My right wing sister forwarded this email to me....

[KamaAina]

9. The honeymoon thing has been debunked.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18509/anderson-coopers-claim-about-bernie-sanders-soviet-union-honeymoon-was-redb

In his follow-up question to Bernie Sanders Tuesday night, after the candidate had explained what he views as “democratic socialism,” CNN's Anderson Cooper returned to the matter of electability and noted, “You honeymooned in the Soviet Union.”

This despicable red-baiting was a means of suggesting that Sanders is a commie without actually saying the word. Here's a guy, the implication runs, who's a secret Bolshevik—so in love with America's arch-enemy that he took his new bride to the USSR instead of Niagara Falls or the Bahamas for their honeymoon. It was a rancid attempt to gin up outrage and do Republicans' dirty work for them. It's also deceptive.

The honeymoon story began at Breitbart in late May, then moved on to other right-wing venues, finally getting play in George Will's August 7 column in the Washington Post. Most of his column was devoted to praise for ex-communist Robert Conquest, who had written about the prisons and other atrocities of the Stalin era and had just died at age 98. Will concluded:

Conquest lived to see a current U.S. presidential candidate, a senator, who had chosen, surely as an ideological gesture, to spend his honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988. Gulags still functioned, probably including some of the “cold Auschwitzes” in Siberia, described in Conquest’s 'Kolyma.' The honeymooner did not mind that in 1988 political prisoners were—as may still be the case—being tortured in psychiatric “hospitals.” Thanks to the unblinking honesty of people like Conquest, the Soviet Union now is such a receding memory that Bernie Sanders’s moral obtuseness—the obverse of Conquest’s character—is considered an amusing eccentricity.