Bernie praised Venezuela. I mean, why give it so much praise and love if he isn't a socialist/communist?
And now that Venezuela has failed he just kinda shrugs and ignores questions about it. Typical scumbag socialist like you. lol
The words attributed to Sanders are traceable to a single online source:
an articleposted on his official website on 5 August, 2011 in the ‘Newsroom’ section and categorised as a ‘Must Read.’ It is entitled “Close the Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America,” and, as the link below the headline indicates, it originally appeared in the 4 August edition of
Valley News, a New England regional newspaper. The link to the
Valley News website now goes to a downed ‘404’ page, but an
archived version shows the article as it appeared on the site. No by-line exists and the author of the article is unclear.
So did Sanders write it? This mystery was resolved with a single email to the
Valley News Editorial Board. An editor named Ernie Kohlsaat replied:
The Aug. 4, 2011, piece you are referring to, headlined “Close the Gaps: Disparities That Threaten America,” was an editorial, not a news article. It was written by a member of the Valley News Editorial Board and as such reflects the opinion of the newspaper. The version on Sen. Sanders’ website appears to be an accurate rendition of the editorial as published on Page A8 of the Valley News on that date.
Sanders’s critics would doubtless reply that cross-posting the article without clarification or caveat amounts to an endorsement. But an endorsement of what? The article is not about Venezuela or Bolivarianism (or Equador or Argentina, for that matter) but American inequalities, poverty, and lack of opportunities. The “Gaps that Threaten America” are domestic inequality, ‘the wealth gap,’ ‘the jobs gap,’ and racial disparities in property ownership. The only mention of Venezuela in the 600 word editorial comes in the endlessly circulated final two lines. It ought to be obvious to fair-minded people that, in the context of the article, this final rhetorical flourish was intended to shame America for failing to live up to its promise.
As would-be shaming attempts go, this one is obviously absurd. By 2011, the idea that Venezuela was any kind of land of opportunity was already a significant departure from reality. In 1931, James Truslow Adams offered this widely accepted
definition of the American Dream as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” A cursory examination of Venezuela’s domestic affairs in 2011
would have shown that this was not a remotely accurate description of the situation there.
There is no record of Sanders sponsoring or co-sponsoring any symbolic motion which praises the “achievements” or policies of Hugo Chavez, or (quite notably for Sanders) any resolutions condemning US foreign policy towards Venezuela. In fact, the opposite can be inferred from an
August 12th 2004 open letter in support of Chavez which bore the signatures of Rev. Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, and U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich. The name of Bernie Sanders, then a U.S. Representative known for his lifelong left-wing anti-establishment politics, is made conspicuous by its absence.
Either way, what makes Sanders unusual among American radicals – from Noam Chomsky and
The Nation magazine to almost every left-wing intellectual and journal of thought – is that he has never uttered a kind word for the cargo cult of Hugo Chavez. The more strange then, that he has been accused, convicted, and tarred-and-feathered on precisely that charge
All taken from this article.
https://quillette.com/2018/03/10/sanders-venezuela-meme/
