Hypocrisy alert: Bernie Sanders, wanting to suck on the military teat

Sen. Bernie Sanders

No wonder Bernie Sanders wants to run as a Democrat, not a Green; he's too willing to suck at the military teat (near end of story): 

Whatever its technical challenges, the F-35 is a triumph of political engineering, and on a global scale. For a piquant illustration of the difference that political engineering can make, consider the case of Bernie Sanders—former Socialist mayor of Burlington, current Independent senator from Vermont, possible candidate from the left in the next presidential race. In principle, he thinks the F-35 is a bad choice. After one of the planes caught fire last summer on a runway in Florida, Sanders told a reporter that the program had been “incredibly wasteful.” Yet Sanders, with the rest of Vermont’s mainly left-leaning political establishment, has fought hard to get an F-35 unit assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard in Burlington, and to dissuade neighborhood groups there who think the planes will be too noisy and dangerous. “For better or worse, [the F-35] is the plane of record right now,” Sanders told a local reporter after the runway fire last year, “and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” It’s going to be somewhere, so why not here? As Vermont goes, so goes the nation.

So, Bernie, really? Ohh, it's bad, but I"m not going to oppose out-of-control military spending that makes Ike's "military-industrial complex" that much, because I want Vermont on the gravy train, even if it's a war weapon, even if it's a bloated one.

What else, Bernie? Want to invite the federal prison system to Vermont. You are a border state, and people could be sneaking through from Canada. Why not ask Immigration and Customs to build one, since they're already being nutbar on one town straddling the border with Quebec?

Better yet, why not contact Geo or one of the other private prison folks about this?

It would be one thing, Bernie, if you fought for tighter standards for organic dairy products to benefit Vermont's dairy industry, or a rule that automatically let all maple syrup be organic unless farmers are spraying known nonoriganic products on trees.

And, beyond that, Vermonters didn't WANT the F-35. They became more and more adamant about that. Result? Bernie pushed harder and harder to land it.

And, it's not just warhawking. It's warhawking for a plane that sucks. No other word for it:

Update, Feb. 23, 2021: By looking for a new low-cost fighter, as Forbes reports, the Air Force has tacitly admitted the F-35 is a fail.

 

But this is ridiculous.

(And, maybe it's connected to Israel wanting to upgrade F-16s to F-35s.)

Bernie, re the military-industrial complex, here's what you should be trying to do instead.

The M16 and its descendant rifles still suck almost as bad as they did in Nam, especially when compared to the good old AK-47, per this sidebar Atlantic piece.

Why don't you find out what,if any, international patents the Kalashnikov family has, get Congress to buy them up, and have us use the damned AK-47 for a quarter of the cost and double the reliability of the M4?

Speaking of guns, Bernie is also some kind of gun nut.

And, then, fight to kill all funding, period, for the F-35.

I've always thought that Sanders was kind of the Wizard of Oz behind some imagery, and now I'm thinking that more and more.

And, on military-related issues, I'm right. Counterpunch was raking him over the coals four years ago.

Let’s start with this:

Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq.  He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return.  If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.

Then note that the F-35 lust isn’t new, either:

Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s.

The author is a Vermonter. It appears that back home, Bernie’s not been fooling all the people for quite some time.

Another Counterpunch piece notes that Sanders is a bit of a squish on fighting hardcore Zionism.

And, a libertarian online mag, gathering a variety of links and sources, argues that Sanders might almost be a warhawk lite.

And, per this link, maybe Bernie's running as a Dem, if anything, because at the Vermont state level, he's long been into deal-making with the Democratic apparatus, and his rightward moves on foreign policy issues are part of this. The skinny on that piece is that Bernie has sold out to the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in exchange for the state Democratic party quashing any official opposition to him.

And, he was a war lover ever since the original Gulf War. Read that piece. Substitute the n-word into Bernie's take, and he sounds like George Wallace or other White South politicos saying in the 1960s that nobody was going to out-n them. Plus, part of why he probably doesn't like to talk about foreign policy issues a lot is that he's illiberal in general on them.

In other words, Bernie already is a Democrat, and has been for 20 years. Thank doorknob he's not running Green; the myth might quash a more legitimate candidate, like Dr. Jill Stein, the 2012 nominee, who's thrown her hat in the ring again.

The first link is a great read in general. James Fallows goes in depth about the separation of the military from the general public, the shallowness of "thank you for your service," the greater shallowness of continuing to feed the beast of the military-industrial complex and more.

And, I'm by no means alone. Here's another blogger calling out Sanders as a warhawk. So does friend Brains, who also tags him as a panderer on gun issues, which he is.