Bernie Trashes Trump Over Russia, Fails to Mention His Own Honeymoon Was in USSR
President Donald Trump’s press conference with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Helsinki sent the political world into a tizzy Monday.
The reaction ranged from mild criticism by some Republicans to sharp rebukes by NeverTrumpers to cries of “treason” and apparent calls for a military coup by Democrats.
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont chimed in with his own denunciation on Twitter.
The septuagenarian senator said he wondered what the millions of Americans who have “risked their lives to defend democracy” would think about the president’s “pathetic performance” in Finland.
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
It’s interesting to see someone who once called for a 50 percent reduction in defense spending invoking the “brave men and women” in the U.S. military to score a political point.
It’s also interesting that the self-described “democratic socialist” failed to mention the fact that many of those Americans who risked their lives were fighting a similar ideology.
Another thing that’s interesting in light of Sanders’ outrage over Trump’s supposedly too-friendly relationship with Russia’s leader: The Vermont senator chose to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union.
That’s right. Instead of heading to Paris or Hawaii, the newlywed Bernie and Jane Sanders traveled to the city of Yaroslavl, 160 miles easy of Moscow, and spent the first days of their marriage surrounded by (fellow?) Communists.
This was in 1988 during the final years of the Cold War.
George Will ripped Sanders for the move in a 2015 column about the death of Robert Conquest, who wrote about the atrocities of Soviet prisons.
“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,” Will wrote. “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.”
Of course hypocrisy isn’t a new thing for the senator.
He’s a millionaire in the top 1 percent of income earners who spends much of his time railing against the wealthy.
He owns three homes but frequently rants about the lack of affordable housing.
Still, if there’s one person who probably shouldn’t be throwing rocks at others for being too cozy with Russia, it’s Bernie Sanders.
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