Contributors

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Bloomberg? No. Just No.

Mike Bloomberg, former Republican mayor of New York and billionaire owner of a major news organization, announced that he is running for the Democratic nomination for president.

There are a ton of reasons why Bloomberg shouldn't be running for the Democratic nomination.

1) He's too old. At 77, he's the same age as Joe Biden, who also shouldn't be running because he's too old. There's a better than 4% chance he'll be dead before inauguration day, and a better than 1 in 4 chance he'll die before the end of his first term.

2) He has a horrendous conflict of interest. Bloomberg News has announced that it will not investigate Bloomberg during the campaign, nor will it investigate his Democratic opponents. But it will still publish stories about his opponents from "credible journalistic institutions."

This is pure bull. Bloomberg flunkies can still print flattering stories about him from the New York Times, and ignore the unflattering ones, and vice versa for the other Democratic candidates.

And what happens if Bloomberg wins the nomination? Will Bloomberg News stop researching stories about his Republican opponent, Donald Trump? To be fair, they'd have to stop printing stories about the presidential race, international diplomacy and the economy because those topics involve Trump.

The only way to avoid a conflict of interest is for Bloomberg to sell his company, which is which Trump should have done.

Trump's conflicts of interest constantly undermine his every decision. Did he pull troops out of Syria because it was best for the United States (which it clearly wasn't, for dozens of reasons), or did he pull out because Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan threatened two Trump hotels in Istanbul? And, as it turned out, Trump didn't actually pull the troops out of Syria, he just moved them to oil fields, allowing Turkey to invade and kill and capture hundreds of Kurdish fighters who had stood by the United States in Iraq and Syria for decades.

Basically, every international, national and economic news story involves the president at some level. Bloomberg News would have to cease publication to avoid a conflict of interest if Bloomberg won.

3) We don't need another billionaire running for president. Yeah, Bloomberg would be better than Trump. Pretty much anyone would be. The problem with billionaires is that they are terrible at dealing with human beings. They are used to buying everything they want and bulldozing through people with their money instead of working with them.

Trump's wealth is the core of why he is such a horrible president and person.

4) Bloomberg's flip-flopping from Democrat, to Republican, to independent, then back to Democrat, is fishy. As is the way he got the New York mayor's office two-term limit removed so he could serve a third term.

5) The only one who wants Bloomberg to be president is Bloomberg. No Democrats want him. His racist stop-and-frisk policy in New York (which he recently characterized as a mistake, and for which he apologized) alienated a large segment of the Democratic party, including blacks, Hispanics, and anyone who isn't a racist.

Yeah, Bloomberg has done some good work on gun policy. But he would serve this nation far better continuing that project than injecting yet another wild card into a Democratic field that already has too many candidates.

The 2016 Republican field had too many candidates, and look how that turned out. If Bloomberg does win the Democratic nomination, Republicans will (hypocritically) claim he bought it. And Russia will use Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk disaster on Facebook and Twitter to even more successfully convince blacks and Hispanics to stay home as they did in 2016.

If Bloomberg wants what's best for this country, he should let the primary process play itself out and let the American people choose the Democratic nominee by popular vote, then help level the playing field during the general election by making contributions to counter the Republican PACs funded by corrupt billionaires like Sheldon Adelson.

He can keep his interest in Bloomberg News, and the organization can continue the important work of reporting the truth, countering the lies spewed by the Russians and Fox News, which has become just another propaganda outlet for Vladimir Putin and his puppets, which now include Donald Trump and nearly the entire Republican Party.

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