I was thinking about Sanders this morning and listening to CNN commentators about him, and I had some thoughts. Several compared Sanders to Trump and commented about the positive aspects of this - him standing toe to toe with Trump on debate stage, being equally forceful, and all that jazz. There's probably some validity to that, but I think it's exposing some serious flaws with Sanders. Look, it's easy to be the guy who talks really loud or forceful, never backs down, and so on. We all probably know that guy. But do you really like that guy? Being that guy was one of the first things that made me dislike Trump the candidate before his policies really came out. Sanders has been in politics for a long while being the voice that never changes (and often isn't really concerned with the details). Consistency can be good, but he's got away with a lot of crap because he's never been the frontrunner before. Well now, guess what buddy. You're the front runner. You can't say stuff like in interviews like we can't nickel and dime things as a way to put off a legitimate question and actually tell the world in the interview how many trillions or tens of trillions or dollars your plans will cost.
Then there's the Cuba stuff from Cooper's interview. I'm sure to many liberals it's not a big deal. I was trying to think of an analogy as to why this is beyond just a misused sound bite, and I came up with it this morning. His statements reminds me a lot of Trump's statements in Charlottesville. There's good people on both sides. Well, sure, the neo-nazis protesting probably do some good things. They probably look after their ailing grandmother or donate money to cancer research or whatnot. But when you're the president or reasonably close to being one, you can't say that. And it's more than just it looks bad. Cuba's regime was evil and not just evil but evil in a way that is very applicable to a government - they were authoritarian - the overall most evil goverment type there is. Bernie took some dumb or naive perspectives back in the day. Instead of taking a step back now and saying, look, this government which imprisoned/killed dissidents is bad full stop, he said, oh i condemn the killing but at least they now can read better...amirite? He doubled down. It just screams Trump to me, and again, he no longer has the luxury of being just a voice of his socialist perspectives. He's running for president. Of course, I may be totally wrong. This may be where all US politics is leading and it may not matter. But it should.