Is there anything more cynical than rich-guy Bernie Sanders out shilling socialism for the rest of us, now marketing it as "love"?

I'm grossed out. Here's what Fox News's Tucker Carlson ran last night, showing the Berns in his own words:

"Choose a different path, a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love, and that is the path I call Democratic Socialism," Sanders intoned.

Notice the irony of the Fox News breaking news crawl below Sanders making his intonement, about Hong Kongers being hauled off to jail and hospital for defying communist China as if that doesn't give a whiff of what this so-called love actually means.

Hugo Chavez, a man Sanders has professed admiration for, summed Bernie's socialism up more originally, calling it "a sea of happiness."

Which underlines, for the millionth time, how willing socialists are to lie about what they promise, and once they get their hands on the levers of power, lie about what they deliver. It's not for nothing that socialism or communism has been called 'the devil's imitation of Christianity.' All that love, can't you see? And enforced by gunpoint, as this Issues & Insights editorial correctly notes.

The Venezuelan strongman did indeed promise a sea of happiness, but Dan Mitchell has some economic insight on what Chavez actually delivered besides the coercion cited above:

How do we measure the cost of Venezuelan socialism?

• Is it people eating household pets?
• Is it people dying of malnourishment?
• Is it women selling their bodies?

Actually, it’s all of the above.

And there’s plenty of additional evidence. All of which shows that more socialism results in more misery.

Let’s review some examples.

Mitchell cite people dying of heart attacks while waiting in gas lines for days, malaria and other stone-age illnessness recrudescing, and criminals leaving because there's nothing left to steal.

He could throw in starvation, devalued money, death squads against protestors, torture in prisons, and the conversion of the country into a gang-run narcostate as additional examples, but not all of them are economic. They're just what happens whenever socialism is applied.

Which is some sea of happiness.

Now Bernie's selling the whole thing as 'love' something that's surely a cynical appeal to teenage girls, naive Millennials and Gen. Z voters.

Because we all know Bernie's been around the block for decades and knows how socialism as it's practiced really turns out.

Thomas Lifson noted that Sanders is a plagiarist, and now that we are at it, this 'love' appeal has been made before, too ... by the murderous Che Guevara, who described lining up teenagers at walls before massacring them by firing squad, and for good measure holding his phone receiver to his victims' mouths so their mothers could hear them scream, as a thrill for himself, and love for the rest of us.

“At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” 
― Ernesto "Che" Guevara

It's a sick pitch, given what socialism actually delivers. Now Sanders is using it again on a new generation of youth, and not only using it, borrowing it from a mass murderer. This is the pitch of a charlatan.

Image credit: Fox News via shareable YouTube screen shot