Bernie in 1985 video: Defending Castro, admitting he helped pro-Soviet Sandanistas with PR strategies

Your next president, America:

When you hear Bernie defending the likes of Castro and Ortega back in the day, it’s tempting to defend him on the grounds that much of the devastation that’s now history hadn’t happened yet. I want to protect you against that temptation, so I’ll take you through a little history.

First Cuba: At the time Bernie made these statements, the Cuban Missile Crisis was more than 20 years in the past. This, of course, was the moment when the U.S. and Soviet Union came the closest we ever got to nuclear war, and it all started because Castro agreed to let the Soviets install missiles in his country that were pointed at American cities.

Whatever else you might not like about JFK, credit him for staring the Soviets down and implementing a blockade of Cuba that ultimately forced the Soviets to remove the missiles. What that incident established beyond any doubt was that Castro was an enemy of the United States. He was not merely a different cat ideologically. He was an enemy. He was not only prepared to help the Soviet Union install offensive weapons that could have wiped us out . . . he did it.

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This is the guy Bernie was defending because he “gave them free health care” or whatever. As to the larger idea that the Cuban people loved life under Castro despite the dastardly propaganda of the Reagan Administration, I think the Mariel Boatlift and various other incidents are sufficient to deal with that claim. Life in Cuba is misery for all but the political elite, and it’s been that way since long before socialist nutcase Bernie Sanders gave this interview.

(If Rob wants to chime in about Castro’s attempt to murder his father-in-law, well, that one’s always a treat.)

Now, about Nicaragua: Sadly, the triumph of democracy that saw Daniel Ortega ousted in 1990 didn’t last, and the communist thug has done a pretty nice job, since returning to power in 2006, of turning Nicaragua into a close approximation of Venezuela. Anyone could have seen this coming in the 1980s when Ortega was busily establishing a Soviet beachhead at the behest of his masters in Moscow.

The Reagan Administration’s support for the Contra rebels was one of the most contentious foreign policy issues of the 1980s, with America-hating Democrats like John Kerry and David Bonior standing in solidarity with Ortega and doing everything they could to make sure the Contras never got any U.S. support.

It was one of the most disgraceful displays by a group of U.S. politicians in history, and Bernie Sanders was right there with them. It was typical of pro-Soviet leftists in those days to deride Reagan as you hear Sanders doing here, and to make the absurd suggestion that the press was in the tank for Reagan at the expense of the “gentle” socialists they loved, like Castro and Ortega.

Just in case you’re not old enough to remember: The press was not as insane in its opposition to Reagan as it is to Trump, but they were just as opposed to him. Make no mistake about that. The press detested Reagan. For Bernie Sanders to have suggested otherwise in 1985 shows exactly how out of his mind he was.

And he’s clearly learned nothing since then. He’s as determined as he’s ever been in his advocacy of socialism, even as we see the devastation at the hands of the very regimes he’s pimped for all these years.

I don’t think there’s a large chance Bernie Sanders will be our next president, but there’s a greater-than-zero chance. And the Democratic Party treats the guy as if his ideas are mainstream and perfectly plausible as U.S. policy. You should know the implications of how he thinks, and you should know that he’s thought this way for a long time.

Now you do.