by A.J Rice
Michael Bloomberg wasn’t able to buy the Democratic nomination. Maybe another billionaire leftist—Mark Cuban—will have better luck buying the Democratic nominee.
Cuban certainly has been carrying water for Joe Biden—or at least, for Biden’s policies, which amounts to the same thing. He hasn’t taken a knee—yet—in support of the rioters who are so upset about the death of George Floyd that they’ve been torching the businesses of people who had nothing to do with it.
But he did warmly proclaim that Biden has “empathy” for them.
This empathy of Biden’s, we were supposed to understand, is strongly juxtaposed with his billionaire bete noir, President Trump who, Cuban assures us, is just “playing the victim.” Trump has had the audacity to side with the victims . . . of the rioters, whom the president hasn’t confused with peaceful protestors.
Cuban also supports what Joe Biden—alongside Barack Obama—imposed on America: A one-size-fits-all/can’t-say-no-thanks, government-run health care system.
He told CNBC’s Karen Gilchrist that the price of health insurance “could be slashed by 50 percent” by doing away with private health insurance, which is based on individual risk profiles and can be tailored to the individual’s needs. He talked up the British and Australian one-size-fits-all models. But he failed to talk up the cost of the taxes imposed to provide one-size-fits-all coverage in Britain and Australia. Instead of paying $1,000 for an MRI—if you ever need one—you’re forced to pay several times that sum every year, in taxes—in case someone else needs one.
Of course, under this system it is the government—rather than you—deciding who gets one.
As a matter of fact, the government decides who gets anything.
It’s a bizarre position to take for a man who claims to be a fan of the arch-capitalist writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Both novels are about the struggle of the individual against the collective—not paeans about the subordination of the individual to the collective.
Rand, were she still with us, would not be glad to have Cuban as a fan.
It gets even weirder.
Cuban says he “wants to be a Republican” . . . but endorsed Hillary Clinton. Which is not unlike confusing rioters with protestors.
Apparently, it’s not just Joe who’s sleepy.
Cuban may be to the left of sleepy Joe, who for all his many faults doesn’t seem to actually hate this country. One wonders about Mark Cuban. About his motives for financing the jihadi-recruiting film, Redacted—which is basically Deliverance revisited only this time in place of leering hillbillies assaulting Ned Beatty and Jon Voight, it’s American soldiers assaulting and ultimately murdering an Iraqi teenager.
As awful as that act was, worse is the certainty that it will expose Americans to more terrorism in the manner of the “protests” that Mark Cuban has so much . . . empathy for.
He also has an affinity for cheap labor—something else he has in common with another ersatz Republican who always seems to come up on the Democrat side of things: Michael Bloomberg.
Cuban thinks it’s “crazy” as well as “really, really stupid” to reserve jobs in America for Americans—the citizens who pay the taxes that fund, among other things, sports arenas such as the one built in Dallas where Cuban’s Mavericks play ball, which has helped make Cuban rich.
But Cuban—and Bloomberg, who founded something called the New American Economy, which advocates that Americans shouldn’t have pride of place in the economy of America—is opposed to checking the “immigration status” of workers. He is as cognitively dissonant—or is it disingenuous?—on this subject as he is on the question of being a “Republican” who supports Hillary Clinton . . . and a fan of Ayn Rand who supports socialized medicine.
A piece in the Dallas Morning News describes the kind of conflation that is infecting Cuban’s mind and causing this confusion:
Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or the children of immigrants, according to a 2017 study by the Center for American Entrepreneurship, a nonpartisan policy and advocacy organization.
If Cuban were honest, he’d acknowledge the legal status of those immigrants he’s praising. Instead, he tries to shame opponents of open borders—and open wallets—by calling them “crazy” and “stupid.”
It’s typical of the gaslighting practiced by the Left, of which Cuban is a part—his posturings about being a “Republican” (and a Randian) notwithstanding.
But it’’s more than just disingenuous posturing. It also may be practical politics.
Cuban knows his presidential ambitions aren’t going anywhere in a Republican Party led by a victorious President Trump. So he’s lining up with the other party—and the man he hopes will defeat President Trump.
Maybe, just maybe, a victorious Biden will make him the number two? Not likely. But treasury secretary?
Or wrinkled t-shirt secretary?
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A.J. Rice is CEO of Publius PR, a premier communications firm in Washington D.C. Rice is a brand manager, star-whisperer and auteur media influencer, who has produced or promoted Laura Ingraham, Judge Jeanine Pirro, Donald Trump Jr., Monica Crowley, Charles Krauthammer, Roger L. Simon, Steve Hilton, Victor Davis Hanson, and many others. Find out more at publiuspr.com.
Photo “Mark Cuban” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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