Loud & Clear Discussion on Media Campaign Aganist Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard (5/20/2019)

Corporate media smears Sanders, Gabbard for refusing to toe Pentagon line on foreign policy

Corporate media came out with a new line of attack on the Democratic presidential candidates most closely identified with the peace movement. The New York Times recently published a magazine article accusing Bernie Sanders of embracing left-wing and liberation movements and involving himself in the Cold War when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont. And The Daily Beast wrote this weekend that Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign is being “boosted by Putin apologists.” Is this the Democrats’ version of McCarthyism for the 2020 campaign? Jim Kavanagh, the editor of thepolemicist.net, and Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor lawyer who is the author of the book “The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela: How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil,” joins the show.

[My related articles: Bernie's End, Plan B Is Not Bernie, Bernie Wriggles On The Obama Hook, What Does Bernie Want?, What Does Bernie Want? - Part 2]

Listen to "Corporate media smears Sanders, Gabbard for refusing to toe Pentagon line on foreign policy" on Spreaker.

Loud & Clear is a daily program of news, commentary, and political analysis on Radio Sputnik, hosted by Brian Becker and John Kiriakou, featuring independent experts, activists, and political writers. (Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.)

It’s Not Unusual: The Left-Right (S)Mashup in American Politics

A number of commentators have remarked on the “unusual” political coalition of progressive Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans that came together last week (July 24^th) in Congress to support an amendment sponsored by new Michigan Tea Party Republican Justin Amash and long-serving Michigan Democrat John Conyers, an amendment that, as Glenn Greenwald points out, would have required "the FISA court under Sec. 215 [of the Patriot Act] to order the production of records that pertain only to a person under investigation [emphasis in original]," an amendment that, in other words, required the FISA court to act in accordance with the plain meaning of the law and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which states, in full:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The passage of the Amash-Conyers amendment, mandating respect for this constitutional right, would have effectively de-funded the NSA program that bulk collects telephone records of all Americans – an outcome the President, along with the leadership of both political parties, could not permit. To their chagrin, however, they faced surprisingly strong and widespread sentiment in favor of the amendment (and the Constitution). 

Conyers was joined by well-known progressive Democrats like Barbara Lee, Rush Holt, James Clyburn, Nydia Velázquez, Alan Grayson, and Keith Ellison, as well as by the newly-elected representative from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard  one of the first two female combat veterans to serve as a member of Congress, who said: “Countless men and women from my state of Hawai‘i and all across the country have worn the uniform and put their lives on the line to protect our freedoms and our liberties…I cannot, in good conscience, vote to take a single dollar from the pockets of hard-working taxpayers from across the country to pay for programs which infringe on the very liberties and freedoms our troops have fought and died for.”