Sanders Doubles Down Communist Regime Praise, Gives Credit to China for Fighting ‘Extreme Poverty’

“Why are we spotlighting the literacy programs of a brutal dictator, instead of being unambiguous in our condemnation about the way he has treated his own people?” – Pete Buttigieg on Sanders’ praise for Fidel Castro’s efforts to spread literacy in Cuba https://t.co/gLtSkaAtkK pic.twitter.com/GmB72hW2Jp

— CNN (@CNN) February 25, 2020

And as for Sanders’ praise for the even-more-murderous communist regime in China, it’s might be true that the Chinese have been lifted out of “extreme poverty,” but it’s demonstrably true that capitalism, the system Sanders despises, has lifted the entire globe out of extreme poverty.

As Heritage Foundation researcher Anthony Kim wrote in a 2018 piece for The Daily Signal:

“Prosperity has not arisen from the beneficence of some good king or a benign technocracy of experts, let alone socialism. Rather, it is the result of the hard work and innovative entrepreneurship of those who have demanded and exercised the fundamental freedom to decide for themselves how to live their lives under free-market capitalism.

“The free-market capitalist system, whose growth is so well documented in The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, has empowered countless individuals around the world by giving them more choices and opportunities. Reforms that enhance economic freedom have enabled hundreds of millions to escape poverty and countless others to enjoy levels of prosperity never before seen.”

And socialism — the system Sanders and so many of his young, foolish followers espouse?

“No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead,” former University of Pennsylvania professor of history Alan Charles Kors wrote in a 2003 commentary for the The Atlas Society.

As of Tuesday, Sanders is the undisputed leader in the 2020 Democratic field after his convincing win in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday.

Even before Sanders’ foolishly cavalier praise for Cuba’s dictatorship, that reality already had establishment Democrats wringing their hands.

After that “60 Minutes” interview aired, it only got worse as Florida Democrats weighed in:

As the first South American immigrant member of Congress who proudly represents thousands of Cuban Americans, I find Senator Bernie Sanders’ comments on Castro’s Cuba absolutely unacceptable.

— Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (@DebbieforFL) February 24, 2020

But if this is the ground Sanders chooses to fight on — doubling down on the despotic regime of the late Fidel Castro (who is now likely somewhere a good deal hotter than the hottest Cuban summer), and praising the tyrants of Red China — he’s only going to lead the Democrats to an electoral debacle in November.

From a strictly political point of view, that’s a plus for President Donald Trump and the tens of millions of Americans who want to seem him win a new four-year term.