After winning this weekend’s Nevada caucuses, Bernie Sanders has become the Democratic front-runner for their nomination for President. Sanders describes himself as a socialist and proposes to totally do away with the capitalist system. He has proposed increases public spending by over $92 trillion over the next ten years (while only proposing roughly $25 trillion in new revenue to pay for it, as an aside). So the fact that he represents the very left-wing of the Democratic Party is no surprise.
But most people would be very surprised at exactly how radical he really is, and has been for his whole adult life.
Just yesterday, Sanders felt compelled to point out the good that has come from the dictatorship in Cuba, which has killed thousands to stamp out all political opposition. Speaking on the campaign yesterday, Sanders said he opposes authoritarian rule in Cuba, “…but you know, it’s unfair simply to say everything is bad.”
Imagine if someone had said “Yeah, Hitler was bad but you know it’s unfair to say he didn’t do anything good.”
And this isn’t the first time Sanders has spoken favorably about Communist/Socialist dictators. At age 44 and a mayor in Vermont, he asked “We’re spending billions on military. Why can’t we take some of that money to pay for thousands of U.S. children to go to the Soviet Union?”
In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to support the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega. He was filmed at a rally where hundreds of thousands of supporters of the Communist dictator chanted “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,” while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinista government of Ortega was “patriotic.”
But then again, Sanders is a socialist and so supporting socialist/communist governments is at least somewhat consistent with socialist ideology.
As radical as those beliefs are (certainly far out of the mainstream of most Americans), he also has had some….well, some other pretty crazy ideas. The following article from the National Review tracks some of the crazier things he’s done and advocated.
You really have to read it, and then you still may not believe it.
Thinking Man's Politics 