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When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/28/when-bernie-sanders-thought-castro-and-the-sandinistas-could-teach-america-a-lesson.html
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As mayor of Burlington, Sanders praised the regimes of Nicaragua and Cuba—claiming bread lines were a sign of economic health and press censorship was necessary in wartime.
After the ISIS-orchestrated bloodbath in Paris last November, CBS News informed the three Democratic presidential candidates that a forthcoming debate it was hosting would be shifting focus from domestic to foreign policy.
It seemed like an uncontroversial decision. But it was enough to send Bernie Sanders’s campaign into paroxysms of panic. During a conference call with debate organizers, one Sanders surrogate launched into a “heated” and “bizarre” protest, complaining that CBS was trying to “change the terms of the debate…on the day of the debate,” according to a Yahoo News source.
Still, the clamor from Bernie’s camp wasn’t that bizarre. Bernie understands that the frisson Sanderistas audiences experience isn’t activated by conversations about the Iran nuclear deal. No, Sanders disciples are slain in the spirit by repeated-ad-infinitum sermons about billionaires twisting mustaches, adjusting monocles, and jealously guarding their “rigged system.” It was this message that vaulted Sanders from the mayor’s office to Congress and into the Senate. But foreign-policy questions, The New York Times noted, had a habit of pushing him “out of his comfort zone.”
(More in link)
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This is serious vetting time...NOW...not later if he happens to win the nomination.
He uses a whole lot of revisionism to explain votes from the past, and likely he will do so with some of his strange foreign policy positions and his fascination with socialist dictators, too. It will be hard for him to color over the fact that he seemed quite at ease with the loss of civil liberties at the time, though.
He "opposed the Iraq war" in one vote and then turned right around and fully funded in the next. Inconsistencies abound with his "moral judgment" back in the '80's and in the new millennium.
A weird palette of questions, sure, but when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he answered “yes” to all of them. Hidden on spools of microfilm, buried in muffled and grainy videos of press conferences and public appearances, Mayor Sanders enumerated detailed—and radical—foreign-policy positions and explained his brand of socialism. (If you find foreign-policy debates tedious, feel free to ask Sanders if he still believes that “the basic truth of politics is primarily class struggle”; that “democracy means public ownership of the major means of production”; or that “both the Democratic and Republican parties represent the ruling class.”)
No wonder the Rove group put out those anti Hillary ads. Pretty clear Sanders would be the weaker opponent.
