Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is a socialist, an authentic radical leftist, the real thing, a self-declared independent socialist.  Senator Sanders announced on April 30 that he is running for President.  We should all celebrate.

The political beliefs of Bernie Sanders are hard to distinguish from those of President Obama and the rest of today’s Democratic Party.  Compare them on taxes, re-distribution, deficit spending, economics in general, and foreign policy.  The wonderful thing about the candidacy of Senator Sanders, his gift to America, is that it will shift to the Democrats the impossible burden of trying to prove that their agenda under President Obama differs materially from textbook socialism.  For trying to make the case that there is little daylight between socialism and the Obama agenda, that comprehensive regulatory control over the private sector is the practical equivalent of ownership of the means of production, Republicans have been hooted off the stage, mocked, called radical right-wing nut jobs, for 6 years.  But now, good old Bernie Sanders, the earnest and honest weirdo from America’s radical East Coast, can do what the Republicans could not.

Thanks, Bernie.