It still comes as a shock to most people that Bernie Sanders is still in the race. He started off seen as kind of a joke candidate — surely he wouldn’t win the nomination; after all, it was Hillary’s to claim, right? Add in the fact that he’s a cranky curmudgeon who is an open socialist, and it seemed that there was no way he could win. Yet here we are. And this is despite the fact that he has no real grasp on the actual issues. Following his disastrous interview with the New York Daily News, that was made even more clear. And at the New York Daily News, James Kirchick has had a revelation: Bernie Sanders is your stoner college roommate, all grown up and yet still railing against “the man”.

Remember that guy who lived in your college dorm, always wore a Che Guevara t-shirt, and ranted about “the system?” That’s basically Bernie Sanders.

… Take Sanders’ signature issue: wealth inequality. Despite railing endlessly on the stump about how American corporations are “destroying the national fabric,” Sanders was unable to name even three American businesses guilty of that grave charge. Similarly, while bemoaning how no Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for supposed crimes that sparked the financial crisis of 2008, he could not name any legal statute that they violated.

When it comes to how exactly he plans to “break up” the big banks, Sanders responded with Trumpian vagueness. Saying you’ll recruit “some people who know a lot about this” is apparently the democratic socialist analogue to “We’ll hire the best people.”

Given that he supports closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and also believes that Islamist terrorists should be subject to the criminal justice system, what would he do with captured ISIS commanders? “I haven’t thought about it a whole lot.”

Asked to clarify his panegyrics to “fair trade,” Sanders replied “what fair trade means to say that it is fair. It is roughly equivalent to the wages and environmental standards in the United States.” If you want to pay $5,000 for that shiny new iPhone, Bernie Sanders is your guy!

Sanders is like a wind-up doll spouting out reliable, populist platitudes — “Millionaries and billionaires,” “the top tenth of the top 1%,” “rigged economy” — that his audiences of debt-strapped, ignorant Millennials applaud like trained seals.

But ask him a real question? Nine times out of 10, the wind-up doll has no answer.

When Sanders did occasionally muster coherent answers to questions, he was usually wrong. Exploring the policy realm where he is weakest, foreign affairs, Sanders was mostly clueless. He did, however, expose his prejudices when he asserted that “over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza” during Hamas’ 2014 war against Israel. Reliable estimates put the number of dead people at less than a quarter of that grossly exaggerated figure — 2,100, of whom 1,462 were civilians.

… Bernie Sanders is not the “conscience” of the Left. He’s more like the Sarah Palin of the Left: clueless, but embodying its cultural preferences and giving voice to its prejudices. Whereas Palin was the godfearin’, plainspeakin’ “hockey mom,” Bernie is a righteously angry agitator.

In short, Bernie Sanders is your typical liberal: completely clueless, but full of ideas on how things “should” be because the world isn’t fair, and that needs to change.

Of course, there’s a difference between Bernie Sanders and other liberal politicians. Hillary Clinton, for example, has at least held a job before entering politics. So did her husband. Sanders, though, never made a paycheck until he turned 40 and stumbled his way onto the political scene, somehow brainwashing the people of Burlington, Vermont into voting for an agitator who wrote rape fantasies for leftist rags.

This man is literally your stoner college roommate who graduated and then moved right into his mom’s basement, yelling about the establishment being out to get us and yet with absolutely no clue whatsoever how the world actually works. The only difference between Bernie Sanders and your stoner college roommate is that Bernie Sanders could potentially be making policy decisions that affect the entire country, and not just the kingdom of Mom’s Basement. Talk about a scary thought.