I'm pleased that other candidates are willing to say the right things about our recent track record abroad - but I believe that their unwillingness to be specific about the harm we've done means that the difference between them and Sanders is a difference in kind and not just degree. He was willing to call this coup at the time what it obviously was. Others were ... careful. And careful is good, but it's not the same thing as being right.

Adding noise to the already regrettable conversation about American foreign policy is the extremely dumb narrative about the Deep State that the Trump presidency has made us sit through. The fact that they're crazy and the fact that there is no secret room of politicians and military officials conspiring to divvy up international power doesn't mean that there isn't a group of government officials, especially in intelligence, who are in charge of determining and implementing American foreign policy but who are not themselves at all accountable to the public because they're:

a)not elected
b)not transparent just by the nature of their work

Ben Rhodes' discussion of "The Blob" as this huge and complex foreign policy business (for lack of a better term) that moves policy through inertia is a much healthier way to talk about this, but Trump's ranting about the Deep State and mainstream libs growing paranoia about Russia has made that conversation nearly impossible.

If we want America to just stop doing awful things abroad, it's not enough to just say "awful things are bad". We actually have to identify the awful things. Identify the bad actors. Identify what you intend to do about the bad actors.

I'd be pleased to hear about any candidate who is willing to sign on, generally, to the idea that our interference in foreign governments is deeply immoral and, incidentally, often damaging to American interests. But I'm pretty sure Sanders is the only one to say why and how. And while we're here, I'm also pretty sure that socialism - insofar as it is an international movement of working class solidarity - is the only political ideology that won't thrust us back into the same bad behavior.

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"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad