The Patriot Post® · Bernie's Favored 'One Percenters'

Coauthored by Bob Morrison.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is having the time of his life. At 73, he is already as old as Ronald Reagan was when he ran for re-election in 1984. But Sanders is undoubtedly — as our friends and family are increasingly calling us — spry. And what a lark. He is leading Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire (his neighboring state) and is gaining on her in Iowa. What’s up with this?

Everyone who tells a pollster Bernie is the guy is poking a finger in Hillary’s “inevitable” eye. A year ago, former Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick (D) warned Hillary that “inevitable” was not good for the party or good for her. He was right.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was inevitable in 1968, the pundits and the pols all said. But anti-war activist Allard Lowenstein ran around Capitol Hill knocking on senators’ doors until he found one — Gene McCarthy of Minnesota — who was willing to take on the man he presented as an ogre, Lyndon. We soon learned that the Inevitable LBJ had feet of clay. Does Hillary have a glass jaw?

Bernie is also the first avowed Socialist to run for president since Eugene Victor Debs campaigned in 1912 on a train called “the Red Special.” Now, it’s true that Henry Wallace in 1948 was far left, too. Embattled President Harry Truman whipped up crowds on his whistle stop campaign swings. Harry “gave `em hell” by calling out Henry Wallace and all his Communists. But Progressive candidate Wallace didn’t quite own up to being a Socialist the way Bernie does — so forthrightly.

Bernie is the darling of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Remember them? They’re the ones who wore red socks and decamped in the public parks in a dozen U.S. cities in 2012. Those “occupies” are back now. And Bernie is their guy.

Bernie is having a grand time bashing billionaires and crying out for income equality. He even went to Liberty University, where students and faculty at that conservative Christian school didn’t protest or blow whistles or head for Student Health complaining of “micro-aggression.” No, he was cordially received.

The One Percenters whom Bernie doesn’t bash are those Planned Parenthood elites whom we’ve seen on the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) videos. CMP has by now posted the tenth video online.

These Planned Parenthood folks shown on camera are obviously more than well-to-do. They go out to expense account lunches at swank restaurants. There, over sushi, salad and wine, they casually discuss “crushing” skulls and abdomens of unborn children — the better to scavenge their victims’ hearts, lungs, and livers for sale. Yet to Bernie and that redoubtable man of the Left, Robert Reich, Planned Parenthood’s billions in taxpayer dollars are untouchable. Not only does this billion-dollar killing machine get massive injections of tax dollars from the taxpayers, Planned Parenthood is itself tax exempt. That means it’s a favorite tax break for some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens.

There could be no better example of “crony capitalism” than this evil enterprise. Yet President Obama says he will veto the Continuing Resolution of Congress and shut down the government rather than take one dollar away from Planned Parenthood.

Bernie is trying to expand his burgeoning movement. He wants to “reach out” to black voters, the most loyal members of the Democratic Party. Maybe he can persuade black Americans that he really thinks “Black Lives Matter” despite thinking unborn black children’s lives don’t.

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley courageously takes on the Left’s hypocrisy in this powerful column. He writes:

In New York City, home to the largest black population of any U.S. urban area, more black babies are aborted than born. New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reported in 2014 that black babies constitute 42% of all abortions in a city where blacks are 25% of the population. In Georgia, where whites outnumber blacks 2 to 1, more than 53% of abortions involve black babies, and black women terminate their pregnancies at nearly 2.5 times the rate that white women do.

What has Bernie had to say about Kermit Gosnell’s abortion abattoir in inner city Philadelphia? There, Gosnell routinely reserved the clean sheets for white patients while women of color were consigned to foul, feculent back rooms. And one of them died there.

As reformed abortionist Dr. Bernard Nathanson (our repentant Bernie) wrote, “there’s a fortune in abortion.” No protest from the “occupies” about Gosnell’s racial exploitation.

We may be sure that the massive abortion industry is one group of One Percenters Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton will never call out. They are the Progressives’ base. They are the major donors to Progressive causes and candidacies.

Socialist Sanders and Progressive Hillary support unrestricted access to abortion-on-demand. In this, their One Percenter cohorts in Planned Parenthood find complete agreement with them.