[rad-green] Bernie's Very Welcome Assault on the Amer ican Cliché of Greatness

*https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/27/bernies-very-welcome-assault-our-cliche-greatness
<https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/27/bernies-very-welcome-assault-our-cliche-greatness>Common
Dreams          February 27, 2020Bernie's Very Welcome Assault on Our
Cliché of Greatness*


*Sanders is giving voice to ideas and realities that have long been
declared taboo in American political discourse. One might even call it
historic.by Robert C. Koehler*

[image: Democratic presidential candidates participate the presidential
primary debate at the Charleston Gaillard Center on February 25, 2020 in
Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)]

*Democratic presidential candidates participate the presidential primary
debate at the Charleston Gaillard Center on February 25, 2020 in
Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)*

“Excuse me, occasionally it might be a good idea to be honest about
American foreign policy.”

I don’t think I’ve heard that much honesty from a mainstream-party
presidential candidate in virtually half a century. And suddenly this race
begins to matter in a way that seems like . . . oh my God, a return of
democracy? Suddenly I don’t feel utterly marginalized as a voter, as an
American, left with nothing but cynical despair as I wait to learn which
“lesser evil” the Dems will serve up for me as a candidate.

The words
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/02/26/chile-guatemala-iran-sanders-applauded-highlighting-us-record-overthrowing>
are
those of Bernie Sanders, of course, standing up to the red-baiting the
moderators and some of the other candidates were slinging at him during the
latest debate, trying their best to bring him down.

He went on: “That includes the fact that America has overthrown governments
all over the world — in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran.”

Well, yeah, but . . . we’re still the greatest country on the planet,
right? I get why the corporate media hates Sanders and wants to get rid of
him ASAP. The American political center (as it likes to call itself) has
done a helluva job marginalizing the truth-wielding, anti-war, pro-empathy,
pro-sanity wing of the American population ever since the early ’70s, in
the wake of George McGovern’s shattering defeat by Nixon. Never again! The
taming of the liberal agenda cleared the way for the Reagan domestic
counter-revolution and the U.S. military’s recovery from Vietnam Syndrome
and public distaste for war. But now that all this is settled and endless,
profit-spewing war is quiet background noise . . .

Along comes Bernie Sanders, giving voice to ideas and realities that have
long been declared taboo in American political discourse, certainly at the
level of presidential politics. Could real change — what I like to think of
as evolution — actually start claiming political traction again?

Sanders is leading in the polls and has won the early state caucuses and
primaries, but there’s no telling if he’ll succeed in actually claiming the
Democratic nomination or, my God, defeating the orange-haired one, much
less pushing a progressive, peace- and environment-conscious agenda through
Congress. But this much seems apparent right now: He’s beating — and, I
hope, deconstructing — the centrist media.

These highly paid bouncers are so used to defining the political limits of
the American spectator democracy — i.e., establishing the nature of reality
(it’s a big horse race) — they are ever more contemptuous of someone like
Sanders, not to mention the constituency for whom he speaks. A glaring
example
<https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/chris-matthews-facing-calls-to-resign-for-comparing-sanders-nevada-victory-to-nazi-invasion-of-france>
of
this contempt was Chris Matthews’ idiotic blather on MSNBC last week, in
the wake of Sanders’ big win in the Nevada caucus, managing in a twisted
analogy to compare this victory to the Nazi invasion of France in 1940.

Well, it turns out Matthews hit himself in the head with his own hardball.
His profoundly offensive analogy immediately generated a #FireChrisMatthews
hashtag and he was forced to spew an apology in order to keep his job.

“Senator Sanders,” he said two days later on his show “Hardball,” “I’m sorry
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/msnbcs-chris-matthews-apologizes-to-bernie-sanders-for-nazi-analogy-saying-senator-sanders-im-sorry>
for
comparing anything from that tragic era in which so many suffered,
especially the Jewish people, to an elected result in which you were a
well-deserved winner. This is going to be a hard-fought, heated campaign of
ideas.”

The apology was accepted by the Sanders campaign, whose manager said “we
hope to get fairer coverage going forward.” And maybe they actually will!
But what’s worth pondering for a moment is the atmosphere behind the scenes
at MSNBC, and throughout the corporate media, prior to Matthews’ remark.
Sanders had relatives murdered in the Holocaust, for God’s sake, but how
could such a stupid comment form in a pundit’s consciousness as a
newsworthy observation about any candidate’s victory? The anti-Sanders, and
therefore anti-progressive, atmosphere at MSNBC must have been wide open
and uncontained.

And indeed, consider one of the primary lines of attack on Sanders, the
democratic socialist, by the corporate media: red-baiting.

Red-baiting is a throwback to the unrestrained Cold War era, in the early
’50s — the McCarthy era, the HUAC era — when a grotesquely hypocritical
moral righteousness gained sufficient governmental power to limit
Americans’ freedom of speech and thought by poisoning certain political
positions with the label “communist.” Has this era returned?

Sanders has been lambasted recently for such sins as saying something good
about Fidel Castro
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/02/24/bernie-sanders-gets-criticized-praising-aspects-castros-cuba/4856499002/>,
telling Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes”: “It’s unfair to simply say
everything is bad. When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he
did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though
Fidel Castro did it?” Pundits have been trying desperately to tear Sanders
to shreds over this outrage (and seem to have no memory of the mob-linked
Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban leader overthrown by the Castro revolution).

The media has also made a point of reporting that Sanders has been briefed
by U.S. intelligence that the Russians
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/02/21/bernie-sanders-told-russia-helping-presidential-campaign-report/4835049002/>
are
attempting to help his campaign, seemingly because he’s the candidate least
likely to defeat Trump. While the briefing occurred over a month ago, it
only became news, reported by the Washington Post, the day before the
Nevada caucus. Sanders’ response: “I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants
to be president. My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American
elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”

And then there was the *New York Times*, throwing such poison seeds
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/us/politics/bernie-sanders.html> into
the wind as “his support for the Sandinistas” — as though there weren’t
legitimate reasons to support them and extreme controversy during the
Reagan years about U.S. support for the anti-Sandinista rebels in
Nicaragua, known as the contras. And in the same paragraph, the Times seems
to summon the ghost of Joseph McCarthy, informing America that Sanders had
a “honeymoon in the Soviet Union.”

Can you imagine electing a president so arrogant he actually claims the
right to think for himself and challenge U.S. foreign policy, past and
present? A president who honeymooned under the Soviet moon?

As the media is pointing out, the cliché we deeply cherish — we’re good,
they’re bad — is under assault in 2020.
<https://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-c-koehler>

Robert Koehler <http://www.commondreams.org/author/robert-c-koehler> is an
award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer.
His new book, *Courage Grows Strong at the Wound
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/055771754X?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim> *is now
available. Contact him at [email protected] or visit his website at
commonwonders.com.

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