The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Troll Of The Year So Far Is @Instapundit

Posted on | July 29, 2015 | 46 Comments

by Smitty

BERNIE SANDERS ON IMMIGRATION: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. . . . It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.”

It’s not quite a Godwin’s Law violation. Probably just ‘Win’s Law:

So it’s okay to have socialism, but it can’t be international socialism, it has to be socialism in one nation. A sort of national socialism, I guess.

Folks, this is how it’s DONE.

Category: Instapundit

Comments

46 Responses to “Troll Of The Year So Far Is @Instapundit”

  1. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    July 29th, 2015 @ 4:57 pm

    Bernie has a gift. Just ask Hillary how much she enjoys him in the race.

  2. MoeLarryCurly
    July 29th, 2015 @ 5:18 pm

    It’s called democratic socialism. Is Norway, and other Scandinavian countries looking to export their political system? NO.

    It’s clear that conservatives still don’t get fascism, or what the left/right political spectrum is, even now when they’re getting a very open challenge from the New Right.

  3. Art Deco
    July 29th, 2015 @ 5:53 pm

    It’s clear that conservatives still don’t get fascism, or what the left/right political spectrum is,

    You’re level of understanding of the political spectrum does not exceed your level of understanding of trade theory or the buttressing empirical literature on the subject. Your confidence is undiminished, as we all might expect.

  4. Phil_McG
    July 29th, 2015 @ 5:54 pm

    Sanders is right though, open borders does make everyone in the country poorer. Except employers who save on labour costs.

    Ask any unemployed American coder why Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg think the US needs unlimited numbers of cheap Indian tech grads on H1B visas.

  5. JeffWeimer
    July 29th, 2015 @ 6:02 pm

    Then you must have missed this over the weekend: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421369/bernie-sanders-national-socialism

    Boy howdy, did folks positively squeal over that article.

  6. Matt_SE
    July 29th, 2015 @ 6:32 pm

    Sorry, I love Instapundit but Moe Lane beat him to that point by a day or two.

  7. Cole
    July 29th, 2015 @ 7:45 pm

    I’m sure all the tech workers fired by Disney during record profits and replaced by foreigners are thrilled with this assessment. I’m sure all those factory workers are thrilled prices on goods have fallen to Koch’s free trade policy even though they’re unemployed and have no money to spend on cheap goods. Free trade sounds great on paper. In actual practice it seems like another way to tear down America and it’s citizenry.

  8. daialanye
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:17 pm

    Wow! Just wow! This guy is tougher on immigration than Donald Trump.

    For some reason, though, I don’t believe either one.

  9. Finrod Felagund
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:31 pm

    Yep. You can tell from all the top-level comments that have been deleted that it made a lot of whiners whine vigorously.

  10. smitty
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:34 pm

    By all means, provide a Moe Lane URL. Was it delivered with the same sneaking-up-on-the-point-while-not-quite-getting-there style?

  11. MoeLarryCurly
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:43 pm

    Heresy! Neo-liberalism is infallible, and free trade makes everyone richer because they can buy cheap Ipods, and clothes made in Bangladesh by 11 year old girls in shacks, meanwhile our manufacturing base is decimated. Conservatives will never admit free trade is problematic for workers even when there is an overwhelming amount of proof that it leads to job loss, and lower wages. It’s also responsible for leading to the decimation of what were once working class black neighborhoods, especially in Los Angeles, and the new dependency culture that they’re always bitching about.

    I think it’s about time we stop talking about the “failures of socialism”, and start talking about the failures of neo-liberal free market capitalism; in 2015, those are abundant.

  12. jakee308
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:44 pm

    Good thing no one remembers the translation for Nationalsozialistische is, huh?

  13. DeadMessenger
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:55 pm

    I couldn’t read more than a few comments before the unreasoned hatred and copious stooopid simply overwhemed my sensibilities. I think I was having a case of the vapors, needing to lie down with a cool compress on my forehead.

    Those commenters were way, WAY worse than the Tumblrina trolls. I’m kind of scared to think that I could be walking around in a mall with dangerously mentally ill people like them.

  14. DeadMessenger
    July 29th, 2015 @ 8:58 pm

    Smitty please, we’re talking about Moe Lane. I think his style is more “sneaking up on the point, then putting a kick-me sign on its back while it’s not looking”.

  15. DeadMessenger
    July 29th, 2015 @ 9:14 pm

    Please stop attributing your made-up, fairyland fantasy beliefs to conservatives.

  16. RKae
    July 29th, 2015 @ 9:24 pm

    Boy! That’s a mouthful!

    …If only the word could be cut down to something short ‘n’ snappy…

  17. McGehee
    July 29th, 2015 @ 9:25 pm

    If that’s what Bernie is, it might explain why his fans call themselves the “New Right.”

  18. Matt_SE
    July 29th, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

    I dunno, folks. What *do* you call a socialist who ISN’T an internationalist?

    http://www.redstate.com/2015/07/28/bernie-sanders-national-ezra-klein-socialism/

  19. Art Deco
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:03 pm

    It does not ‘make everyone poorer’. It’s just that the aggregate welfare gains for the extant population are too small to matter and skewed in their distribution.

    The problem with open borders is not economic. It’s social and cultural, and, ultimately, political.

  20. Art Deco
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:06 pm

    I think its a reasonable wager MoeLarryCurly is a union shill.

  21. MoeLarryCurly
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:18 pm

    No, I am not, although neoliberalism killed private sector unions, and job protections for American workers. It’s nice to see that there is challenge from the right toward the free market neoliberal capitalism that most conservatives embrace, and free trade. The two are not synonymous, either. The Catholic Church even opposed capitalism (and under this Pope do again)for centuries.

  22. Daniel Freeman
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:18 pm

    The Scandinavian countries are also not doing a good job of protecting their cultural integrity, thanks to the EU. And it was also a joke. You sound like a SJW, no sense of humor.

  23. MoeLarryCurly
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:28 pm

    How is that “fantasyland”? The Reaganomic/Freidman model is the neoliberal model, and has absolutely destroyed the manufacturing base, and hurt American workers, especially black factory workers who resorted to crime, or wound up dependents of the state when their jobs were outsourced. Not hard to argue that the same economic philosophy lead to the 2008 meltdown along with the crash of 98, and 87, not to mention the S&L scandal. This is why you’re c*****. Neoliberalism is actually a loss for conservatives because it has changed demographics, and hurt the white working class. No wonder a lot of them are now looking at Sanders. Consumerism, the by product of neoliberalism, also hurts traditional values. It’s ironic that an anti-feminist like McCain would support the system that lead to their ascendancy.

  24. DeadMessenger
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:34 pm

    I think I just heard the rattling of the keys to the banhammer closet.

  25. Wombat_socho
    July 29th, 2015 @ 10:57 pm

    I’d say it’s been nice knowing you, but I’d be lying. Bye now.

  26. Finrod Felagund
    July 29th, 2015 @ 11:20 pm

    I’ve always thought of him more as the Bill Buckley erudite type, but from a former Democrat/English major background.

    While typing this, I found this little piece of good news from Moe:

    http://moelane.com/2015/07/29/bill-patmon-planned-parenthood-ohio-defund/

    Short version: an Ohio state Representative wants Black Lives Matter protesters to protest Planned Parenthood.

  27. DeadMessenger
    July 30th, 2015 @ 12:25 am

    I didn’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that he’s subtle in the beginning, but then BLAMMO!, there’s the punch line.

  28. DeadMessenger
    July 30th, 2015 @ 1:33 am

    Because they’re at a loss for any more euphemisms for “communist”?

  29. Dystopia Max
    July 30th, 2015 @ 3:48 am

    Attacking a socialist…by attacking his most popular, appealing, and defensible positions, and making weak ‘gotcha’ comparisons to Naziism, while casually slandering the concept of a nation-state in the process. THIS WILL TOTALLY MAKE THOSE MAINSTREAM CONSERVATIVES LOVE US.

    Glenn, at least was just glib on the section he quoted, and gave his opponent the benefit of a full quote before going for the cheap shot. I’d tend to forgive him on this one because he posts a lot of good things throughout the day and aims on quantity rather than quality (better border controls and longer word detainment between his brain and keyboard may be occasionally needed.)

    But this just isn’t how it’s done if you’re halfway competent or focused on the victory of your guy, or your ideas. A critique of Bernie Sanders on immigration should follow his actual record on it in his own state:

    “despite his general critique of corporations’ refusing to raise wages
    and hire Americans, Sanders supported immigrant workers for the dairy industry in his own state. (See Family Dairy Farms: Killed by Illegal Immigration
    by Patrick Cleburne.)His explanation: “Here in Vermont, while I wish it
    were the case that kids would go into dairy, they do not.”

    At which point a moderately talented Internet humorist might ask him how many cows his kids milked while he was growing up in New York. And a true professional troll would try to work the Compromised Utilitarian Collegiate ass-Kisser angle in there somewhere, as Nazis are rather remote from the experience of most individuals at the moment, whereas insincere cowards who sell out their constituents are all too common and rightfully hated.

  30. Quartermaster
    July 30th, 2015 @ 5:38 am

    In Germany, such things are illegal. They love them some compound words. A lot.

  31. Quartermaster
    July 30th, 2015 @ 5:42 am

    There is an economic component, like it or not.

  32. smitty
    July 30th, 2015 @ 5:42 am

    > I’d tend to forgive him on this one

    What’s to forgive? I submit that, if I’m supposed to watch a Stephen Colbert figure and “laugh at myself” (and I do) then what’s good for the soose is good for the Sanders.

  33. Art Deco
    July 30th, 2015 @ 6:27 am

    Not much of one. It has a disagreeable distributional effect on wage earners with low levels of human capital (though this is disputed by some economists). Like with any discrete policy, the effects are small in context. Because this is a vulnerable population and a source of trouble if they’re priced out of the labor market, mass immigration channeled into this segment should be avoided. Again, a social problem.

  34. Phil_McG
    July 30th, 2015 @ 7:14 am

    It’s not just poorer unskilled people whose econpmic prospects are harmed by mass immigration.

    Skilled people suffer too – H1B visas mean that American kids who went into huge debt to get computer science degrees have to directly compete with Indian and Chinese tech workers who can and do work for lower wages.

    There are also the externalities borne by the host society as a whole. The costs of educating immigrant children are passed on to American taxpayers. The cost of all those uninsured illegals clogging up hospital emergency rooms is passed on to American taxpayers and people with legitimate medical insurance.

    About 25% of prison inmates are immigrants. The bill for housing, feeding, and caring for them goes to the US taxpayer.

    This all adds up to many hundreds of billions of dollars a year spent by US taxpayers on accomodating legal and illegal immigrants. It’s like paying strangers to squat in your home and help themselves to whatever’s in the fridge. Sheer madness.

  35. Daniel Bonevac
    July 30th, 2015 @ 7:51 am

    Phil is right. I see the effects everyday on a University campus. Students in CS and engineering have to compete with the very best people from India and a host of other countries. In business and other fields, they don’t. American students tend to gravitate toward fields where their hard work has a better chance of paying off. So, not many go into tech fields. Then companies say we need even more H1B visas because Americans don’t want to study CS and engineering. It’s a vicious cycle.

  36. Gunga
    July 30th, 2015 @ 7:53 am

    Thanks, Smitty! I needed that.

  37. Rob Crawford
    July 30th, 2015 @ 9:30 am

    Sorry, but it’s a myth that the foreign students are the best and brightest. They’re the ones able to pay the full cost, that’s their only qualifications. The best and brightest go to the best schools at home and get good jobs at home. The mediocre and incompetent get jobs at body-shops.

    And US companies outsource because they get fixated on the lower hourly cost. In the end they pay more, though, because they end up in an endless work/rework cycle as the body shops do poor quality work.

  38. Finrod Felagund
    July 30th, 2015 @ 9:53 am

    I didn’t read it as bad; I just have an alternate perspective.

  39. Dystopia Max
    July 30th, 2015 @ 11:52 am

    “What’s to forgive?”

    A bad trolling attempt, like a bad pun, is generally something that doesn’t bear repeating, or signal-boosting.

    It especially doesn’t deserve repeating in a mangled/shortened format that makes it look like Glenn was associating all nationalism with national socialism. He’s glib, but he’s not THAT glib. The only people who seriously and rightfully feel threatened by nationalist feeling are transnational progressivists and their willing sellouts, and you really don’t want to be too closely associated with them.

    Much like Donald Trump doesn’t want to be closely associated with the Koch brothers, come to think of it.

  40. Quartermaster
    July 30th, 2015 @ 12:52 pm

    It is far, far larger than you are willing to admit.

  41. CaptDMO
    July 31st, 2015 @ 7:13 am

    OMG!
    Exactly WHERE were you awarded “credentials” for comprehension of Economics OR Political Science?

  42. CaptDMO
    July 31st, 2015 @ 7:18 am

    Because Social Justice Warriors ALWAYS lie?

  43. CaptDMO
    July 31st, 2015 @ 7:23 am

    ” …and gave his opponent the benefit of a full quote before going for the cheap shot.”
    Ooooo, you might look up
    1. Sand bag
    2. Coup de Grace
    But…you know, .tomato…tomaaaahto

  44. Bob Belvedere
    July 31st, 2015 @ 7:33 am

    Looks like the Cuckheads are trying to destroy another TOM thread.

  45. McGehee
    July 31st, 2015 @ 10:08 am

    That too.

  46. Dystopia Max
    July 31st, 2015 @ 4:11 pm

    When you have a politician up on the public stage who’s committed actual and measurable harm against his own constituents on the very issue he’s trying to demagogue on, the cute classroom stuff isn’t what serious people reach for.

    It certainly isn’t what serious people claim as the TROLL OF THE YEAR OMG.

    (Trolling is a two-way street, Where there is no knee-jerk public emotional response from the target indicating provocation, there was no successful trolling.)