Last Updated on February 3, 2020
The Eternal Martyr
Our project was one example of spineless behaviour. While portrayed as a fighter willing to sacrifice by his supporters, Bernie Sanders has too often let them take the slings and arrows for him while keeping his quiver full. He is much less of a victim than they are.
In 2018 by recognizing one odd discrepancy in a Politico article I stumbled onto a media scandal that should have shaken progressive circles to the core. During our efforts to expose the fraud perpetrated by John Mattes my research could only go so far, and it would have been just another critique of the press without hearing the accounts of Bernie Sanders delegates like Jo Piarulli and Jim Boydston as well as their friend Joanne Allen.
During hours of discussion as well as correspondence, it became clear that notwithstanding my deep contempt as a libertarian for the economic and political beliefs of their candidate, it was easy to understand why they yearned for a cleansing of American politics.
In that time I do think we formed a bond, but there remains a massive gulf between our attitudes towards Bernie Sanders himself. Some of them continue to support the Vermont senator, and while their loyalty is admirable, it is misplaced. I propose now with the facts open to the public eye that they deserve better than him, but as always they can vote their own conscience.
The aspersions cast through the so-called “Russian bot infiltration” hoax were part of a broader campaign by high level Democratic officials along with their media cohorts and enablers to skirt responsibility for their colossal incompetence and corruption during the 2016 presidential campaign. Bernie Sanders and his supporters represented an obstacle to them during that cycle.
Let me stress, it was not an obstacle solely to their policies and vision, but to their own ambitions and grip on power. Hillary Clinton was supposed to have won in a cakewalk and the DNC nomination was to be a formality with the convention being a debutante ball and election night a coronation. When this plan went awry those that had invested in it needed to exact their vengeance on those they determined had wronged them.
The most conspicuous example was the Trump-Russia investigation of 2016-19, an affair that was tinged in false pretences as exhibited most recently by the January 23 revelation that two Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants issued with respect to Carter age “were not valid”. None of those that were charged as part of the special counsel investigation conducted by Robert Mueller were revealed to have colluded or collaborated with Russia in any way.
Did Bernie Sanders, a person who for years had been a skeptic of the American intelligence community, stand up and object to the farcical witch hunt of the Robert Mueller and his underlings? No. On the contrary he bet in favour of the empty case saying in April 2019 that “it is clear that Donald Trump wanted nothing more than to shut down the Mueller investigation” and calling for further investigation. This is from someone who in 1974 called for the CIA to be disbanded, a comment that he had to recant in 2016.
One could argue however that Sanders has no reason to come to Trump’s defense, seeing as they are ideological adversaries. Supposing that, did he ever speak out to defend the integrity of fellow leftist non-interventionists like Dennis Kucinich or Jill Stein that were slandered as pawns of Russia or “Assad apologists”? No. And in fact in 2018 he withheld his endorsement from Rep. Kucinich as he battled middling centrist Richard Cordray for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Ohio.
Did he speak out to defend Hawaii’s Rep. Tulsi Gabbard who resigned from the DNC in 2016 in order to support him and has been a tireless champion of the non-interventionist wing of the party both before and since when she was painted as a Kremlin tool?
Only in October did he react to Clinton’s incendiary statement against her, whereas until then she had been accused of supporting Russian military action in Syria as well as being too close to India’s “Islamophobic” president Narendra Modi and he couldn’t be bothered to say a thing.
In the interest of avoiding a long argument, I will not delve into all of the betrayals that Sen. Sanders has committed with respect to policy. Those are not my policies to defend anyway. But to illustrate just a sliver of them, let’s imagine that Secretary Clinton would have been elected president in 2016 with Sanders’ endorsement. What would he have been capable of doing then? Does anyone imagine for a moment that Medicare for all would have passed Congress, that the TPP would not have been ratified with huge bipartisan majorities, or that the press and Congress would check her abuses and oppose interventions overseas?
Bernie Sanders would have been a gently tolerated court jester in an otherwise boring government possibly frozen in gridlock. America would have continued its slide into being a regional hub of a large multinational corporate friendly China-dominated oligopoly. This is the very globalist hellscape that the populist movements that propelled both the Sanders and Trump campaigns sought to avoid.
The Bernie campaign and their supporters do know how to defend themselves once in a while, such as when they object to dishonest and biased coverage by the media. However, many of those battles could have been avoided were they not sprinkled with interludes of appeasement.
In April 2019 after several hit pieces from their in-house blog ThinkProgress, liberal think tank Center for American Progress (CAP) raised the hackles of the Sanders campaign in an official letter of protest. Perhaps Bernie had thought that by hiring former CAP stooge Faiz Shakir as his campaign manager they would give him a pass.
In December he appeared in the DNC’s Unity Fund video along with all of the other major Democratic candidates — except Gabbard of course. Then in late January the DNC repaid him. . . by appointing Clintonistas like John Podesta and Barney Frank to its convention committee. But not to worry, Bernie surrogate and former State state senator Nina Turner is on the case calling it outrageous on a podcast, without threatening any repercussions. I’m sure that will sway the DNC.
Having represented a state with so much wild nature like Vermont for so long, one would think that Sanders would have learned not to feed the bears.
But Bernie is perfectly fine with telling his own people to shut up so the media isn’t too mean to him. In 2016 he tweeted that surrogate Dr. Paul Song’s comments that Hillary Clinton was a “corporate whore” were “inappropriate and insensitive”. He had similar responses to statements by surrogates Killer Mike and Susan Sarandon regarding Clinton’s faux feminism as well as Rosario Dawson on the suspicion that Clinton was under FBI investigation, which later proved to be true.
In October after hiring video creator Matt Orfalea thanks to his mash-up of media smears against Sanders, the campaign promptly ditched him when the Washington Post published a hit piece against him that included the mention that he had used offensive language about disabled people. Apparently using the word “retarded” in the past is enough to disqualify one from a behind-the-scenes digital media job. While Orfalea was canned so fast he might as well have Del Monte tattooed on his forehead, the Sanders campaign has curiously refused to fire any of the (so far) four paid campaign staffers caught on video in Iowa and South Carolina gleefully discussing plans for Gulags and other persecutions against their enemies should Sanders become president.
Far be it for me to advocate for anyone’s firing, but which is the bigger issue; the clip editor who uses the R word, or the people going door to door pitching the campaign for voters and then justifying class genocide over beers?
This week the Sanders campaign hinted in an ad that Donald Trump was a threat to Jewish Americans, whereas Bernie stands for Jewish values using the backdrop of the Pittsburgh shooting to evoke fears of white supremacist terror. This is a lot of empty talk from a person who has said almost nothing concerning the daily street assaults on religious Jews in the New York-New Jersey including the murder of three people in Jersey City in December. None of the perpetrators were white, but the victims included the female store owner, a Yeshiva student, and a non-Jewish Hispanic store employee.
Bernie left that attack out of his video, because he wants to pander to any demographic that he can. Why else would he continue to retain Rep. Rashida Tlaib as his surrogate following her demented retweet of a blood libel accusing Israeli settlers of murdering a Palestinian teen prior to his body having been found lifeless in a well in the Arab Jerusalem neighbourhood of Beit Hanina?
There has as of right now been no evidence of foul play revealed in the case. Bernie has never stood against those that have threatened Jewish Americans, and there’s no point in him pretending to do so now. It would actually conflict with the rest of his agenda.
Just last week Bernie Sanders apologized for calling opponent Joe Biden corrupt. Let’s understand the significance of that. He apologized to the former vice president whose son was appointed to the board of directors of a Ukrainian gas company, which apparently does not conflict with Bernie’s commitment to a green economy.
But Bernie didn’t apologize to Jill Stein and Dennis Kucinich, nor to the legions of donors that he betrayed by endorsing Clinton, nor to Matt Orfalea, nor to the public for his complicity in the failed Trump-Russia media canard, nor to his own supporters slandered as a footnote to it. Every time his supporters get kicked in the nuts, Bernie is around to say, “Thank you sir, may I have another”.
The Bernie slogan has long been “Not me, us”, but read between the lines and it says “I need to win, so until then you’re all expendable”.
