“We’re losing our damn minds!.. (Bernie Sanders) has never been a Democrat. He's an ideologue." (James Carville, Feb. 7)
"The issue of this campaign. It is that word, socialism…Those of us like me, who grew up in the Cold War, and saw some aspects of it after visiting places like Vietnam, like I have, and seeing countries like Cuba, being there, I've seen what socialism is like and I don't like it. Okay. It's not only not free. It doesn't frickin' work." (MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Feb.8.)
Let’s give Sanders some credit. He’s holding up a mirror to his fellow Democrats and saying: take a look! Because in praising one of the bloodiest (per-capita) and most disastrous forms of socialism known to history, many mainstream Democrat standard-bearers are in prefect lockstep with Bernie Sanders. To wit:
“Everybody was totally convinced that Castro was the worst guy in the world and all of the Cuban people were going to rise up in rebellion against Fidel Castro. They forgot that he educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society.” (Candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination Bernie Sanders)
But Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has many, MANY Democrat precursors in this department. To wit:
“Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education…We greeted each other as old friends.” (Former President of the United States and official “Elder Statesman” of the Democrat Party, Jimmy Carter)
“Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, I frankly like him and regard him as a friend.” (Democrat presidential candidate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and “Conscience of the Democrat party” George McGovern)
“Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” (Two-time candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination Jesse Jackson, bellowing while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself in 1984)
“Countries like Cuba or Canada or Russia or a lot of places in this world spend half what we spend per capita and they got better health outcomes than we do.” (Deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Keith Ellison)
“Medical care–the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to that of the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That’s a huge achievement. They should be congratulated!” (Democrat U.S. President Barack Obama)
And lest anyone think Obama was blustering empty campaign rhetoric, he proved the veracity of his praise for the sh*thole level, sub-Third-World health-care in Stalinist Cuba by actually putting his pen where his mouth was:
“The US Department of Health and Human Services (under Obama) and the Cuban government on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding to encourage cooperation between the two countries on health matters…Cuba has made significant contributions to health and science,” HHS Secretary (under Obama) Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in a statement. “This new collaboration is a historic opportunity for two nations to build on each other’s knowledge and experience, and benefit biomedical research and public health at large.”
For details of the utter disaster known as Cuban healthcare please see here.
For the swinishness and propaganda-mastery that has so many people duped about it, please see here.
Next, let's look at John F. Kennedy, nowadays harked-back-upon by many as a “sensible” even “conservative” Democrat. Well here he was parroting a Fidel Castro/KGB concocted transcript of outrageous lies practically word for word:
“I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. (Democrat U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Oct 24, 1963.)
(Please note: bandwidth constraints preclude listing all the Democrat lawmakers and Democrat-affiliated celebrities who have visited/lavished praise on the Stalinist mass-murderers Fidel and Raul Castro. So the sampling above consists only of those Democrat figures who at one time represented (or craved to represent) the Democrat Party as a whole, and were taken seriously by the leadership of the Democrat party–thus buttressing the gist of this post’s title.)
Interestingly, for sheer absurdness, it’s Democrat Kennedy’s propaganda meme above that takes the cake. He was describing a nation (pre-Castro Cuba) with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western Hemisphere, the 13th lowest infant-mortality on earth and a huge influx of immigrants. Furthermore, in 1959 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 per cent the island’s GNP, and. U.S. owned companies employed only 7 per cent of Cuba’s work force.
Early in the Cuban revolution, for instance, Czech economist Radoslav Selucky visited Cuba and was rudely awakened: “We thought Cuba was underdeveloped except for a few sugar refineries,” he wrote when he got home to Prague. “This is false. Almost a quarter of Cuba's labor force was employed in industry where the salaries were equal to those in the U.S.”
A hapless Soledad O’Brien sure didn’t see it coming when she heard some of these (thoroughly-documented) propaganda refutations on MSNBC. Her face says it all.