the group of stingy Democratic presidential candidates, but less than half as generous as the American families earning between $25,000 and $50,000 a year.Had a Sanders regime been in power when Marcus and his colleagues were starting Home Depot, the company simply would have never existed. Though he has tried to back away from some of his more hard-core socialist positions, because he knows they won’t play well to an audience larger than the hysterical fringe that’s followed him since his early days, Sanders at one time openly admitted he believed in “the public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.” Knowing this, Marcus and the others would have logically reasoned there was no sense in starting a business that the government was going to eventually seize.
In this tale of two Bernie's, one has tried to foster the best of times while the other would usher in the worst of times if he gets the raw political power he craves. It’s wisdom vs. foolishness, light vs. dark, hope vs. despair.
— Written by J. Frank Bullitt
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A cynical fraud, hypocrite and disgrace who defines the Democrat Party. Wherever she goes she spreads discord and purposely seeks to create misunderstanding. (See 1 below.)
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I had just finished reading "John Adams" by David McCullough, when I cam across this article. After I finished the biography I said to myself, Cooledge was a more modern version of Adams. "Cal" was honest, not as outspoken as Adams but also frugal ad deserving of more respect than simply being tagged "Silent Cal."
Few Presidents have been as well read as Adams and Jefferson.(See 2 below.)
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Today is the 4th of July and several thoughts have come to mind.
I watched an interview of Gorka, Kirk and Hanson yesterday and it was very revealing.
Kirk made the observation that the same ones who spit on returning Viet Nam Troops subsequently became radical professors and proceeded to teach generations of Americans to hate this country and question it's greatness.
They also discussed the article in The NYT's decrying how un-special America was and naturally discussed those who have bashed Trump's desire to honor our military and those who have accused Trump of politicizing one of our most important holidays - the birth of this great nation.
The Democrat Party has become radicalized and taken over by those whose voices and actions find nothing redeeming about this nation nor anything Trump does.
Every day we hear a drumbeat of vituperation and hatred toward members of the Founding Fathers . They attack Washington, Adams, Jefferson and , of course, Trump as imperfect and racists, as if any human could ever meet their insane PC standards. They attack our nation as unworthy yet, cannot name a better one. What is going on from the radical left is not random. It is an organized attempt to create discord, to spread hatred and contempt and to bring down this nation which has done more than any other to benefit the world, notwithstanding our mistakes.
So for those who are fed up with the radicals on the left and the Antifa goons who are the true threats to this republic along with their progressive nut case supporters, go out and enjoy the freedom secured by the greatest patriots of the greatest nation on the face of this earth. If that means enjoying a military parade, eating a hot dog, watching the national sport and/or rejecting the products sold by NIKE have at it and remember how fragile our freedoms are and don't be sucked in by the hatred spewing from the radicalized Democrats who find nothing favorable yet, refuse to leave our shores for another land.
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Dick
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1)
AOC’s grandstanding ignores real cause of the border crisis
If there’s one thing rookie congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows about, it’s grandstanding.
She turned her visit to a detention facility for illegal immigrants at the border this week into a media extravaganza. But her well-timed tantrum and cries of racism were pure baloney. AOC’s wild assertions that inmates were drinking out of toilets were debunked almost as quickly as they were spread by her credulous press cheering section.
She and other Democrats are seeking to spin what is a very real crisis as evidence of the administration’s moral failings. But if they want someone to blame for the conditions they encountered, they can start by looking in the mirror.
The situation at the centers AOC visited is undoubtedly rough. When hundreds of thousands flood across the border, it’s hard to quickly provide services to handle the crisis. Yet this is not the fault of the Border Patrol or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, let alone President Trump.
The problem is a massive surge of illegal immigrants pouring over the border that has overwhelmed understaffed and underfunded agencies that were already hard-pressed to cope with their responsibilities.
As El Salvador’s President Nayib Buekele said Monday, referring to the thousands of his citizens who are flooding north — including a father and daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande whose picture has become the symbol of this crisis — the responsibility for their plight belongs to failed Central American countries.
Part of the blame also belongs to politicians like AOC and her party’s presidential candidates, who want to decriminalize illegal immigration and give amnesty to those already here. Every mass movement across the border has been preceded by liberal promises that those who come here without following the rules don’t have to worry about being held accountable for breaking the law.
The only way to curtail this flood of migrants is to make it clear that all those who try will be caught and deported. Democratic pledges of free health care, college tuition and driver’s licenses are a neon welcome sign that led directly to the unfolding catastrophe at the border.
Nor does AOC, who voted against granting additional funding for the border facilities, have any standing to gripe about the fact that the lack of those funds has made things worse for the illegal immigrants who are caught or make bogus asylum claims. If it were up to her, conditions there would be even worse.
The tragic deaths at the border, as well as conditions at the detention centers, are not due to America’s moral failings or the result of Trump’s rhetoric. Trump didn’t create the mess in Central America. It’s those who have encouraged these people to endanger themselves and their children by coming here illegally who are the ones who should be apologizing.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributing writer for National Review. Follow him on Twitter: @jonathans_tobin
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to the National Review, the New York Post, the Federalist, Haaretz and the New York Jewish Week.
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2)
John Adams Was the Most Ingenuous Founding Father
The second president was honest, passionate and far plainer in intention than Washington and Jefferson.
By
Of all the Founding Fathers, John Adams, who died July 4, 1826, impresses me most. He was the literal father of many, including another future president, and took great interest in shaping his children’s character. And he was the metaphorical father of a nation whose character he likewise tried to shape, often against fierce resistance.
No man was more honest, more passionate, better read or more prepared for the public offices he filled. At the same time, no man was more vilified and scoffed at. There were obvious reasons for this seeming contradiction. Adams expressed himself without moderation and was enormously thin-skinned. He couldn’t see that the men he dealt with—even those as august and admirable as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (who died the same day as Adams)—weren’t as plain in intention as he was. He was deeply invested in doing right, even when impolitic to do so.
Men like Adams are rare in public life today. I say this because no one I know—not my children, my children’s friends or my friends’ children, all well-educated, intelligent, and honest people—has considered public office as a vocation. Where are our Adamses? Where are our brilliant public servants, fueled by intemperate idealism?
Of all the Founding Fathers, John Adams, who died July 4, 1826, impresses me most. He was the literal father of many, including another future president, and took great interest in shaping his children’s character. And he was the metaphorical father of a nation whose character he likewise tried to shape, often against fierce resistance.
No man was more honest, more passionate, better read or more prepared for the public offices he filled. At the same time, no man was more vilified and scoffed at. There were obvious reasons for this seeming contradiction. Adams expressed himself without moderation and was enormously thin-skinned. He couldn’t see that the men he dealt with—even those as august and admirable as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (who died the same day as Adams)—weren’t as plain in intention as he was. He was deeply invested in doing right, even when impolitic to do so.
Men like Adams are rare in public life today. I say this because no one I know—not my children, my children’s friends or my friends’ children, all well-educated, intelligent, and honest people—has considered public office as a vocation. Where are our Adamses? Where are our brilliant public servants, fueled by intemperate idealism?
I was struck by the absence of such people in my circle after reading about Adams in Gordon Wood’s 2017 book “Friends Divided.” Adams comes off better in character than Jefferson, the man I was taught to admire above all others in grade school in the 1960s. This may be the root of the problem. We were taught Washington and Jefferson were paragons, then discovered they were human. When you teach people to worship idols, they will smash them when they are revealed to be imperfect. When you teach people to revere human beings, they will accept their failings more readily.
Adams was flawed. As vice president, he was presumed to be a monarchist because he favored a strong president and spent inordinate time arguing on behalf of a regal appellation for Washington (at one point he favored “Your Most Benign Highness”). Such quirkiness wasn’t unusual for him, though it almost always connected to some legitimate concern—in this case, his fear that, without a strong executive, the new government would dissolve into factionalism.
“Integrity,” Adams wrote to his son Thomas when under siege for unpopular policies during his vice presidency, “should be preserved in all events, as essential to [a young man’s] happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence.”
In a later letter to his grandson John Smith, Adams wrote in a similar vein: “Have you considered the meaning of that word ‘worthy’? Weigh it well. . . . I had rather you should be worthy makers of brooms and baskets than unworthy presidents of the United States procured by intrigue, factious slander and corruption.”
Reading about Adams, one understands how hard it is to serve with integrity. It often means taking principled stands, even if they go against one’s political interests. It may mean looking like a crank, and cranks don’t tend to get elected, let alone re-elected. Adams lost a second term as president to Jefferson, who knew how to maintain a pristine public image while machinating behind the scenes to achieve what he wanted. Adams was never able to do that.
Even now, despite the effort of some historians, Adams remains a marginal Founding Father. History prefers a polished image to a tarnished one. Yet without Adams, we might not have had a Constitution, a strong Navy, the financial aid of the Dutch during the American Revolution, or peace with France during their revolution. These achievements required integrity in the face of staunch opposition, and without them our young nation may never have survived.
Ms. Cohen is a dean and English professor at Drexel University.
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