US Presidential Contenders

[Buster's Uncle]

Benito Mussolini: Donald [Sleezebag] Retweets Quote From Italian Dictator

[Sleezebag] on Sunday retweeted an account that attributed Mussolini's quote, "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep," to the GOP candidate. Gawker said they created the account.

https://www.facebook.com/topic/Benito-Mussolini/107465109283314?source=whfrt&position=1&trqid=6256427325118320923

[binTravkin]

I just read Bernie's love story with commies this morning.
Hillary is the better candidate of those two.
She is incompetent & corrupt, but not insane.

My two cents on [Sleezebag]:
He's won the "crazies" of GOP.
Ok, that's like 1/4 to 1/3.
Still 2/3+ to go to even get close he needs to have 1/2 of U.S. votes.
If I was betting, I'd bet [Sleezebag] is to GOP what Corbyn is to Labour - Finita La Comedia.

[Buster's Uncle]

Got a link for that first?

[Buster's Uncle]

And hey - I don't necessarily mean for that to sound adversarial - I'd like to read about 'Bernie's love story with commies' for myself.

[binTravkin]

Sure.

As mayor of Burlington, Sanders praised the regimes of Nicaragua and Cuba—claiming bread lines were a sign of economic health

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/28/when-bernie-sanders-thought-castro-and-the-sandinistas-could-teach-america-a-lesson.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Thanks.

Sanders keeps his Judaism in the background, irking US Jews
Associated Press
By RACHEL ZOLL and JOSEF FEDERMAN  1 hour ago



In this Feb. 8, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., smiles as he greats attendees during a campaign stop at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H. As Sanders headed toward victory in New Hampshire, pundits noted the barrier he was about to break: Sanders would become the first Jewish candidate to win a major party presidential primary. But since he won that night, instead of the burst of communal pride that usually accompanies such milestones, the response from American Jews has been muted. One reason: The Vermont senator, the candidate who has come closer than any other Jew to being a major party presidential nominee, has mostly avoided discussing his Judaism. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)



NEW YORK (AP) — As Bernie Sanders headed toward victory in New Hampshire, observers noted the barrier he was about to break: Sanders would become the first Jewish candidate to win a major party presidential primary.

But instead of the burst of communal pride that usually accompanies such milestones, the response from American Jews has been muted. One reason: The Vermont senator, the candidate who has come closer than any other Jew to being a major party presidential nominee, has mostly avoided discussing his Judaism.

Sanders won't identify the Israeli kibbutz where he briefly volunteered in the 1960s. When reporters found the kibbutz, Sha'ar Ha'amakim in northern Israel, he wouldn't comment.

In New Hampshire, he described himself as "the son of a Polish immigrant," not a Jewish one. At a Democratic debate, he spoke of the historic nature of "somebody with my background" seeking the presidency, but didn't say "Jewish." A recent headline in the liberal Jewish Daily Forward newspaper read, "We Need To Out Bernie Sanders as a Jew — For His Own Good."

Rabbi James Glazier of Temple Sinai, in South Burlington, Vermont, said Sanders' comments were being discussed by fellow rabbis in the liberal Reform movement. "What did he leave out there? He didn't say 'Jewish Polish' immigrant. Reform rabbis have picked up on this big time."

Sanders' lack of religious observance is not what rankles. Many Jews identify "culturally" instead of religiously with the faith.

But unlike some other prominent non-observant Jews, Sanders, during more than three decades as a mayor, congressman and U.S. senator, has developed few relationships with Jewish groups or leaders on religious issues or on Israel. He has supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but has not made Israel in a priority.

"I would say that he has never been one of those in Congress who was active in a Jewish caucus, who turned out for Israel, who was involved in those issues — and he still isn't," said Jonathan Sarna, an expert in American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

Ironically, when Sanders gave his most religiously focused campaign speech, he underscored his distance from Judaism. It was last fall at Liberty University, the evangelical school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Virginia, and Sanders addressed the school on Rosh Hashana, or the Jewish New Year.

Discussing his beliefs in the speech, he said he was "motivated by a vision" for social justice "which exists in all of the great religions." Later, he attended a local Rosh Hashana gathering.

The Sanders campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Sanders has said the Holocaust wiped out much of his father's family in Poland. As a child in Brooklyn, Sanders went to Hebrew school and had a bar mitzvah.

"Being Jewish is very important to us," his brother, Larry, said in an interview. "There was no problem of debate, it was just a given in our lives, just as being Americans was a given in our lives. But Bernard is not particularly religious. He doesn't go to synagogue often. I think he probably goes to synagogue only for weddings and funerals, rather than to pray."

In his secular-leaning home state, Sanders was rarely called on to discuss his faith. In 1988, he married his second wife, Jane, who was raised Roman Catholic.

He has been facing increasing challenges about his support for Israel.

At a 2014 Vermont event, after the war started between Israel and Palestinian Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza, some voters demanded Sanders do more to protest Israeli bombing. The war killed more than 2,200 Palestinians in Gaza, including hundreds of civilians, and 73 people on the Israeli side.

Sanders said Israel "overreacted" with the intensity of its attacks, and he called the bombing of U.N. schools "terribly, terribly wrong." But he also criticized Hamas for launching rockets into Israel. Israel has said Hamas is responsible for civilian casualties, since it carried out numerous attacks from residential areas in Gaza.

"I believe in a two-state solution, where Israel has the right to exist in security at the same time the Palestinians have a state of their own," Sanders said.

Despite Sanders' reticence about discussing his Jewish roots, his religious identity is clear, Sarna said.

"I think it is very much a statement about America that someone who everybody knows is of Jewish background and has a Jewish name and sounds Jewish from Brooklyn can get several delegates," Sarna said. "There is a sense that only in America could a Bernie Sanders be a candidate."

____

AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll reported from New York, and Josef Federman from Jerusalem. Aron Heller in Jerusalem and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/sanders-keeps-judaism-background-irking-us-jews-162516509.html


Not exactly a shock that he's Jewish, but the first mention I've seen.  I sorta like that no one I've read thought it worth mentioning...

[binTravkin]

Btw the Mussolini quote thing is seriously dumb.
There is nothing wrong with agreeing to quote that is agreeable.
E.g. if Hitler said "Work is the main venue of success", would me retweeting it make me a Nazi?
Mussolini might as well be quoting someone else in all those quotes.

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't pretend to even think the Fame-[prostitute] is a worthy adult member of the human race, and was taking a cheap-shot.  I admit it freely.  He's a joke, and him falling for that one -and declining to walk it back when caught- is funny.


Fair is fair, and here's the article bin linked:

When Bernie Sanders Thought Castro and the Sandinistas Could Teach America a Lesson
The Daily Beast
Michael Moynihan  02.28.16 12:01 AM ET



Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast



As mayor of Burlington, Sanders praised the regimes of Nicaragua and Cuba—claiming bread lines were a sign of economic health and press censorship was necessary in wartime.

After the ISIS-orchestrated bloodbath in Paris last November, CBS News informed the three Democratic presidential candidates that a forthcoming debate it was hosting would be shifting focus from domestic to foreign policy.

It seemed like an uncontroversial decision. But it was enough to send Bernie Sanders’s campaign into paroxysms of panic. During a conference call with debate organizers, one Sanders surrogate launched into a “heated” and “bizarre” protest, complaining that CBS was trying to “change the terms of the debate…on the day of the debate,” according to a Yahoo News source.

Still, the clamor from Bernie’s camp wasn’t that bizarre. Bernie understands that the frisson Sanderistas audiences experience isn’t activated by conversations about the Iran nuclear deal. No, Sanders disciples are slain in the spirit by repeated-ad-infinitum sermons about billionaires twisting mustaches, adjusting monocles, and jealously guarding their “rigged system.” It was this message that vaulted Sanders from the mayor’s office to Congress and into the Senate. But foreign-policy questions, The New York Times noted, had a habit of pushing him “out of his comfort zone.”

So here we are: The candidate accused of not caring about foreign policy was the same politico who, years ago, was routinely accused of preferring foreign affairs to the tedium of negotiating overtime pay with the local firefighter’s union. Indeed, after he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders turned the town into a fantasy foreign-policy camp. In his 1997 memoir, Outsider in the House, he asked, “how many cities of 40,000 [like Burlington] have a foreign policy? Well, we did.”

What were the policies and ideas that animated his small-town internationalism? In a recent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Sanders was asked about a comment he made in 1974 calling for the CIA’s abolition. He qualified, hedged, and offered a potted history of CIA meddling in the affairs of sovereign countries, all while arguing half-heartedly that his views had long-since evolved toward pragmatism.

If CNN can ambush Sanders by reaching back to 1974 and his not-entirely-unreasonable criticism of the CIA, perhaps another enterprising television journalist will ask the candidate-of-consistency one of the following questions:


— Do you think that American foreign policy gives people cancer?


— Do you think a state of war—be it against the Vietnamese communists, Nicaraguan anti-communists, or al Qaeda’s Islamists—justifies the curtailment of press freedoms?


— Do you stand by your qualified-but-fulsome praise of the totalitarian regime in Cuba? Do you stand by your unqualified-and-fulsome praise of the totalitarian Sandinista regime in Nicaragua?


— Do you believe that bread lines are a sign of economic health?


— Do you think the Reagan administration was engaged in the funding and commissioning of terrorism?


A weird palette of questions, sure, but when Sanders was mayor of Burlington, he answered “yes” to all of them. Hidden on spools of microfilm, buried in muffled and grainy videos of press conferences and public appearances, Mayor Sanders enumerated detailed—and radical—foreign-policy positions and explained his brand of socialism. (If you find foreign-policy debates tedious, feel free to ask Sanders if he still believes that “the basic truth of politics is primarily class struggle”; that “democracy means public ownership of the major means of production”; or that “both the Democratic and Republican parties represent the ruling class.”)

In the 1980s, any Bernie Sanders event or interview inevitably wended toward a denunciation of Washington’s Central America policy, typically punctuated with a full-throated defense of the dictatorship in Nicaragua. As one sympathetic biographer wrote in 1991, Sanders “probably has done more than any other elected politician in the country to actively support the Sandinistas and their revolution.” Reflecting on a Potemkin tour of revolutionary Nicaragua he took in 1985, Sanders marveled that he was, “believe it or not, the highest ranking American official” to attend a parade celebrating the Sandinista seizure of power.

It’s quite easy to believe, actually, when one wonders what elected American official would knowingly join a group of largely unelected officials of various “fraternal” Soviet dictatorships while, just a few feet away, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega bellows into a microphone that the United States is governed by a criminal band of terrorists.

None of this bothered Sanders, though, because he largely shared Ortega’s worldview. While opposition to Reagan’s policy in Central America—including indefensible decisions like the mining of Managua harbor—was common amongst mainstream Democrats, it was rare to find outright support for the Soviet-funded, Cuban-trained Sandinistas. Indeed, Congress’s vote to cut off administration funding of the anti-Sandinista Contra guerrillas precipitated the Iran-Contra scandal.

But despite its aversion to elections, brutal suppression of dissent, hideous mistreatment of indigenous Nicaraguans, and rejection of basic democratic norms, Sanders thought Managua’s Marxist-Leninist clique had much to teach Burlington: “Vermont could set an example to the rest of the nation similar to the type of example Nicaragua is setting for the rest of Latin America.”

The lesson Sanders saw in Nicaragua could have been plagiarized from an editorial in Barricada, the oafish Sandinista propaganda organ. “Is [the Sandinistas’] crime that they have built new health clinics, schools, and distributed land to the peasants? Is their crime that they have given equal rights to women? Or that they are moving forward to wipe out illiteracy? No, their crime in Mr. Reagan’s eyes and the eyes of the corporations and billionaires that determine American foreign policy is that they have refused to be a puppet and banana republic to American corporate interests.”

But Sanders was mistaking aspirational Sandinista propaganda for quantifiable Sandinista achievement. None of it was true, but it overlaid nicely on top of his own political views. Sanders’s almost evangelical belief in “the revolution” led him from extreme credulity to occasional fits of extreme paranoia.

For instance, in 1987 Sanders hosted Sandinista politician Nora Astorga in Burlington, a woman notorious for a Mata Hari-like guerilla operation that successfully lured Gen. Reynaldo Perez-Vega, a high-ranking figure in the Somoza dictatorship, to her apartment with promises of sex. Perez-Vega’s body was later recovered wrapped in a Sandinista flag, his throat slit by his kidnappers. When Astorga died in 1988 from cervical cancer, Sanders took the occasion to publicly praise Astorga as “a very, very beautiful woman” and a “very vital and beautiful woman,” positing that American foreign policy might have given her cancer. “I have my own feelings about what causes cancer, and the psychosomatic aspects of cancer,” he said. “One wonders if the war didn’t claim another victim; a person who couldn’t deal with the tremendous grief and suffering in her own country.”

(Sanders often lurched toward conspiracy theory to make banal historical events conform to an ideological narrative. He argued that Ronald Reagan was as Manchurian president created by millionaires who run corporations: “Some millionaires in California said ‘Ron, we want you to work for us. We want you to become governor.’ They sat around a table. A dozen millionaires. They made him governor. And then they made him president. And he did his job effectively for those corporations.”)

The conflict in Nicaragua exacerbated Sanders’s more extreme positions. He asked a group of University of Vermont students to consider how “we deal with Nicaragua, which is in many ways Vietnam, except it’s worse. It’s more gross.” His answer was to raise money and civilian materiel for the revolution, establish a sister city program in Nicaragua, and act as a mouthpiece for the Sandinista government.

The local Vermont journalist corps, with whom Sanders had an extraordinarily contentious relationship, occasionally questioned Sanders on Nicaragua’s increasingly dictatorial drift.

In 1985 Sanders traveled to New York City to meet with Ortega just weeks after Nicaragua imposed a “state of emergency” that resulted in mass arrests of regime critics and the shuttering of opposition newspapers and magazines. While liberal critics of Reagan’s Nicaraguan policy rounded on the Sandinistas (talk-show host Phil Donahue told Ortega that his actions looked “fascist”), Sanders refused to condemn the decision. He was “not an expert in Nicaragua” and “not a Nicaraguan,” he said during a press conference. “Am I aware enough of all the details of what is going on in Nicaragua to say ‘you have reacted too strongly?’ I don’t know…” But of course he did know, later saying that the Sandinistas’ brutal crackdown “makes sense to me.”

What “made sense” to Sanders was the Sandinistas’ war against La Prensa, a daily newspaper whose vigorous opposition to the Somoza dictatorship quickly transformed into vigorous opposition of the dictatorship that replaced it. When challenged on the Sandinistas’ incessant censorship, Sanders had a disturbing stock answer: Nicaragua was at war with counterrevolutionary forces, funded by the United States, and wartime occasionally necessitated undemocratic measures. (The Sandinista state censor Nelba Blandon offered a more succinct answer: “They [La Prensa] accused us of suppressing freedom of expression. This was a lie and we could not let them publish it.”)

To underscore his point, Sanders would usually indulge in counterfactual whataboutism: “If we look at our own history, I would ask American citizens to go back to World War II. Does anyone seriously think that President Roosevelt or the United States government [would have] allowed the American Nazi Party the right to demonstrate, or to get on radio and to say this is the way you should go about killing American citizens?” (It’s perhaps worth pointing out that La Prensa never printed tutorials on how to kill Nicaraguans. And it’s also worth pointing out that in 1991, Sanders complained of the “massive censorship of dissent, criticism, debate” by the United States government during the Gulf War.)

Or how about the Reagan counterfactual: “What would President Reagan do if buildings were being bombed? If hospitals were being bombed? If people in our own country were being killed? Do you think President Reagan would say, ‘of course we want the people who are killing our children to get up on radio and explain to the citizens of the country how they are going to kill more of our people?’”

Or perhaps Abraham Lincoln can convince you: “How many of you remember what happened in the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s feeling about how you have to fight that war? And how much tolerance there was in this country, during that war, for people who were not sympathetic to the Union cause?”

While Freedom House and Amnesty International agitated on behalf of La Prensa, Sanders was making excuses for the government that censored its articles, prevented it from buying newsprint, harassed its staffers, and arrested its journalists. “The point is,” he argued, “in American history the opposition press talking about how you could kill your own people and overthrow your own government was never allowed…Never allowed to exist.”

The Burlington Free Press mocked Sanders for playing the role of internationalista dupe and lampooned him for expressing, after just a brief, government-guided tour of Nicaragua, “such approval of the Sandinistas on the basis of what was at best a cursory inspection,” an instinct that “says more about his naïveté in the foreign policy field than anything else.”

Sanders countered that he was free to quiz real Nicaraguans on their political allegiances, but they “laughed” when he asked which party they backed because “of course they are with the government.” When asked about the food shortages provoked by the Sandinistas’ voodoo economic policy, Sanders claimed that bread lines were a sign of a healthy economy, suggesting an equitable distribution of wealth: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.” When asked about Nicaragua’s notoriously brutal treatment of the Miskito Indians, the Free Press noted that Sanders “attempted to cut off” the line of questioning. (Ted Kennedy called the Sandinistas’ crimes against the indigenous Miskitos “unconscionable,” “intolerable,” and “disturbing,” commenting that they were relocated at gunpoint to “forced-labor camps which resemble concentration camps.”)

Through the Mayor’s Council on the Arts, Sanders tried to bring some revolutionary third-worldism to Vermont when he funded cable-access television that showed “films from Cuba [and] daily television fare from Nicaragua.” At a press conference, Sanders highlighted the grants that allowed the importation of “films produced in Nicaragua, that appear on Nicaraguan [state] television, on Channel 15. We have films from Cuba on Channel 15.”

Ah, yes, let us not forget the democratic socialist Shangri-La in Havana. In 1989 Sanders traveled to Cuba on a trip organized by the Center for Cuban Studies, a pro-Castro group based in New York, hoping to come away with a “balanced” picture of the communist dictatorship. The late, legendary Vermont journalist Peter Freyne sighed that Sanders “came back singing the praises of Fidel Castro.”

“I think there is tremendous ignorance in this country as to what is going on in Cuba,” Sanders told The Burlington Free Press before he left. It’s a country with “deficiencies,” he acknowledged, but one that has made “enormous progress” in “improving the lives of poor people and working people.” When he returned to Burlington, Sanders excitedly reported that Cuba had “solved some very important problems” like hunger and homelessness. “I did not see a hungry child. I did not see any homeless people,” he told the Free Press. “Cuba today not only has free healthcare but very high quality healthcare.”

Sanders had a hunch that Cubans actually appreciated living in a one-party state. “The people we met had an almost religious affection for [Fidel Castro]. The revolution there is far deep and more profound than I understood it to be. It really is a revolution in terms of values.” It was a conclusion he had come to long before visiting the country. Years earlier Sanders said something similar during a press conference: “You know, not to say Fidel Castro and Cuba are perfect—they are certainly not—but just because Ronald Reagan dislikes these people does not mean to say the people in these nations feel the same.”

There is, of course, a mechanism to measure the levels of popular content amongst the campesinos. Perhaps it’s too much to expect a democratic socialist to be familiar with the free election, a democratic nicety the Cuban government hasn’t availed itself of during its almost 60 years in power.

But Sanders has long been attracted to socialist countries that eschewed democracy. He recalled “being very excited when Fidel Castro made a revolution in Cuba” in 1959. “It just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against a lot of ugly rich people.” In an interview with The Progressive, almost 30 years later, Sanders was still expressing admiration for the Cuban dictatorship: “And what about Cuba? It’s not a perfect society, I grant, but there aren’t children there going hungry. It’s been more successful than almost any other developing country in providing health care for its people. And the Cuban revolution is only 30 years old. It may get even better.”

During his tenure as mayor, Burlington established sister-city programs in Nicaragua and the Soviet Union, and tried—and failed—to create one in Cuba.

By the 1980s, certain elements of the radical left were still defending the honor of the Cuban revolution. But few had kind words for the Soviet Union, with most political pilgrims having long since wandered to Cuba, Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. And Sanders too was routinely critical of the Kremlin, criticizing the invasion of Afghanistan and acknowledging the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union, while still managing a bit of socialist fraternity, praising Moscow for constructing the “cleanest, most effective mass transit system I have ever seen in my life…you wait 15 seconds in rush hour between trains.” He was “impressed” by the state-run youth programs “which go far beyond what we do for young people in this country.”

Sanders has long claimed to be a “democratic socialist”—the type of lefty who loves Sweden, but is offended by the totalitarian socialism that dominated during the Cold War—but he has long employed the tepid language of “imperfection” when discussing the criminal failures of undemocratic socialism. Totalitarians with unfriendly politics are correctly met with derision and thundering demands for extradition and prosecution. So Sanders succinctly described the Chilean murderer, torturer, and destroyer of democracy Augusto Pinochet as a “mass murderer, torturer, and destroyer of democracy.” And Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos is rightly tagged as a “crook and murderer.”

Perhaps at this point I don’t need to point out that Fidel Castro is likewise a crook and a murderer. Or that Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega, while achieving none of the milestones Bernie Sanders once claimed he had achieved, stole enormous amounts of money from the Nicaraguan people and was, to name just one example, behind the infamous bombing at La Penca which killed seven people (including three journalists).

So to my fellow journalists: the next one of you who gets caught in one of Sanders’s riffs about the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh, ask him one of my questions. Ask him how consistent he has been on foreign policy. And help him answer a question posed by a Burlington Free Press journalist in 1985, who wondered if his useful idiot trip to Nicaragua would come back to haunt him in a future race.

“The answer is ‘probably.’ But I’ll be damned if I know how.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/28/when-bernie-sanders-thought-castro-and-the-sandinistas-could-teach-america-a-lesson.html

---

Not to dismiss it as a hit piece, but I note that it's trying to re-fight the murky business in Nicaragua in the 80's -and someone correct me if I'm wrong that the Sandinistas eventually surrendered power peacefully following a democratic election- and while I don't know enough to quibble with any of the assertions of fact, the tone, far from pretending objectivity, is so deeply hostile as to demand being taken with a grain of salt.

TL;DR: Sanders Has radical past  -Now that's journalism!

[binTravkin]

If we qualified or dismissed all arguments by their tone, the best ones would never be heard and we would be left with misguided opinions.


This is the worst lineup I remember.
In dems you have a dumb puppet vs Corbyn-look-a-like (I suspect Corbyn to be a puppet too).
In GOP you have a cluster[intercourse]of "dumb and dumber" won by the very predictable winner - yard bully made mafia tycoon.

It's as if every sensible candidate realized it's not in their best interests to run and skipped.

The real question is thus - why are the sensible people skipping it and when this ends?

Btw, I was once a fan of Obama too.
His foreign policy is such a disaster, it will undo any domestic good deeds he might have.

[Buster's Uncle]

I find Mr. Sanders to have the non-trivial virtue of not being Mrs. Clinton - not a lot of choices there.  Nobody on the right even meets minimum qualifications unless Kasich pulls off a miracle, and I'm used, after 33 years as a voter, to settling for the lesser of two evils and turning out to lodge my protest vote.

You're British, aren't you?  -You keep bringing up Corbyn.

I was pointing at Bakrama in 2007 and talking about emperors sans trousers - I'd hoped he was what his fanboyz imagined after all, but I pointedly stayed home last time around, which is very much not my habit.  Trying to please all sides has pleased none.

[binTravkin]

No, I'm Latvian.

What are the important policy differences between Obama and Sanders?

I understand there are little if any in foreign policy - it is going to be same sad story of withdrawal?

Not being someone can not be a virtue.
Only being someone can.
Otherwise you are running from a known evil into unknown one.

[binTravkin]

Found this handy tool.
Looks like Bernie is mostly the same as Obama:
http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/compare/1-35/Barack-Obama-vs-Bernie-Sanders

Except, in some key areas he is worse.

Support & expand free trade: Strongly Disagree

Avoid foreign entanglements: Strongly Agree

[Buster's Uncle]

I can't make heads nor tails of your politics.

I'm intrigued to hear someone on another continent being down on a US candidate for being isolationist - though I imagine it makes more sense coming from a European than most places in the world.  -We didn't screw up there nearly so bad as pretty much all the foreign interventions since 1945 that have made us so beloved around the world...

I'm less of a lefty than left-leaning and don't like the right's style at all.  Sanders --- I don't know if he'd actually make a GOOD president, but Clinton's in the pocket of the bossmen and the Republicans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the bossmen (the Pig IS the bossmen), so I'm running out of choices, there.  Thing is, Sanders isn't going to win and I'm going to have to support Clinton in the end - but I'm making my protest heard well in advance, because if Sanders ain't the guy, some of the positions he represents (not that NO free trade thing) advocating for the poor and the working people, deserve to do well until the Right Guy comes along.

Isolationism is a bad idea to be sure - but this nation has been STUPID abroad for a very long time and needs to get in the habit of SMART before we send in the marines...

-You're making me explain base assumptions I hadn't considered in so many words, and I like that.  That kind of challenging makes for good political conversation, and is a learning experience.  Thanks.

[binTravkin]

I can't make heads nor tails of your politics.

Because I'm not really talking politics.
Regarding policies there are things that work and ones that don't. And plentiful evidence.
E.g. free market works.
Better than anything else by a margin that, when drawn the "else" part looks like the actual margin, rest being the difference between free market and them.
People who oppose free market are delusional.

Regarding people there are things that stick and ones that don't.
I suppose if somebody is corrupt, it's for life.
Similarly, I'm really skeptical that somebody can be a delusional commie or a liar/agent and then "straighten up".
There just aren't that many precedents in history of these things happening.

I also expect [Sleezebag] to "suddenly" become significantly more rational if/once he is in the post.

For Hillary, I expect her actions to at least be explainable by lobbying of certain groups.
Including many of her campaign policies going "poof" same way as for [Sleezebag], once elected.
She does not seem to be delusional, just working along the rules of a puppet.

I'm intrigued to hear someone on another continent being down on a US candidate for being isolationist - though I imagine it makes more sense coming from a European than most places in the world.  -We didn't screw up there nearly so bad as pretty much all the foreign interventions since 1945 that have made us so beloved around the world...

People in U.S. seem to have kind of "we screwed up" syndrome.
What is the rational basis of this feeling of screw up?
U.S. has spent last 70 years creating a global system for its own safety which, by proxy has disabled wars in many other places, thus also propelling economic development, enabling freer, more interconnected markets as well as removing many obstacles for development, including, but not limited to collapse of soviet union and significant difficulties to many other regressive regimes.
How can this be described a screw up?

Screw up is now, when the likes of Obama and Sanders are either doing or proposing to dismantle all this immense work with immense benefits to humanity and civilization in the name of some irrational feeling of guilt.
We already see how that works in Ukraine, Syria and other places.
More people have died in Syria because of U.S. non-intervention that there could be victims of U.S. intervention.
Probably by an order of magnitude.
And I'm not talking about misplaced people and massive economic devastation.

I'm less of a lefty than left-leaning and don't like the right's style at all.  Sanders --- I don't know if he'd actually make a GOOD president, but Clinton's in the pocket of the bossmen and the Republicans are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the bossmen (the Pig IS the bossmen), so I'm running out of choices, there.

Talking about bossmen.
Do you think Sanders was really so stupid as to say all that bat[poop]about commie regimes or was he in pocket?
Both choices are bad, one invalidates your argument vs Clinton, not that I like her either.

Thing is, Sanders isn't going to win and I'm going to have to support Clinton in the end - but I'm making my protest heard well in advance, because if Sanders ain't the guy, some of the positions he represents (not that NO free trade thing) advocating for the poor and the working people, deserve to do well until the Right Guy comes along.

The advocating for the poor and working people is a slippery slope.
Many of commie regimes were/are also nominally advocating for the poor and working.
Two of the most powerful got into power this way.
And then proceeded to make everyone poor, until removed/reformed.
There are only so few things you can do in this direction that do not take away from something else, possibly with long term implications.
See tax burden in welfare states.

Isolationism is a bad idea to be sure - but this nation has been STUPID abroad for a very long time and needs to get in the habit of SMART before we send in the marines...

You are talking stupid vs pure evil.
I pick a stupid marine vs marauding robber regime like so many in the places "opposed to US" any time of the day.
Clinton's corruption is nothing compared to what you get when "stupid marine" leaves.


Btw, Iraq is cited as prime example of being stupid abroad.
My opinion, which is partly borrowed from people much smarter on the topic is that Hussein had to be disposed of 1991.
That would solve ISIS, since ISIS is mostly Hussein's former troops + some cream on top.
What was screwed up in Iraq was not the military action or the fact it took place, but:
1. It was too late. Significant radicalisation under Saddam had already happened.
2. The administration post invasion blew in a major way, in particular, by disbanding the Iraqi army, which was still more secular than general population.

You're welcome.

[binTravkin]

More on the "stupid marine" vs "local actors".
Just think of all the conflict zones in last 10 years and try to filter out those where, you being a citizen there, you would choose "local actors" vs "stupid marine".
E.g. for Syria, I'd say 80%+ people would choose the "stupid marine" vs chemical-gassing, cluster-bombing Assad and his friends, Russia, Iran & ISIS.