With Bernie rising, it’s time to bring back Reagan’s Soviet jokes
Soviet humor has special significance given Bernie’s embrace of socialism and socialist tyrants — and it offers a fatalistic window into the reality of a Bernieconomy and your health under Berniecare.
Bernie is rising.
The mainstream media is all over the “Bernie can win” theme.
Bret Stephens writes in the NY Times, Of Course Bernie Can Win — To say Sanders is unelectable is indefensible. Harry Enten writes at CNN, Yes, Bernie Sanders can pull it off.
Bernie also is on the attack, with his campaign operatives badmouthing Elizabeth Warren barely below the surface while Bernie plays nice above surface.
The conventional wisdom, including by Obama-land alums, is that Bernie is the candidate against whom Trump most wants to run.
“If I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders,” [Jim] Messina said. “I think the contrast is the best. He can say, ‘I’m a business guy, the economy’s good and this guy’s a socialist.’ I think that contrast for Trump is likely one that he’d be excited about in a way that he wouldn’t be as excited about Biden or potentially Mayor Pete or some of the more Midwestern moderate candidates.”
Regardless of prospects, I wrote not long ago that Bernie v. Trump is the battle we need, just as Britain needed Corbyn v. Johnson.
There will be plenty of time for pointing out what a total disaster Bernie would be to our economy and foreign policy. But I’m not sure that alone is how you beat Bernie — there is an even more powerful tool: Mockery of what Bernie’s America would look like if he were able to implement his policies.
Nothing is as powerful as humor. And nothing is as biting as Soviet humor, which has special significance given Bernie’s honeymoon in the Soviet Union and embrace of socialism and socialist tyrants. Soviet humor offers a fatalistic window into the reality of a Bernieconomy and your health under Berniecare.
I traveled extensively throughout the Soviet Union during the cold war, from the “stans” to Soviet Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Estonia and, of course, Moscow (where I studied) and Leningrad. I really appreciated the enduring wit and humor of average Soviets. The people I met were uniformly friendly and welcoming, despite their government, and I came to appreciate their endearing but fatalistic outlook and humor, a byproduct of Russian domination of the country.
Thinking about Bernie, I thought about how Ronald Reagan loved to tell Soviet jokes. Or at least jokes attributed to Soviets. Regardless of origin, they make very Soviet points.
So, here’s to you, Bernie (the first one is my favorite, and could just as easily be applied to your doctor under Berniecare):
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Comments
It has been a very long time since presidential elections were something more than the Democratic Party running against the other Democratic Party known as the Republican Party. We have an opportunity to actually challenge Americans to choose between capitalism and communism and candidates who are willing to argue openly about it. Let’s do it. The corrupt kabuki theater of failure has gone on long enough. Let’s get to the heart of the problem and solve it once and for all. Establishment communist candidate vs Trump.
The only issue Bernie has is the high cost of college. That really is something we should have solved, already.
How do you solve the democrat slush fund that we call the cost of college?
Dems aren’t going to accept the fact they’ve been cheating American taxpayers for years with the rising costs.
Maybe if we elect enough PDJT style repubs who won’t take crap from dems then we can see college costs getting contained.
Ok Val, you take the first step through the progressive doot to a cheap college education. I want to hear how anyone but the person going to school should pay one cent towards their own education. If you are lucky and have a family that can help that’s great. If you don’t and have to work two or more jobs to get your education that’s not as good but makes for some fine leaders later in life. I think loans are acceptable but they have to be based on reality and the economics for that regimen. Black history, female studies and many more of the newer courses would not qualify for a student loan because in most cases the student would never be able to repay the loan. When we cheapen the task to obtain something we cheapen the object. In this case, a college degree would be worth much less if the people getting them had no skin in the game. But I’m open to something logical but not socialistic.
Duh. Eliminate government money from the system. Zero grants and zero backed loans. Reintroduce market economics. Costs would plummet, and myriad other benefits would be realized in short order.
We need to reinstate “A vs C” a high school AND College class that was MANDATORY when I was in HS… A vs C… Americanism vs Communism
Fine. Have the government stop guarantying or making these loans, period. Within 5 years, all faculty salaries will be halved, the climbing rocks gone, the “studies” courses a thing of the past, and the useless clowns that teach such crapping on the streets of San Fran.
True enough. Easy student loans –> more money available –> increased demand –> rocketing costs. As the demand increases, so does price. Even if quality plummets, the price still goes up as long as demand will support it; and with cheap (even if only temporarily) money, the demand can indeed support it.
This is elementary stuff; Adam Smith wrote all about it two and a half centuries ago. Or as the late great C. Northcote Parkinson could have said, college expands to soak up the money available. Keep government out of the money business, and the market will keep costs within sight. Not easy to apply retroactively, unfortunately, without causing severe dislocation and ruin.
It starts with what goes on through High School.
It used to be that college was course studies where a Bachelor’s Degree would put you in line for a job right after graduation. Not so anymore. For STEM type vocations undergraduate study closes the gap for what you need to know of the tools used, but lightly delves into your actual chosen field. For engineering you really need a Masters degree to get what you used to have at the end of a Bachelor’s degree.
Then you have the whole accreditation requirements put on colleges where improvements to buildings and infrastructure is tied to colleges keeping academic accreditation. Why does that need to be a part of it? Sure, buildings and equipment need updating but not at the pace they are required to.
From an early age people are told they have to go to college. Blue collar work is deemed as being lesser than those who work white collar. Labor trades are scoffed at.
Degrees in meaningless pursuits are a whole new area of cost increases for zero job demands.
Want costs to go down for college? Start with expanded public schooling with two career tracks. One for skilled labor the other for academic. Expanding HS to two years in either a labor based program which teaches skills useful for working with your hands, or academic training which teaches you the currently used program tools which takes up at least two years of college education.
Limit the number of students that can come in from other countries who pay huge dollars for their children to go to our schools. Those take up slots for our own children meaning we have to pay more to get in.
“”a Bachelor’s Degree would put you in line for a job right after graduation.””
As a freshman, we were bluntly told that we’d never get a decent job with just a BS. That was for chemistry majors in 1960.
“”Start with expanded public schooling with two career tracks.””
Once again, we were doing that in the ’50’s. One academic/pre-college track and one vocational. Most of the kids in the “vocational” track were farm kids who dropped out of school at 16 to work on the family farm. The difference between our 8th grade and 12th grade graduation pictures is telling.
Clean up the student loan system, and get rid of all the top-heavy college administration and diversity nonsense, and tuition prices would drop like a stone.
The problem here is you have one party that pretends to care about the issue, while being the same party who represents the universities themselves.
So they will try “fix” the issue through increased student aid, which goes straight in the universities pockets, while they contually raise tuition at rate that outpaces inflation, and fees and price of textbooks, etc.
The other party doesn’t say much about the issue, presumably because the college-age kids tend to not vote, or if they do, it’s for the opposite party. But that may be short-sighted because it’s parents and taxpayers who get fleeced
As Reagan used to say “Big Govt is not the solution, Big Govt is the problem.”
Every time the govt steps in and steps on the Free Market, unintended consequences ensue.
Does your area have Rent Control and subsidized housing? The “solution” to lack of affordable housing is what caused the lack in the first place. More of the same doesn’t result in a different outcome.
Does the govt subsidize single parent families having more kids? Single parent families WILL have more kids, and single moms won’t be marrying the baby daddies.
Does the govt subsidize the costs of college with cheap loans? When colleges don’t have to worry about students not being able to front the money for raised tuition, there’s nothing to halt tuition costs rising and rising ad infinitum. So colleges can spend money like a drunken sailor and students not only can no longer “work their way thru college”, they can’t even pay back the debt after college.
Lots of Big Govt programs SOUND good, and may even work well when limited so as to not overwhelm the feedback from a Free Market system. Unless the program somehow addresses the bad unintended consequences, chaos and bad things ensue. And the pieinthesky program proponents never see it coming, so they never address those issues until it’s too late, if at all.
My roommate and I were taking the Metro to see the Moscow Circus. We were obviously American ….staring at our tickets a Russian military officer in perfect American accent told us we had passed the correct station and needed to go back one.
From totally different historic backgrounds I found the Russian people to be very much like us. Humor is a good gauge and when we can laugh with them it is also sad that their past can be our future if the Left brings the USA to its knees. The soft Left has no idea of the hardships they will create.
Being a Vermont resident (a flatlander, not the real thing) I recall The Gipper and Sanders met one time. The Gipper had been told that Sanders honeymooned in the USSR, and he said to Sanders that he was reminded of a joke. Sanders replied, “what’s a joke?” Sure, the story is apocryphal, but all you to know about Sanders is he has the sense of humor of Brezhnev and the charm of Andropov. In fact, he has no redeeming qualities. He is a nasty piece of work.
Bernie’s embrace of socialism and socialist tyrants
Bernie likes to call himself a “democratic socialist” and the press lets him get away with this, even though the evidence is overwhelming that he is a hard core communist who supports communist tyrants. This in itself is solid evidence that so-called “liberal” journalists are also our enemies–not fellow Americans with whom we disagree but enemies intent on enslaving and destroying us. Treat them accordingly.
Democratic socialism is when 50.1 % vote to take away the rights of the other 49.9 %. It is tyranny, plain and simple.
True, but with one slight difference: Every so many years you get a chance to vote the tyrants out. Bernie will even let you vote if you’re in a gulag. And if the tyrants lose they’ll go home and try again at the next election. But so long as they can get more supporters than opponents to vote, their reign continues.
One man; one vote; one time. So we’d better make sure we pick the right man.
No, that’s African democracy. Eurocommunism, or Democratic Communism, believed in regular elections, and more-or-less free speech in between. See, for instance, Israel from 1948 to 1977.
To paraphrase a quote usually attributed to Stalin, it isn’t who votes, it’s who counts the votes. There was a vast difference between voting in Western Europe and “voting” in the USSR and its satellites.
What has the USSR got to do with it? We are discussing actual democratic communists, not the USSR.
You are operating under the delusion that Democratic Socialists who don’t accept the results of losing elections will accept the results when given more power.
Since when did they not accept the results of elections? They lost dozens of elections and never once failed to accept the results.
You notice that many Democratic leaders are corrupt liars and even worse the Democratic voters don’t care. Furthermore, the Democrats want to greatly expand the power give to the state and their leaders which is a recipe for disaster.
The thing that keeps me from ever accepting socialism is that it won’t work on even a small scale project. Look at all of the communes that have tried it but failed. The leaders become frustrated because people do not act the way they are “Supposed” to. That means that human nature kicks in and people become the same slugs they were under capitalism. The work when they have to and eat when they want to. No one is exceptional because there is no reward. Why would a doctor see ten patients when he can see just three? He still gets the same salary. The entire system is based on unrealistic images of human beings. Now greed, that’s a whole different story!
First one was my favorite too.
This scene from a German movie is a good joke too. It’s a great movie too.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gHZJsMfukQY
The jokes are funny, but the idea that bernie sanders is considered by any of the population as a serious contender as president is frightening.
Well, we let it get here (we hired the Crying Boehners as our bulwark against tyranny, and, predictably, we got the Keystone Cops – except more corrupt).
We need to act as if our freedom depends on it.
One thing I will disagree with from above. Sanders has never been a “nice” person. He is as rude in real life as anyone could imagine. He is rude to common workers, fellow Senators and all around him. He is personally greedy and calculating. He is as dangerous as Lenin and has half the IQ. He is a dangerous dullard that has latched on to an easy, intellectually lazy spiel.
If Ebenezer Scrooge had been a Red Diaper baby, he would have been Bernie Sanders — except that Scrooge was redeemable.
Puhiawa. Very well said. Bernie is angry, bitter, ignorant and very, very dangerous.
Reagan was 1 in 1,000,000. I always crack up at his “the bombing begins in 5-minutes” line.
Russia finally achieved the same level of agricultural production it enjoyed prior to the Russian revolution in 1917…a word of caution to today’s communist wanna-bees..
https://tsarizm.com/news/eastern-europe/2020/01/04/russia-hits-post-soviet-oil-production-record/
Soviet salesman: congrats, comrade. Your LADA (cheap communist knock off a FIAT) will be delivered ten years from today.
Soviet Guy: morning or afternoon?
Soviet salesman: what difference at this point does it make?
Soviet guy: the plumber is coming in the afternoon.
I still cannot believe Sanders actually SAID he likes bread lines, that they’re good things.
I mean, what a confession of hatred of humanity.
All these young people that think they support him: they don’t have any clue, none at all, what a miserable life he wants to give them. They have their lyft apps, their Smoothie King srawberry/banana smoothies, their Samsung Galaxies…. privation isn’t part of their vocabulary nor their lived experience….
Voting without a clue. Our schools have completely failed them.
Enough already with the “socialism vs. capitalism”—it’s communism vs free markets.
This is not an academic quibble. If sensible Americans can get that “free” part into general circulation, half of Bernie’s support will switch to DJT. They do love them their free stuff, even if they don’t understand it.
God…..I miss Reagan. I was only a kid watching clips of him on NBC nightly news with Tom Brokaw. Just the best.
George McGovern coulda won.
Walter Mondale coulda won.
Bob Dole coulda won.
John Kerry coulda won.
Mitt Romney coulda won.
Any theory looks good on paper. In practice…?
Q: Why did universal free BernieCare fail in Vermont after nearly bankrupting the state Bernie?
A: (to be read out loud… VERY loud) Because we didn’t go far enough.
Same excuse always offered after communism fails somewhere. The stupid never ends.
Thanks for letting me reminisce on President Reagan. I forgot how funny and genuine he was. He was a great President.
Best Soviet joke I know ..
First Secretary of the Central Committee Joseph Stalin is riding in a train. The train becomes stuck in a snow bank.
Stalin orders .. “Remove all the engineers and replace them with the proletariat.” The train begins to move again.
Some time later, the train gets stuck in another snow bank. First Secretary of the Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev orders .. “Bring back the engineers, they knew what they were doing.” The train begins to move again.
Some time later, the train gets stuck in yet another snow bank. First Secretary of the Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev orders .. “Lower the shades and pretend the train is moving.”
Fellow goes to a Soviet department store and asks a sales rep “Haven’t you got any shoes here?”
“Oh, no”, he replies, “We haven’t got any furniture here; they haven’t got any shoes on the third floor”.
True anecdote to follow that joke: At some point in the 1930s my grandfather worked at a bakery and my great-uncle as a night watchman in a warehouse. They were both asleep, and my grandmother heard my great-uncle call out, кто идет — “Who goes there?”. To which my grandfather replied, in his sleep, пряники нет — “We’re out of cookies”.
Reagan’s “joke” is already starting to make itself present and “train” the leftist lemmings to live with such delays. The default method of buying a Tesla, the lefty dream car for everyone, is put your money down here and we’ll tell you months later when your car is ready to pick up. Now that Musk is moving his operations to China, expect longer delivery times. People are already getting conditioned to expect delays.
Musk used the down payment cash from the Model 3 to keep the company alive. In retrospect it was brilliant.
I believe Tesla cars made in China will only be sold in China.
No one is compelled to buy a Tesla, and Tesla buyers CHOOSE to wait because they want a Tesla.
Just like I will CHOOSE to wait when I buy my next car because I finally found a salesman willing to order what I want rather than sell me what I don’t want from stock.
Under the Soviet system they solved the housing problem. Everyone had a room that they could live in.
It just happened to be the same room.
In the future, when communism finally succeeds, everyone will have a helicopter. That way, when the news arrives that there is toilet paper in Moscow, everyone will fly to Moscow and get toilet paper; then when they hear that there are light bulbs in Leningrad, everyone will fly there and get light bulbs.
Stalin calls the head of the GPU to report that his watch has been stolen. Two hours later he calls back to let him know that he found the watch. “But Comrade, fifteen people have already confessed!”
Stalin’s response….. ” send some to gulag and execute the rest”. Presently reading “Stalin” by Kotkin… the Kirov and Kremlin incidents prove this out…
“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor… you will both be in the same re-education camp..”
Old Yakov Smirnoff joke about former Soviet Union:
Naïve U.S. college student visits USSR and asks RUssian citizen, “So how are things here in the Workers’ Paradise?”
Citizen: We can’t complain.
Student: Things are that good?
C: No, we can’t complain!
S: But I’ve read your constitution. It guarantees freedom of speech.
C: True, but is different here than in America.
S: How so?
C: In America you also have freedom AFTER speech!
(Something American Socialists and Dem Leftists [I repeat myself] are actively working to “fix”.)
Wendy’s – Soviet Fashion Show (1985, USA)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpypTXccG2I
The guy playing the violin was a client of mine back in those days.
Who is the only Presidential Candidate to have honeymooned in the Soviet Union?
Bernie Sanders
{end of Soviet Union joke}
It’s a cold, blizzardy, winter night somewhere on the Volga. Old Ivan Ivanovich is lying shivering in bed, extremely ill. Suddenly, the door blows open. In strides a tall, skeletal figure clad in a long, black hooded robe. In one hand, it holds a scythe; in the other, an hourglass with the sand almost run out of the top globe.
“I am the Angel of Death!” Says the figure in a low, lugubrious, ominous tone.
“Thank goodness,” says Ivan Ivanovich. “For moment, thought it was secret police!”
Moshe Kaputski is crossing a wooden footbridge in the Birobidzhan Autonomous Oblast in winter. It gives way under him (even though he is a thin man, and the next thing he knows, he has broken through the ice covering a tributary of the Amur.
“Help! I’ll drown and freeze!” Mose cries.
To policemen pass by. “Aha!” they say, “Drown, Zhid!”
Desperate, Moshe thinks for a moment, and cries out, “Down with Brezhnev! Down with the Communist Party! Long live ZIonism!”
The two cops immediately jump in and pull him out to arrest him.