Bill Maher says he wants to help Senator Sanders win the Democratic nomination for president. Is he not ready for Hillary? At least we have that much in common.
Maher wants Sanders to expound the inner truth and greatness of national socialism. “We have to teach America what this is,” Maher says. “I don’t know if we’re doing that yet,” he concedes. It sounds like the premise of what could be a funny routine, and in its own way it is (video below, rapidly approaching 1,000,000 views).
Sanders is a man with a mania. He reminds me of the late teachers’ union leader Albert Shanker, to whom Woody Allen paid tribute in his dystopian 1973 comedy Sleeper. Allen’s character in the film is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and awakens in 2173 to learn that civilization was destroyed because “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
NOTE: In this post I am obscurely alluding to an infamous comment of Martin Heidegger and to Kevin Williamson’s NR article “Bernie’s strange brew of nationalism and socialism.”
UPDATE: I see that Jeff Jacoby has written a good column responding to Sanders on Scandinavian “socialism” here. I also see that Sanders’s routine with Maher was just a preview of coming attractions.”
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