A lot of people were up in arms over President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, including Sen. Bernie Sanders. The socialist senator slammed the summit on Twitter, pondering what the “millions of […] brave men and women” who gave their lives defending America’s democracy would think of Trump’s “pathetic performance” in Helsinki.
Millions of Americans have risked their lives to defend our democracy. What would those brave men and women think if they saw President Trump’s pathetic performance today?
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 16, 2018
First, Sanders has no business invoking our troops to score political points; he called for a 50 percent reduction in defense spending during his 2016 campaign. Second, Sanders has apparently pivoted 180 degrees on Russia, considering he chose to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
In 1988, during the final years of the Cold War, Bernie and Jane Sanders spent their first days as newlyweds in the city of Yaroslavl, 160 miles northeast of Moscow. As George Will wrote in a 2015 column about the death of Robert Conquest, at the time of Sanders’s honeymoon “gulags still functioned” and political prisoners were still “being tortured in psychiatric ‘hospitals'”:
Conquest lived to see a current U.S. presidential candidate, a senator, who had chosen, surely as an ideological gesture, to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gulags still functioned, probably including some of the “cold Auschwitzes” in Siberia, described in Conquest’s “Kolyma.” The honeymooner did not mind that in 1988 political prisoners were — as may still be the case — being tortured in psychiatric “hospitals.” Thanks to the unblinking honesty of people like Conquest, the Soviet Union now is such a receding memory that Bernie Sanders’s moral obtuseness — the obverse of Conquest’s character — is considered an amusing eccentricity.
Clearly, Sanders has no room to accuse Trump of cozying up to Russia when, once upon a time, he likely wished America were more like Russia. To this day, Sanders lauds communist countries: in 2011, he said that “the American dream is more apt to be realized in […] Venezuela.” In 2017, he praised Cuba’s health care and education system despite their wrecked economy.
Of course, Sanders is also a known hypocrite. Despite vilifying the wealthy, he’s a millionaire in the top 1 percent of income earners. Despite railing against college debt, Jane Sanders wracked up so much debt as president of Vermont’s Burlington College that the school was forced to close. Despite championing affordable housing, he owns three homes, including a $600,000 summer home on one of Vermont’s Lake Champlain Islands.
Sanders is a wealthy commie who’s never been keen on foreign policy. He should know better than to throw stones at Trump for trying to fix America’s diplomatic relationship with Russia.
Source: Western Journal
