ZeroHedge:

Hat tip to Robert Laird.

There is a decades-old custom followed by most candidates for the presidency of wearing American flag pins on their left coat lapel. Of course, wearing an American flag lapel pin doesn’t mean very much. It doesn’t really prove that you are genuinely patriotic or genuinely love America.

But failure to follow that trivial practice tends to be noticed and to provoke comment. Barack Obama ran into questions from reporters about not wearing one back in 2007. Obama initially characteristically sneered at the custom, but pressure mounted and by the next Spring of the election year, Candidate Obama fell into line and began wearing the flag pin.

In the run-up to this election, we have another representative of the radical left-wing of the democrat party who is obviously more comfortable denouncing America for institutionalized injustice than participating in conventional displays of patriotic symbols. Vermont’s Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (as you can see in the above photo) has been substituting a gold lapel pin in the place of that conventional US flag.

Naturally, one wondered: Is it a small gold hammer-and-sickle? Is he wearing (sentimentally) the symbol of the IWW (Wobblies)? Looking into it, I found that I was not the first to inquire. And the correct answer may be given here.

Bernie Sanders is deliberately side-stepping the flag lapel pin issue, by wearing instead the gold badge which identifies him in the Capitol building to security as a US Senator.

After all, how could we expect Senator Sanders to wear the flag of a country like ours. Senator Sanders denounced America as unjust in a speech he delivered just yesterday evening.

[I]n my view, it would be hard for anyone in this room today to make the case that the United States of America, our great country, a country which all of us love, it would be hard to make the case that we are a just society, or anything resembling a just society today.

In the United States of America today, there is massive injustice in terms of income and wealth inequality. Injustice is rampant. ..

[T]here is no justice when so few have so much and so many have so little.

What would Sanders do if he were present for the playing on the national anthem?

Matthew Continetti tells us that Barack Obama began planning his post-Presidency as far back as February of 2012, right after his reelection, meeting and dining with billionaire hedge fund managers, technology executives, Toni Morrison, and Hollywood director Stephen Spielberg in order to have them assist in “develop[ing] a ‘narrative’ for [the president] in the years after he leaves office.”

Continetti does not envy all the caviar and Haut Brion. In fact, he visualizes Obama’s billionaire-infested planning dinners as using the same caterer who provided the menu for Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962).

I tried to imagine the scene as President Obama sat back in his chair, sipped his first extra-dry Grey Goose martini of the night, and asked this hand-selected group of bold-faced names, seemingly plucked at random from Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential” issue, what he should do with his life. The pomposity, the self-importance, the snide remarks, the raised eyebrows, the sidelong glances, the oblique references to Taos and Nantucket and St. Tropez and Telluride, the mutual self-regard, the flattering small-talk, the knowing head-nods and chin-pulls, the pretentious lips-pursing—all of this combustible vanity squeezed into the pressure-cooker of the residential dining room. It’s a wonder the house didn’t explode.

Because it’s a trick question: conversations about Obama’s future are really cues to celebrate his past. To cheer his accomplishments, list the ways he has changed this country, explain his historical and geopolitical importance, lament the obstacles he’s encountered from recalcitrant conservatives, obstructionist Republicans, nativist, racist, sexist, backward elements of the population, recount how he overcame them, joke about how he deserves a vacation, mention the best courses he has yet to play, ponder the work of social justice and transformation that must still be done, affirm that history is, indeed, on the side of progress.

And this conversation goes on—on and on and on—with digressions into the latest fads in Silicon Valley and the nuttiest invention Khosla can come up with after two Manhattans, with genuflections at the altar of Elon Musk, explications of the markets from Doerr, Lasry, and Hoffman, mysterious oracular pronouncements from Toni Morrison, bird-like regurgitations of the latest Paul Krugman and Fareed Zakaria columns (how envious Fareed must be that he wasn’t invited!), tedious on-the-one-hand-on-the-other lectures from the president on the lead story in the Times, the most recent editorials in the Washington Post, late night comedy he found unfair, clever “This is Sportscenter” commercials, episodes of Game of Thrones and Homeland, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Jordan’s handicap—and with caustic put-downs from Michele, partisan bromides from Longoria, witticisms spiced with anecdotes from academic studies no one besides Gladwell has read, and bottle after bottle of wine, course after course after course of chewy overcooked hard to swallow smugness.

And then, when you’ve grown tired, when the Grenache is making you sleepy, when all you want to do is retire to the Oprah suite at the Ritz Carlton for a dirty movie and shuteye, the president forbids you to leave. You can be one of the most powerful people in the world, manage thousands of employees, but he won’t let you go. You’re stuck! Around midnight, we learn, Reed Hoffman said kindly to President Obama, “Feel free to kick us out.” And the president replied, snidely, “I’ll kick you out when it’s time.” And Hoffman sat down, like a disciplined child, because what could he do—even the cofounder of LinkedIn can’t walk out on the president of the United States. So the conversation went on, according to the Times, “well past 2 a.m.”

Trapped in a room with a collection of pompous and entitled people utterly convinced of their brilliance and moral purity, whose conversation ranges from what’s in this month’s Atlantic to what’s in this week’s Economist, who haven’t been told No in years—and then being informed that there is no escape? This, friends, is the vision of hell that greeted me in Monday’s paper: not of other people but of self-important ones, in a well-appointed house with no exit, eating an organic gluten-free farm-to-table meal and endlessly repeating the conventional wisdom as if they were coming to it for the first time. To look at the plans for Obama’s retirement is not just to see that big-dollar fundraising never stops. It is to peek inside the Bobo abyss, to visit the purgatory of the coastal elite—to enter, in horror, the balsamic inferno.

John Hinderaker explains why Obama’s Nuclear Agreement is a great deal for the Iranians.

[W]hat does Iran get?

First, and most important, it gets in excess of $100 billion in currently-frozen assets. This will happen in the near future, on or about the agreement’s Implementation Date. I think this prospect is what is making Iran’s leaders so jubilant. With that money, they can step up their support for allies in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and their support for terrorism everywhere. (By way of perspective, the entire United States military budget for the current fiscal year is only $560 billion.) To the extent that they spend some of it at home, it will help cement their position domestically.

Second, the agreement grants Iran international legitimacy. Since the revolution of 1979 and the seizure of America’s embassy in Tehran, Iran has been treated as a rogue state. Under the agreement, that status comes to an end. Investment in Iran will be permitted and likely will flourish. Sanctions will be removed and Iran’s nuclear program will not only be tolerated, it will be explicitly recognized and to some degree supported by the international community. The agreement contemplates that upon implementation, “the Iranian nuclear programme will be treated in the same manner as that of any other non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].” It is hard to overstate how important this legitimacy is to the regime.

The third benefit to Iran’s rulers is perhaps the most important, and is closely linked to the first two. The agreement guarantees that, at least for the foreseeable future, the mullahs will remain in power. Realistically, the only way Iran could be denied a nuclear arsenal in the long term is through regime change. Early in the Obama administration, that seemed like a plausible scenario, but the administration declined to aid, or even encourage, anti-regime forces when such support might have made a difference. Now, with the mullahs both flush with cash and blessed with international legitimacy, their grip on power is probably stronger than ever. Nuclear weapons will follow, sooner or later, at a time of the regime’s choosing. And in the meantime, Iran’s ability to make mischief in the Middle East and around the world (e.g., through its newfound alliance with Venezuela) has been greatly enhanced.