This is the kind of thing that explains the stop-Bernie movement in the Democratic Party. Sanders is a Communist, or, best case, a Communist sympathizer. I am so old, I can remember when The Manchurian Candidate was fiction.
The latest comes from NPR. I take it that this is one more instance of the mainstream Democratic Party lining up in lockstep against Sanders. NPR interviewed Alan Gross, who was for five years a political prisoner in Cuba. In 2014–2014! Gross was visited in prison by three senators, Jon Tester, Heidi Heitkamp and Bernie Sanders. This is what happened:
During the one-hour meeting, Sanders told the prisoner that he didn’t understand why others criticized Cuba, Gross said in an interview with NPR.
“He said, quote: ‘I don’t know what’s so wrong with this country,'” Gross recalled.
Gross was wrongfully imprisoned by Castro:
Gross, who now says he opposes Sanders’ campaign for president, was arrested in December 2009 after completing a U.S. Agency for International Development subcontract. He was in Cuba working to expand Internet access to the country’s small Jewish community, beyond the restrictive Internet regulations set by the Castro government.
He spent 1,841 days in detention, during which he lost five teeth and over 100 pounds. He also said his interrogators threatened to pull out his fingernails and to hang him.
“The first year of my captivity was akin to sensory deprivation because I saw about 20 minutes of sunlight during the first year,” Gross said.
The Obama administration and Gross’ advocates said he was wrongfully convicted. He was ultimately released by Cuba in exchange for the U.S. government releasing three Cubans convicted of spying.
None of this bothered Sanders, apparently.
Gross said Heitkamp and Tester brought him a big bag of peanut M&M’s, a memory that Gross remains fond of today because of his undernourishment at the time. Sanders brought an issue of The Atlantic magazine. Gross was also allowed to wear civilian clothes for the visit — a treat because normally he was allowed to wear only prison pajamas.
He said he had a pleasant conversation with Heitkamp and Tester, while Sanders remained mostly quiet for the duration of their one-hour meeting.
“Senator Sanders didn’t really engage much in the conversation,” Gross said.
But near the end, the Vermont senator offered a comment to the detained American, saying he didn’t see what was so wrong with the country.
Gross, as a prisoner in that country, said he took offense to the remark.
No kidding! NPR reached a representative of Heitkamp, who essentially confirmed Gross’s account:
A source close to Heitkamp said the then-North Dakota senator remembered that Sanders seemed to disregard the meeting with Gross and that an uncomfortable exchange occurred, but did not remember the exact remark.
There is a pattern here. Sanders honeymooned in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1988, one year before the Berlin Wall fell and three years before the USSR dissolved. The Russian empire was in its last stages of decomposition, but Bernie returned to the U.S., singing its praises. Similarly, by 2014 Cuba was in desperate straits. Essentially no one was defending Castro’s regime at that point–except Bernie Sanders.
Sanders is a lifelong apologist for the world’s cruelest regimes, and his defense of them has continued more or less to the present. Sanders is either an evil man, or a profoundly stupid one. No wonder the Democratic Party establishment wants to go with Joe Biden, who is undeniably stupid, but, at least arguably, not evil.
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