His latest fabrication is that he was arrested in the 1970s while attempting to visit and/or free Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa. That story might have been more believable if he had told it before this primary season, but it is absent from any contemporary news article, from any of Joe’s biographical sketches, from any recollection of anybody else (including liberal Democrats who look on Biden with favor), and, as we indicated, even from any of Joe’s own recollections.
This excursion into the flawed memory of the former Senator and Vice President is significant in that it shows that the vast majority of Democratic primary and caucus voters no longer believe “it is Joe’s turn.” The other candidates are as badly flawed. Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly lied about her ethnicity, her children’s attendance in private schools, her own employment history, etc. etc. Pete Buttigieg failed as mayor of South Bend, Indiana and has embellished his record as a JAG officer in Afghanistan. In addition, he worked hand in hand with his father, a Marxist professor who translated and popularized the works of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Amy Klobuchar can’t break out of single digits for the most part; Michael Bloomberg entered the race too late to have run in anything yet, although he has spent hundreds of millions of his own dollars to buy his way into the Nevada debate and a truckload of TV and Facebook ads. His past is at least as colorful and checkered as that of Donald Trump, and Mr. Bloomberg seems intent on repudiating and apologizing for the few things that he did well as mayor of New York City. Tom Steyer also is spending his own money by the carload, but, lacking name-recognition and without any solid achievements of his own, is pretty much a lost cause. The others have either dropped out, suspended their campaigns, or are teetering on the thin edge of electoral irrelevance. Perhaps most of them were hoping for a vice-presidential nod instead.
And that leaves us with Sen. Bernie Sanders. Interesting, isn’t it, that if we had term limits of, say 12 years in the House and 12 more in the Senate, that only the political junkies and consumers of lists in almanacs would have heard about Sen. Sanders or Sen. Biden, who would have hit their pull-by-date five and thirty-five years ago, respectively
Anyway, Sen. Sanders claims to be a Democratic Socialist, and he says that Denmark is his model state. However, he has never gone to the mat to fight for Denmark-style socialism; and Denmark, while a welfare/provider state is a free market democracy, not a socialist republic.
But Sen. Bernie has supported “socialism” during his political career. He was a stout defender of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and that includes all of the excesses of the Ayatollah’s regime, and continues to side with Iran against the United States. Bernie Sanders supported the Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 1980s and since (remember the Ortega Brothers?). He has been a major defender of the Communist Castro regime in Cuba, even to the point of defending the lies that Cuba provides free health care and education to “the masses.” Actually, only to those who sell out to the Communist regime. He defended the Chavez regime in Venezuela (another Communist) and he continues to defend Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, although with less enthusiasm than he defended Chavez. He supports a Palestinian state (socialist, of course), and although of the Jewish faith, Sen. Sanders is no friend of Israel.
It is difficult if not impossible to find a Marxist movement, people’s republic, or Communist state that has NOT been defended by Bernie Sanders, but let’s not forget “the big one,” the Soviet Union, which bankrolled all of the Communist states and movements given above and many more. He infamously took his honeymoon in lovely Yaroslavl, USSR, during the time of Gorbachev’s glasnost, for sure, but Gorby was no friend of freedom or liberty and was an enemy of the United States. Bernie sang the praises of practically everything he came across in the Soviet Union, from its magnificent architecture (universally panned then and now by everyone who opposes monolithic structures built more to augment the leader’s power and to control the population than for artistic purposes) to its over-built, Taj Mahal creations more for the pleasure of western tourists and the party-leaders’ ego than for the people who actually had to use those train and transportation stations; in any event, their construction was limited to the largest cities only and never trickled down to the “masses” in the countryside or smaller cities or towns. He defended the Soviet arts, culture, theatre, even though their purpose was to fortify the party and to subdue all freedom of independent thought (including that on the left) that deviated from the party line. Heavily subsidized, artists completely sold out to the Communist regime. Those who did not either escaped to the West or were imprisoned.
Well, President Carter had little difficulty in opening up a relationship with Castro’s Cuba, and provided little resistance to Cuban aggression in Latin America or Portuguese Africa , and President Obama had no problem standing in front of one of those magnificent buildings emblazoned with murals of Castro and other Marxist leaders, but Sen. Bernie has gone way beyond their actions. He defends tyrannies, dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, gross violators of human rights, deniers of freedom and liberty, and yet pretends he is a “Democratic Socialist” whose role model is Scandinavia. If that were so, he would not be playing footsie with Communist regimes who have nothing at all in common with any Scandinavian country.