When it comes to politics, be careful who you get in bed with. You might be in agreement on one or two things, but then it all tends to bleed together into a general alliance and if you’re generally aligned with somebody, then what they do is going to rub off on you, period. That said, the two strange bedfellows of the day are Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk. Never thought I’d live to see that combo, but I never thought I would live to see a great many things, so this is just the next one in a conga line of catastrophes coming our way — potentially. Sanders agrees with Musk that the Pentagon is a wasteful thing and so is the Department of Defense — which Donald Trump would have manned by Pete Hegseth, who is a horrible choice for the post. Oversight is a wonderful thing if it’s done ethically but this has all the earmarks of becoming volatile. Rolling Stone:
They may not agree on much, but when it comes to Pentagon spending, Sen. Bernie Sanders and billionaire Elon Musk are aligned.
Sanders, who usually makes enemies of billionaires like Musk, posted on X Sunday, “Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”
Musk, tapped by Donald Trump to run a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy,
Sanders isn’t the only lawmaker on the left who is open to working with DOGE to reduce defense spending. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna called out “waste, fraud and abuse” by the Department of Defense, noting its failed audits.
“When it comes to cutting waste, fraud, and abuse and opening the 5 primes to more competition, there are Democrats on [the House Armed Services Committee] who will work with @elonmusk and @DOGE,” Khanna wrote in a post on X, the platform Musk owns.
CAVEAT: We are looking at what could be a good thing or a bad thing. The good thing about people like Sanders and Khanna working with Musk and Ramaswamy is that there would be some expertise exchanged. Sanders and Khanna can be the much needed adults in the room. Plus, Sanders and Khanna are elected officials. That’s a major plus nowadays with Trump putting his friends and in-laws everywhere, in positions which are way over their heads. The bad thing is that Sanders and Khanna working with DOGE could be construed as a tacit approval of any and everything that DOGE may do, or propose to do, no matter how extreme.
I’m assuming Bernie understands that but maybe not. Sanders has already gotten heat for his Musk alignment on Twitter, because Twitter is still upset at Musk for threatening Alexander Vindman. So you see how this goes and how the optics are, shall we say, less than optimal?
Let’s keep an eye on this. Maybe the good will outweigh the bad. I think we’re all agreed the next four years is going to be a real shitshow on wheels, so this may be par for the course.
Bernie Sanders has always been a mixed bag for me. However somewhere in recent years I came to the belief it was time for him to step away into retirement. As you say it’s not like he couldn’t do some good on this or other matters but too often over time he’s seemed like someone just being a curmudgeon to get attention. A toned down “Senator version” of some of the jackasses we’ve seen over in the House during our liftetimes.
Sanders doesn’t deserve to be on any committee as a part of the Democratic contingent. He ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016 but refused to actually become a Democrat during the process. At the Convention (which is where he had said he *would* join the party *IF* he were the nominee), he promised that he would run as a Democrat in ALL future elections but, in 2018, when running for re-election to the Senate, he broke that promise. Then, in 2020, he decided to throw his hat into the ring to run for the Democratic Party nomination–again, without joining the Party. Sanders knows he had a snowball’s chance in Tahiti of getting elected to the Presidency as an independent or third-party candidate so he tried to hijack the Democratic Party.
Yes, I’m aware I’ve run this rant before but it bears being repeated because Sanders isn’t all that much different from Musk or Trump; he’s as much an opportunist as either Musk or Trump. The fact his politics run in the opposite direction doesn’t make a difference–and he’s not all that great when it comes to gun control either. He was one of the handful of “progressives” who went against the move for greater gun control after Sandy Hook.