When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson

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 thefrisson Sanderistas audiences experience isn’t activated by conversations about the Iran nuclear deal. No, Sanders disciples are slain in the spirit by repeated-ad-infinitumsermons 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.”

So here we are: The candidate accused of not caring about foreign policy was the same politico who, years ago, was routinely accused of preferring foreign affairs to the tedium of negotiating overtime pay with the local firefighter’s union. Indeed, after he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders turned the town into a fantasy foreign-policy camp. In his 1997 memoir, Outsider in the House, he asked, “how many cities of 40,000 [like Burlington] have a foreign policy? Well, we did.”

What were the policies and ideas that animated his small-town internationalism? In a recent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Sanders was asked about a comment he made in 1974 calling for the CIA’s abolition. He qualified, hedged, and offered a potted history of CIA meddling in the affairs of sovereign countries, all while arguing half-heartedly that his views had long-since evolved toward pragmatism.

If CNN can ambush Sanders by reaching back to 1974 and his not-entirely-unreasonable criticism of the CIA, perhaps another enterprising television journalist will ask the candidate-of-consistency one of the following questions:

— Do you think that American foreign policy gives people cancer?

— Do you think a state of war—be it against the Vietnamese communists, Nicaraguan anti-communists, or al Qaeda’s Islamists—justifies the curtailment of press freedoms?

— Do you stand by your qualified-but-fulsome praise of the totalitarian regime in Cuba? Do you stand by your unqualified-and-fulsome praise of the totalitarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua?

— Do you believe that bread lines are a sign of economic health?

— Do you think the Reagan administration was engaged in the funding and commissioning of terrorism?

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.”)

In the 1980s, any Bernie Sanders event or interview inevitably wended toward a denunciation of Washington’s Central America policy, typically punctuated with a full-throated defense of the dictatorship in Nicaragua. As one sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991, Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.” Reflecting on a Potemkin tour of revolutionary Nicaragua he took in 1985, Sanders marveled that he was, “believe it or not, the highest ranking American official” to attend a parade celebrating the Sandinista seizure of power.

It’s quite easy to believe, actually,... (read the rest at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/28/when-bernie-sanders-thought-castro-and-the-sandinistas-could-teach-america-a-lesson.html?via=desktop&source=twitter)