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Bernie Sanders Had A Great Response To War Hawks

"I’ve talked to too many people who came home without legs, without eyesight, with traumatic brain injury."
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By 

Senior Culture Reporter, HuffPost

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday offered a striking rebuttal to criticisms of his anti-war views, saying that he is opposed to war because of its lasting physical and mental toll on America’s veterans.

“War should be in my view, the last resort of a great nation. We should explore every other option -- and I know that opens up the political types: ‘Oh, you’re wimpy. You don’t want to go to war.’ Well, I don’t accept that. I’ve talked to too many people who came home without legs, without eyesight, with traumatic brain injury,” he said in an interview with the Des Moines Register.

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Bill Clark via Getty Images

The Democratic presidential hopeful has long opposed war: as an activist, he protested the Vietnam War, and as a congressman, he railed against the Iraq War.

But Sanders also cares deeply for military veterans and has spent much of his legislative career fighting for better health care, jobs and educational opportunities for veterans. As chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee last year, he brokered a bipartisan deal to pass a bill allocating $17 billion to reform the VA health care system and reduce backlogs at VA hospitals (though veterans continue to experience severe delays in receiving care).

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Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, shakes hands with House Veterans' Affairs Chairman Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, July 28, 2014, during a news conference as they outlined their agreement on a compromise plan to fix the vast health care system responsible for treating the nation's veterans. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On Thursday, Sanders also defended the Iran nuclear deal, criticizing opponents of the deal who say the United States should just impose more economic sanctions.

“Do I particularly trust Iran? No, I don’t,” he said. “But I think that this agreement has enough mechanisms in it to say to Iran that if they break the agreement, we’re going to snap back those sanctions, and they will be punished severely, and military force always remains an option. But I think we should do everything we can to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon without having to go to war.”

 

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Bernie Sanders' Most Interesting Quotes
On Youth Unemployment(01 of15)
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"We got to put young people to work, we got to give them an education, rather than putting them in jail," Sanders said in an interview on MSNBC's "The Ed Show."

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On The Middle Class(02 of15)
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"Ordinary people are profoundly disgusted with the fact that the middle class is being destroyed and income going to the top 1 percent," Sanders tweeted. (credit:Justin Sullivan via Getty Images)
On Gun Control(03 of15)
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"Folks who do not like guns [are] fine. But we have millions of people who are gun owners in this country -- 99.9 percent of those people obey the law. I want to see real, serious debate and action on guns, but it is not going to take place if we simply have extreme positions on both sides. I think I can bring us to the middle," Sanders said in a CNN interview.

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On Free Tuition(04 of15)
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"It is insane and counter-productive to the best interests of our country, that hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, and that millions of others leave school with a mountain of debt that burdens them for decades. That must end," Sanders said during his campaign announcement.

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On Wanting Top Marginal Tax Rate Over 50 Percent(05 of15)
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"In the last 30 years there has been a massive -- we’re talking about many trillions of dollars being redistributed from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent. It is time to redistribute money back to the working families of this country from the top one-tenth of 1 percent," Sanders said on PBS's "Charlie Rose."

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On Marijuana(06 of15)
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“I coughed a lot, I don’t know. I smoked marijuana twice -- didn’t quite work for me,” Sanders told Yahoo.

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On Universal Health Care(07 of15)
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"So I do believe that we have to move toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system. I think it's not going to happen tomorrow, but that certainly should be the goal," Sanders said on ABC’s "This Week."

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On Police Reform(08 of15)
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"We’ve got to demilitarize the police -- we don’t need tanks, you don’t need heavy military equipment in the communities of the United States. We gotta pay attention to the African-American communities, to poverty so these kids get the education and job training they need," Sanders told Yahoo.

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On His American Citizenship(09 of15)
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"Well, no, I do not have dual citizenship with Israel. I'm an American. I don't know where that question came from. I am an American citizen, and I have visited Israel on a couple of occasions. No, I'm an American citizen, period,” Sanders said in an interview with a D.C. NPR affiliate. (credit:Tom Williams via Getty Images)
On Health Care And Education(10 of15)
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"Please don't tell me that the United States of America, our great country, cannot guarantee health care to all people. Don't tell me that every person in this country should not be able to get all the education that they need regardless of their income," Sanders said in Portland, Maine.

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On Campaign Finance Reform(11 of15)
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"A major problem of our campaign finance system is that anybody can start a super PAC on behalf of anybody and can say anything. And this is what makes our current campaign finance situation totally absurd," Sanders said to the Burlington Free Press.

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On Undocumented Immigrants(12 of15)
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"Despite the central role that undocumented workers play in our economy and in our daily lives, these workers are too often reviled by many for political gain and shunted into the shadows," Sanders said at the National Association of Latino Elected Officials conference.

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On Bank Bailouts(13 of15)
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"If a bank is too big to fail, that bank is too big to exist," Sanders said in Denver, Colorado.

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On Raising The Minimum Wage(14 of15)
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"Our goal as a nation is that if somebody works 40 hours a week, that person will not be living in poverty," Sanders said in Iowa.

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On The War On Drugs(15 of15)
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"What I can tell you is this: We have far, far, far too many people in jail for nonviolent crimes, and I think in many ways, the war against drugs has not been successful, and I think we've got to rethink that," Sanders told Yahoo News' Katie Couric. (credit:MICHAEL B. THOMAS via Getty Images)

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