evidence: Both conservative and libertarian critics of Bernie Sanders have joyfully dug up and displayed on the Internet and social media a huge trove of video clips showing Sanders praising the social and economic achievements of the communist regimes in Soviet Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua. [...] The leaders of those socialist countries are all honest and honorable men who left a very positive impression on Bernie Sanders’s sensitive appreciation for the betterment of his fellow man. No mention, it seems, was ever made by him about the tyranny, terror, or mass murders by his collectivist comrades in arms in the communist workers’ paradises that he visited. [...] It would be unfair and historically inaccurate not to emphasize that there were many "democratic socialists" in Western countries, both between the two World Wars and during the Cold War years, who refused to support or clandestinely collaborate with the Marxist masters in Moscow. They were sincerely devoted to the ideals of a society of civil liberties (freedom of speech and the press, freedom of religion, and individual autonomy over personal affairs) and democratic politics.