Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is no fan of President John F. Kennedy, mostly because the 2020 hopeful couldn’t stomach the young president’s fight against communism.
In a recently resurfaced video of a lecture delivered by Sanders in 1986, the socialist from Vermont explained why JFK was far too conservative for his liking, as well as his lifelong obsession with communism.
“But I remember for some reason or another of being very excited when Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba. I was a kid and I remember reading that, and it just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people,” Sanders said.
Sanders recalled sitting in the student lounge of his dorm during the 1960 presidential debate when he “was becoming increasingly interested in politics,” but didn’t know much other than he loved the Cuban Revolution.
Video: @BernieSanders, University of Vermont, 1986, recalls his excitement watching Castro’s revolution “rising up against the ugly rich people.” & his sick feeling watching JFK speak out against communism in Cuba.
Also bashes the @nytimes for lying about communism. pic.twitter.com/OUqzLFbsvz
— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 21, 2019
“And there was Kennedy and Nixon talking about which particular method they should use about destroying the revolution. And I remembered the irony as we learned the history later on,” he said.
“Kennedy was saying Nixon was too soft on communism … in Cuba. We should deal firmly with Fidel Castro. And Nixon was playing the role of, ‘Hey, you’ve got to patient. You know you can’t do these things. You’ve got to negotiate,’” he continued.
“But of course, what he was upset about is that secretly they were planning the Bay of Pigs invasion right then. … So he was the liberal and Kennedy was playing the conservative,” Sanders said.
The situation was moving experience for the young and impressionable Sanders.
“Usually I’m sufficiently unemotional not to be sick, but I actually got up in the room and almost left to puke,” he said. “Because for the first time in my adult life what I was seeing is the Democrats and the Republicans, both of them, and … Kennedy was the flashing young liberal and what we were seeing right before my eyes way, way back then – and I didn’t know anything about politics – but clearly there really wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two.”
The middle-aged Sanders explained in the video, dredged up by The Reagan Battalion last month, that he ultimately blamed the media for manipulating public opinion about Cuba and the Contra scandal in Nicaragua, rather than longstanding foreign policy that “the United States has the right to destroy any government in Latin America that they want.”
“That’s been consistent for 50 or 100 years, there’s nothing new about that. What is new is why, when you read ‘The New York Times,’ the real truth is not being told and how that’s obfuscated,” he said in 1986.
The revelation about fake news, Sanders said, is when “I began to understand that you don’t always hear all the truth.”
In a different video, from 1985, Sanders described how he advised then president Nicaraguan Daniel Ortega about how the media in the United States twists the narrative to suit an agenda. Ortega rose to power during the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, serving as president from 1985 to 1990. He’s now serving another term after he was re-elected in 2007.
.@BernieSanders is a threat to our national security.
In this video he admits on camera that he advised communist murderer Daniel Ortega on how to fight the United States of America https://t.co/dpjn7yVFb0
— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) April 23, 2019
“I was impressed,” Sanders said shortly after visiting the country’s socialist leaders. “The point I tried to make to many of the people I spoke to was they’re getting killed in the American media. They just cannot compete. Reagan and his people are so sophisticated, they own the airwaves.
“Of course, Reagan, the media, every time Reagan gives them a photo opportunity, thousands go ‘thank you Mr. President for telling us another lie,’” he continued. “The media, of course, is not allowed to ask sharp questions of the president. That’s not allowed.
“And, um, you know, my point to Ortega is they are not getting their message on what they’re trying to do out to the American people, there’s just no question about that.”
Fast forward more than 30 years and Sanders is among the front runners in the Democrat primary for president in 2020, a campaign aided in large part by a fawning media that’s obsessively critical of President Trump.
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