Sanders, Redbaiting and the ‘Denouncing’ Double Standard

[flamingdem]

-- snip

http://fair.org/home/sanders-redbaiting-and-the-denouncing-double-standard/

A handful of Clinton partisans jumped at the chance to paint Sanders as a far-left loony who likes to cozy up to “dictators.” Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of the media’s most reliable Clinton boosters, jumped right in, linking to a recent Daily Beast piece by Michael Moynihan, former senior editor of libertarian Reason magazine and current Vice/Bank of America talkshow host, who did a rundown of Sanders’ dreaded leftist past. Suddenly, a topic Marcotte had never once tweeted about, or expressed any public concern for, was of utmost importance and needed to be brought to the forefront of public discourse.

The Daily Beast’s Jonathan Alter followed suit, tweeting out after Sanders praised Cuban healthcare, “Bernie a lefty sucker for Cuban line on healthcare. If he got sick there, he’d medevac out. And where’s his concern for human rights there?” Alter’s concern about “human rights” was hard to discern when he wrote “Time to Think About Torture” for Newsweek in November 2001, imploring liberals to consider the practice so long as it didn’t involve “cattle prods or rubber hoses.” In his almost 6,000 tweets, this is the first time Alter’s employed the words “human rights.” Like Marcotte, such urgent liberal principles only seem to pop up when it serves their preferred candidate’s talking points.

A third such instance again involved the Daily Beast, which published “Hey, Bernie, Don’t Lecture Me About Socialism,” by Garry Kasparov. Kasparov, chair of the dubious Human Rights Foundation, is the author of the subtly titled book, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. In his piece, the famous chess player-cum-neocon offered up some warmed-over capitalist bromides:

And that while inequality is a huge problem, the best way to increase everyone’s share of pie is to make the pie bigger, not to dismantle the bakery…. A society that relies too heavily on redistributing wealth eventually runs out of wealth to redistribute. The historical record is clear. It’s capitalism that brought billions of people out of poverty in the 20th century. It’s socialism that enslaved them and impoverished them.

It’s no surprise the Daily Beast would be ground zero for Sanders red-baiting; this is, after all, the publication that claimed communist Cuban troops had been deployed to Syria based entirely on one spurious Fox News report, and despite numerous requests from FAIR to do so, refused to correct this error. There’s something almost charming about the Daily Beast’s crusading Cold War posture in 2016, or at least there would be if it didn’t serve as fodder for Clinton partisans to offer tacit apologies for Reagan’s right-wing death squads.

[ucrdem]

1. It was Jorge Ramos who made a huge f'ing deal about Fidel Castro.

I'd never noticed it before but Ramos is kind of a winger, at least when it comes to Clinton. He made a huge big deal about Benghazi too and got booed for it.

[flamingdem]

6. That seemed overwrought, like Ramos wants to be taken seriously by

bringing up Benghazi. Maybe more guest appearances on Fox? On the plus side Ramos is pushing a voter registration drive for Latinos, goal 3 million. He wants to get back at Trumpito.

[cantbeserious]

2. The Establishment Is Apoplectic About Bernie - No Tactic Or Smear Is Too Low Or Malicious

eom

[flamingdem]

7. Redbaiting is passe

and dates the one talking as McCarthyesque at this point.

[jillan]

3. The funny thing about all this is that the people

That show up to Bernie's rallies are not reading the daily beast Lol

[Bluenorthwest]

4. Hillary supporter Al Franken on Reagan in Latin America:

"Now, the Gipper wasn’t the kind of president who saw terrorism just in terms of black and white. No, Reagan distinguished between good terrorists and bad terrorists. He loved his terrorist death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, and most of all, Nicaragua. Enough to violate the Constitution to support the Contras as they raped and tortured nuns. Bad terrorists, on the other hand, were those who used terror irresponsibly. See, Reagan saw the shades of gray, where a less nuanced politician may have only seen unmitigated evil."

That's from his book 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them' and of course back then he was selling books so he might not have meant it. Now he is for Fracking and claims the Reagans were about to cure AIDS when the dementia thwarted their research efforts. Whatever.

[Cheese Sandwich]

5. "Such a double standard shows not a concern for human rights...

Such a double standard shows not a concern for human rights, but for weaponizing liberal sympathies: namely, the idea of human rights, used to muddy the waters and ultimately promote America’s imperial ends. It is an almost 90-year-long tradition—and one on full, depressing display in the latest round of Sanders red-baiting.

From the linked piece.