Why did Bernie join Rand Paul in voting against new Russian sanctions?

[JCanete]

64. elections have barely had consequences for republicans. We got 8 years of obstruction. I am

all for our politicians not sacrificing the American people at the altar of that tit-for-tat game, but sacrificing them at the altar of "elections have consequences" is even more disturbing to me. I'm not saying this bill does that, although generally speaking, there's got to be something wrong with a bill that almost all Republicans sign onto, particularly when, as you say, they are in control. But then maybe not. This could be one of the few times that's not the case. I'm just saying that "well it was going to pass anyway" doesn't give me any confidence in our system. I want to know who helped to get it passed and by what narrow margin it succeeded. I don't want the convolution of these vote parsings.

As to Chomsky, I agree with him, its a very very risky approach to opt out and risk a Trump Presidency, and after the convention, I came down on the same side of things. That said, being as certain as he is suggests more confidence in the direction our machinery has been taking us than I have. Trump's viability is a symptom of something horribly wrong with our system. That something has been mostly ignored by Democrats as well as all of the Republicans, and now here we are. Had we gotten Clinton, maybe we'd be here in 4 or 8 years. The argument for Trump was never that he's such a monster people will wake up, its always been that he's an incompetent one, and maybe he'll be so brutish and stupid that we'll all get a peak behind the curtain, and that wakes us the fuck up.

That said, yeah, I think it was the wrong call too. I just don't hate on people for making it.