Toward the end of her Tuesday show on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell decided to echo Bernie Sanders and praise the state of communist Cuba. After that, she questioned Michael Bloomberg's "really snarky tweets jumping on Sanders" for his fondness for Fidel Castro. She was more offended by that than Bernie's actual embrace of the dictator.
Mitchell began by telling Margaret Carlson of The Daily Beast, "I covered Cuba for years, there's a lot of great things to say about their social services, their education, their health system." Great things include Potemkin clinics for foreigners, high abortion rates to help the government fudge statistics, and the sending of doctors to work in slave-like conditions in foreign countries for propaganda purposes. As for education, how "great" can it when the government heavily censors material?
She seemed much more concerned about the political ramifications of being "controversial", asking "has Sanders stepped into something in that it is controversial with voters in Florida, a lot of people."
Carlson tried to save Mitchell from herself. She declared Sanders has already lost Florida and as to the larger point declared, "You can say in an kind of offhand way that Castro did a lot for literacy in Cuba, but you have to immediately acknowledge what awful things he did: forced labor camps, all kinds of repression, killed his own people and there's simply no way to balance the two."
Mitchell, however, then judged the real villain of the story was not Sanders for defending a communist dictator, but Bloomberg for pointing it out, even if in an imperfect way:
The other thing, Eugene [Scott], that is reverberating, the Bloomberg campaign's very aggressive social media practices. They deleted a bunch of tweets, really snarky tweets that were jumping on Sanders for what he said about Castro, and then saying, “well if he likes that dictator, what may he say about Putin?” and then completely fabricating, you know, jokey tweets which really cross a bar and it echoes that fake video they created out of last week's debate, making it look like Bloomberg on stage put everyone on the spot when he absolutely did not.
Here is a transcript for the February 25 show:
MSNBC
Andrea Mitchell Reports
12:52 PM ET
ANDREA MITCHELL: Joining me, Daily Beast columnist Margaret Carlson and Eugene Scott, political reporter for the Washington Post. Margaret, you know, I covered Cuba for years, there's a lot of great things to say about their social services, their education, their health system, but has Sanders stepped into something in that it is controversial with voters in Florida, a lot of people.
MARGARET CARLSON: Well, he stepped into losing 29 electoral votes in that state, hurting anybody down the ballot. You can say in an kind of offhand way that Castro did a lot for literacy in Cuba, but you have to immediately acknowledge what awful things he did: forced labor camps, all kinds of repression, killed his own people and there's simply no way to balance the two. Except to pivot right to that. It shows just how stubborn Senator Sanders can be that he didn't take the opportunity handed to him last night to do both.
MITCHELL: The other thing, Eugene, that is reverberating, the Bloomberg campaign's very aggressive social media practices. They deleted a bunch of tweets, really snarky tweets that were jumping on Sanders for what he said about Castro, and then saying, “well if he likes that dictator, what may he say about Putin?” and then completely fabricating, you know, jokey tweets which really cross a bar and it echoes that fake video they created out of last week's debate, making it look like Bloomberg on stage put everyone on the spot when he absolutely did not.
