Shalala, Death Squad Supporters and Dems Target Bernie Sanders' Foreign Policy

Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Miami) hits Bernie Sanders
for foreign policy stand focusing on democracy,
human rights, diplomacy and peace. (Twitter)

No surprise to read Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Miami) is extolling the virtues of United States intervention in South America and Central America, and trying to blast Bernie Sanders in light of Sanders' expressed hesitation to invade Venezuela and his lifelong work for peace and human rights.

Shalala is hyping the newest invade-now-everyone-wants-to piece in Slate Magazine.

Shalala was never an opponent of death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Chile.

Shalala is close to the Queen of Chaos, Hillary Clinton, who ran against Bernie Sanders' foreign policy too, with Clinton championing Henry Kissinger.

We all lost the subsequent 2016 general election in which Trump actually endorsed peace over Clinton and her policy of invading, bombing and intervening in other countries.

Now, Shalala is promoting an attempted Sanders hit job in Slate Magazine, (always hot for an invasion and a war), in which Shalala tweets:

I’ll make it clear, @SenSanders does not reflect the majority of the Democratic Party and our support for Venezuela’s interim president @jguaido and the Venezuelan people. Maduro is a dictator and must go. https://t.co/Q1GDp9q2Tw #VenezuelaLibre

— Rep. Donna E. Shalala (@RepShalala) February 21, 2019

The piece Shalala promotes is written by León Krauze.

Krauze's thesis is: If a presidential candidate does not want to invade, bomb and destabilize another country today, then the candidate, Bernie Sanders, per force, has a "soft spot" for "three dictators" and all of the social defects of three respective countries—still recovering from decades of American intervention, intervention that is long opposed by Bernie Sanders and most of the American population.

Krauze has discovered that Bernie Sanders said, "I think the United States has to work with the international community to make sure that there is a free and fair election in Venezuela."

Get him. Stop Bernie Sanders! Bernie wants our country to be like Venezuelan socialism.

And, notes Krauze, Donald Trump has already spoken against socialism, so again we must stop Bernie Sanders.

Writes Krauze:

'Socialism has so completely ravaged this great country [Venezuela] that even the world’s largest reserves of oil are no longer enough to keep the lights on. This will never happen to us,' Trump said, continuing a theme he had broached during his State of the Union address. 

With decades of illegal intervention and human rights atrocities defining American foreign policy since post-World War II, Shalala, Clinton and Trump all assure us we need to intervene now.

And domestically: Stop the campaign of Bernie Sanders because somehow, someway Sanders is just like those socialist dictators, and Donald Trump, whom Hillary and the hawks bequeathed to America, is going to say the same things and Trump never makes a political miscalculation.

Concludes Krauze:

If he wins the nomination, Sanders’ old (and not so old) videos praising failed socialist experiments and tiptoeing around recent cruelties in Latin America will surely resurface, playing on a loop while Trump warns about the long-dreaded socialist takeover of the United States of America. This may be fearmongering, but Democrats dismiss its effectiveness at their own peril.

I'll let the reader unpack that (above) one because Krauze's piece, as hit jobs go, isn't that good.

It is just 17 years ago that former-Slate editor, Jacob Weisberg, dismissed another anti-interventionist, international-law-supporting peace movement socialist, Noam Chomsky, as a "malnourished left-wing straggler," suffering from "clinical symptoms that have been obvious to everyone else for years" in a better-written hit job.

Chomsky's illness? Chomsky warned about the consequences to civilians from the invasion of Afghanistan, and cautioned death and destruction, including catastrophe to the invader, were likely to follow.

As of October 2018, conservative estimates put the civilian death toll in excess of 200,000, over 2,400 U.S. deaths, 10,000s wounded, and Afghanistan is an unmitigated disaster.

In 2002, I wrote Chomsky about Weisberg's hit piece against the peace movement, echoed today in the liberal-corporatist-Democratic Party campaign against Bernie Sanders, who keeps criticizing armed insurrections and illegal American interventions.

Wrote back Chomsky to me in 2002:

(L)iberal intellectuals have lined up in support of the war machine in the familiar style—discussed, for example, by Randolph Bourne in classic essays—and since they know they do not have the intellectual competence to deal with those who refuse to go along, resort to what comes natural to the educated classes: hysterical tantrums, lies, and abuse. Why become involved? There are more important things to do—such as continue to falsify their increasingly desperate claim that everyone is following them in their depraved subordination to power.

Today's propaganda offensives against Sanders evokes the campaign against the peace movement 17 years ago,

As Shalala says: "I’ll make it clear, @SenSanders does not reflect the majority of the Democratic Party ... ."

Actually, Shalala, Clinton, Trump, Krauze, and the whole bunch of liberal war hawks are wrong again.

Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky and the majority of the American people are correct. As Bernie put it on Feb. 20:

The U.S. must lead the world in improving international cooperation in the fight against climate change, militarism, authoritarianism and global inequality. I'm running for president because we need a foreign policy which focuses on democracy, human rights, diplomacy and peace.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 20, 2019

I'm going with Bernie Sanders.

If the United States is ever to reclaim a moral center in international relations, then we need to stop trying to overthrow elected foreign leaders, make human rights the basis for our foreign policy, and the Democratic Party must stop demonizing domestic human rights workers such as Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders.