Bernie Sanders and me here pictured together in New York City, October 2016
There are a lot of people trying to derail the momentum of Senator and Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders right now. To those ends, there is a lot of rather predictable disinformation regarding Bernie Sanders and what he believes and advocates.This is true even of mainstream media, particularly (but not necessarily restricted to) MSNBC figures like Chuck Todd and the recently departed Chris Matthews. They have only been the most outrageous examples, although there have been some others in otherwise normally respectable news outlets, such as NPR, CNN, and The New York Times.
Frankly, I began to recognize the reality of how slanted and openly biased the major news media could be during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003. I visited Canada a couple of time during that time period, and the one truly crucial question that American media was not asking was being asked there, time and again, and on the major news. Here, the questions were how successful an invasion could be, should it open up with ground forces, or should Americans rely on an aerial assault? How long could we expect the war to last, and would we be welcomed with open arms? In Canada, the most important question of all, which I rarely encountered among American news media, was this: should there be an invasion at all?
It was so transparent, so striking and so blatant, that it really stuck with me. To be sure, there was opposition to the invasion, but it was rare, and when it did happen, those who expressed doubts about the invasion and/or cynicism towards the Bush administration that was aggressively pining for the war, they were often labeled as unpatriotic traitors or cowards or terrorist sympathizers.
Of course, a lot of people, particularly people on the so-called "left" in this country, took a very convenient, politically crafted argument. This was particularly true of prominent politicians with enormous ambitions for their future careers, particularly people like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who expressed caution in the lead-up to the invasion (as opposed to the mindless lust for war by the most fanatical advocates) and who were also critical of the Bush administration's handling of the war once it started. Yet, they voted in favor of war, ultimately, and when they criticized it, they again restricted it to criticism of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and/or Donald Rumsfeld, and were not so bold as to suggest that the war itself was wrong or a huge mistake.
Very inconvenient, but also very slanted. This problem with the disingenuous, intellectually and morally dishonest approach to key issues has only grown more blatant in the years since. After all, anyone who doubts that only has to look at the 2016 election, and how despite his success, the momentum of Bernie Sanders, who drew thousands of people to his rallies regularly and went from a virtual no name candidate to someone who won 23 primaries (including 10 in a row at one point) and had drawn even with her in national polls, just prior to her officially receiving the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Initially, they continued to take this approach for the 2020 race, although even they could not deny how big of a name, and how prominent his position was. Once he won in Iowa, and especially after he emerged victorious in New Hampshire, they had to acknowledge that not only was he a serious candidate, but that, in fact, he was the frontrunner for the Democrats.
Still, they try to taint his image, and claim that he said things or stands for things that he never said, and never stood for. Many claim that his version of socialism is a desire to bring the United States closer politically to Cuba or Venezuela, with some (again, these are supposed self-identified liberals) claiming that there might be execution squads, or comparing supporters and political successes of Sanders with Nazis, as Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews infamously did.
What he actually wants for the United States is to join the family of nations in the developed world who actually do not fail their citizens so blatantly and transparently with this extreme, no holds barred version of capitalism that exists in this country. He wants to abolish "for profit" healthcare, and he is concerned enough about the reality of the science behind climate change that he feels urgent and immediate action is required at this point, and champions the "Green New Deal." He wants a living wage for anyone who works full-time, and he also wants common sense background checks for gun ownership, something that polls reveal a vast majority of Americans favor. And he is not a fan of wars of aggression that make much of the rest of the world suspicious of us, and even often hate us. Perhaps most dangerously for the powers that be, he wants big money out of politics, to end the politics of the elites and end the influence of Wall Street and big corporations on American policy, both foreign and domestic.
So, for a better and more balanced summary of what Bernie Sanders actually stands for, I added this link by BBC News, which gave a fairer summary of what he stands for than you usually see in major American media sources. Please take a look:
Bernie Sanders: 18 things the Democratic front-runner believes by BBC News, 27 February, 2020
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35364868?intlink_from_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Ftopics%2Fc5m8rrkp46dt%2Fus-election-2020&link_location=live-reporting-story&fbclid=IwAR28Eu8JywW99v6xJkrrrkVi7xOS0LPNCH_Aicv7f0nbISN8pCx0_EK3MAc
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