Circling the Wagons

As members of the Democratic Party, we are known as “the bleeding hearts” or “the liberals” or any number of other derogatory names. Some of our behaviors have also led to our being called “the Party of Political Correctness” or “the Smarty Party”.

One of our behaviors is to turn on each other after every loss. This last election, we successfully (sort of) defended the Party against a Democratic Socialist (of sorts). In a long summary of obvious MORE long hours of research, Loretta Wallace summarized her own take on how our media ignored facts about Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and how that helped some politically active people, but hurt others.

Loretta Wallace (Facebook)
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TO ALL MY BERNIE SUPPORTER FRIENDS BOTH NEW AND OLD, AT THE RISK OF CREATING HARD FEELINGS

I have recently declined numerous new FB friend requests from Bernie supporters spouting continued rabid vitriol on their walls, up to and including Photoshopped meme images of Hillary as a literal living and breathing shape-shifting monster. I don’t know whether these individuals know any of what follows about Bernie or simply choose to ignore it as Trumps supporters chose to ignore the facts about him. I have personally never been into hero worship and blind adoration of anyone. We are all are human hence we are all flawed. It is not my intent to try to burst your bubble but your guy was not a savior and certainly not the saint and hero many believe him to be and by the same token, neither was Hillary. Bernie had little to no chance of securing the win in the general election due to his deeply controversial personal and professional resume which follows only in part but there are those die hard supporters proposing he run again in 2020, claiming he would surely win in a landslide against a Trump second term……no, he wouldn’t.
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I repeatedly hear and read “Bernie would have won” or “we told you so” or “Bernie was ahead of Trump in the polls”.
First of all, the polls changed almost daily. Bernies “yuge lead” in the polls against Trump was way back in April/May/June, months before the general election. All through the summer after her convention, Hillary was way ahead of Trump in the polls, by as much as 12 points, but that lead eventually evaporated. Neither Bernies or Hillarys “lead” in the polls would have and did not stand up in the end, no polls ever do. Mature, seasoned voters and lifelong followers of the political process understand and accept this.
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Secondly, Bernie was never VETTED during the primary. The GOP had/has a dossier on Bernie as long as your arm and would have taken him down in 2 weeks with it. Everything from the fact his father was a member of the Communist party in Poland to Bernies lifelong association with members of the Communist party. No, I am not talking “Democratic Socialists” or Socialists, I am talking bona fide Communists. (Google Kurt Stand and Leslie Cagan et al). Bernie spoke alongside Leslie Cagan on stage (a verified Communist and a self described “red baby” raised in a Communist household). Bernie headed the American People’s History Society, an organ for Marxist propaganda. There, he produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as “America’s greatest Marxist.”.
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Sanders hung a Russian flag in his office as mayor of Burlington, Vt., while he invited East German Communist party members to visit him at the height of the Cold War. One of the more interesting members to visit Bernie REGULARLY in Vermont was KURT STAND who had belonged to the Young Workers Liberation League, the youth arm of the Communist Party USA and a former Communist spy for the Soviet Union’s KGB, East German Stasi (DDR), and then the ‘new’ Russia’s FSB (CIS). Bernie’s buddy Stand was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage, attempted espionage, and illegally obtaining national defense documents. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison in 1998 and released in 2012 for supposed terminal health reasons, which he recovered from shortly after being released.
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Where is Kurt Stand now? Stand reunited with Bernie after his release from prison and campaigned hard for Bernie for president in 2016 in Communist/Marxist circles. While the devoted majority of Bernie supporters whose own politics lean far left might not find issue with his personal and professional association with members of the Communist party, moderate Dems across America would likely have found issue with it.
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To add to the above issues, in 1963 Sanders visited Israel as a guest of the Israeli Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist Marxist-Stalinist youth movement founded by Communist Ya’akov Hazan, who called the Soviet Union a second homeland and eulogized Stalin as “the great leader and extolled commander”. During his stay in Israel, Sanders stayed at the movements affiliated kibbutz, Sha’ar Ha’amakim,, founded in 1935 during Stalin’s reign. The kibbutz viewed the USSR as a model society worthy of adoption. During the primary, Sanders campaign TURNED AWAY REPEATED QUERIES about his Israel stay.
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In 1985, Bernie traveled to Nicaragua to stand with Socialist, Marxist and Communist dignitaries from Eastern Block countries in Europe to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Marxist Sandinista regime and later created a sister city partnership between Managua and Burlington, Vermont. Upon his return, Sanders said that he was “impressed” with the “intelligence and sincerity” of Daniel Ortega and other Sandinista leaders, arguing that they were not the “political hacks” some had portrayed them to be. While admittedly, the Sandinistas enjoyed mixed reviews from various factions in the USA due to their Soviet support, they did overthrow a nasty dictatorship.
The fact is, Sanders was the sole US “dignitary” (mayor of Vermont) to join in the celebration sitting in special seats near the podium to hear Ortega speak.
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In 1989, he and Jane traveled to Cuba on a research trip, 30 years after the end of the Cuban Revolution. He tried to meet with Fidel Castro, dictator of Cuba, whom he praised but was denied a meeting. He commented on a now widely available video: “In 1959 […] everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world and all of the Cuban people were going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro,” said Sanders. “They forgot that he educated their kids, gave their kids healthcare, totally transformed the society.” Needless to say, the vast majority of Florida’s Cuban immigrant voters who fled Castros oppressive regime would have had issues with Bernies continued praise and respect for Castro.
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Moving away from his political affiliations, there was the subject of his numerous essays written for underground newspapers, in one of which he cited studies claiming that cervical cancer could be caused by psychological factors such as unresolved hostility toward one’s mother, a tendency to bury aggression beneath a “facade of pleasantness” and “having too few orgasms”. “Sexual adjustment seemed to be very poor in those with cancer of the cervix,” Bernie wrote. I personally dealt with cervical cancer when I was 32 years old and let me assure you……
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Another of his essays espoused his belief that toddlers should be allowed to play naked in the home and “explore each other genitals so they do not grow up sexually repressed”. Another essay suggested that girls at the age of 16 were already 3 years into their sexual prime and should disregard the will of their parents and “give their love to their boyfriends”. This was before readily available birth control. I guess to hell with the repercussions of unprotected teen sex, huh, as long as the raging hormone teen boys get their jollies?
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The fact is, the majority of Bernies essays obsessed on controversial sexual issues which many mainstream Americans would have found highly objectionable. I really, truly, honestly personally don’t care what his affiliations with the Communist party were/are or his seemingly obsessive controversial theories on sex but stand firm in my contention that the majority of Dem voters would have been opposed to them and him in a general election.
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Another claim by Bernie supporters is that he spent his whole life working for “the people”. By his own admission, he never voted in his entire life until he was almost 40 years old and that was for the express purpose of voting for himself for mayor. He also in fact, never really held a full time job or collected a steady paycheck until his 40s when he was elected to mayor by a mere 10 votes.
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Previous to that, he existed by writing his newspaper essays for $15-$30 a pop while living in a dirt floor former maple sugar shack in Vermont, often without electricity. He used to run an extension cord from his maple sugar shack to a neighbors basement for power. His ability to buy this first “home” was due to a small inheritance from the death of his father and living off his wife’s personal finances and had nothing to do with his own efforts to earn a living. This first wife left him after only 18 months, not willing to deal with the sugar shack squalor lifestyle he offered her. When asked to comment during the campaign, she declined.
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During the primary, Bernie touted and promised many truly wonderful things for the American people: free college, single payer universal health care and more, all of which we all want and deserve. Unfortunately Bernie knew full well that his plan for free college was pie-in-the-sky because it relied on 1/3rd financial support from each states governors, 30 of whom are REPUBLICANS. Yeah, right, like the GOP governor of Michigan who won’t fork over money for new pipes in Flint to protect the children from lead poisoning is going to allocate free college funds for his states students at the request of their new Democratic Socialist president. That and Congress has been threatening to repeal the ACA for 6 years but as soon as Bernie took office they would suddenly flip and go far left and approve single payer universal health care? Yeah right. The typical rebuttal argument you get is “but all other civilized countries have universal health care and free college”. Very true but those countries are not a group of UNITED STATES each with their own governors and legislators who are majority GOP. Unless these programs can be implemented and paid for without any involvement by the individual state GOP leaders, quite sadly, it will never happen.
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When Bernie was confronted by Chris Matthews on MSNBC about the college funding issue, his response was “those governors and Congress people will have to look out their windows and see the millions in the streets demanding it and those protestors will threaten to go to other states who have free college tuition”. Once again, those millions of protests would fall on deaf GOP ears. But Bernie continued on with this platform which fell on the hopes and fears of many first time young voters with little to no experience with the process. They needed help with their college debt and they did not research any further into the logistics of how it could happen. They believed Bernie.
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Some of his staunch supporters may ask for proof of all this, “links please”, I say, please do your own research as I took the extensive time to do. Before the primary election even commenced, I expressed dismay at Hillarys stance on fracking, GMOs, the Middle East and several other issues important to me. I mentioned this to a Bernie supporter friend who pointed me in his direction. Upon first reading his platform, I decided he was definitely “my guy” but the researcher in me prompted me to delve further and once I discovered all of the above and more, I decided, in the end, to support Hillary because I believed Bernie didn’t have a snowballs chance in hell after the GOP would have gotten through with him.
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Amazing isn’t it that we never heard him dragged through the mud in any way all through the primary? That was not coincidental but instead intentional by the GOP, they were “hands off” laying in wait for Bernie to beat Hillary and then they would pounce with their “dirt” on him insuring a GOP win. They never got the chance and so they continued on their 32 year smear campaign against Hillary crowning it with the cherry on the top FBI renewed e-mail investigation just 11 days before the election not to mention Hillarys child porn ring headquartered in a DC pizza shop basement (um, by the way, that pizza shop does not have a basement, but I digress). That is not even taking into account the 90+ ill fated enemies, friends and co-workers that Hill and Bill put murder contracts out on. Seems Bernie and the Orange One somehow escaped their wrath. I personally know many Bernie supporters who actually listened to and believed this and much of the other GOP/Fox News/Alex Jones/Breitbart “damning truths” about Hillary.
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PLEASE, I am not into heated, vitriolic debate about this. I am only passing on this easily researched information for those that may not be aware of it and who continue to believe that Bernie was pure as the driven snow and would have beaten Trump. Choose to ignore it if you wish. If you disagree, please just move on, I am not going to change my mind with continued debate and neither are you. Caustic nasty remarks and personal insults will be promptly deleted.