The Mugging of Bernie Sanders by Daniel Lazare!
(2020-01-26 at 14:13:49 )

The Mugging of Bernie Sanders by Daniel Lazare!

Beginning on Jan. 15, Bernie Sanders has been the victim of a Jeremy Corbyn-style mugging. Elizabeth Warren started it by teaming up with the ghouls at CNN to accuse him of saying that a woman could never win the presidency.

Joe Biden followed up by charging his staff with doctoring a video to make it look like he favors cutting Social Security.

Finally, Hillary Clinton joined in the pile-up by calling him ineffectual, duplicitous, and a misogynist to boot.

It was all too predictable. The higher Sanders climbed in the polls, the sooner the Democratic establishment would launch an offensive aimed at stopping him from winning the nomination.

But Mr. Sanders response was predictable as well - predictably weak, that is.

Instead of letting Ms Warren have it for a story that she obviously concocted out of thin air - Mr. Sanderss anti-sexism credentials are impeccable - he held his tongue in the hope that the controversy would fade away. Instead of blasting CNN for its outrageously biased questioning during the Iowa debate, he let that go as well.

As for the "doctored" video, he could have pointed out that Mr. Biden was lying since the clip was clearly not tampered with at all. But he did not.

Then, however, he made matters worse by apologizing for an article by a supporter named Zephyr Teachout pointing out that credit-card companies located in Mr. Bidens home state of Delaware "bankrolled" his political career and that he paid them back "by spearheading a bankruptcy bill that made it harder for United States of Americans to reduce their debts and helped cause the financial crisis."

The piece, entitled "Middle Class Joe Biden has a corruption problem," also noted that a healthcare-industry super-PAC is now financing his presidential bid and that what he has given the industry in return is a "healthcare proposal that preserves the power of the insurance industry and leaves 10 million United States of Americans uninsured."

As for climate change, Ms Teachout observes that Mr. Biden signed a pledge not to take fossil-fuel money and then broke it and that the climate policy he has come up with since "has gotten dismal reviews from several leading environmental groups."

What about this was wrong?

The answer is nothing.

Yet Mr. Sanders told CBS News; “It is absolutely not my view that Joe Biden is corrupt in any way. And I am sorry that that op-ed appeared."

It is not that Ms Teachout was incorrect, in other words, merely that her facts were inconvenient.

Yet what made it doubly ironic is that Ms Teachout left out the most important incident at all: the $50,000-a-month post that Mr. Biden allowed his son Hunter to take with one of the Ukraines most notorious oligarchs at a time when the then-vice president was supposedly overseeing the Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

It is as if Eliot Ness had allowed his kid to go to work for Al Capone. If Ms Teachout forgot to bring it up, it is presumably because she knows that Donald Trump will use it to clobber Mr. Biden if he makes it to the general election and that, good Democrat that she is, she does not want to give him anything by way of encouragement.

But it does not undo the fact Mr. Biden was guilty of such a massive conflict of interest that even the New York Times was taken aback or that Donald Trump will use it not only against Mr. Biden, but against Democrats in general for covering up their candidates obvious corruption.

It will not be pretty.

As for Ms Clinton, her comments were so over the top that Mr. Sanders should have come out with both guns blazing.

She told the Hollywood Reporter that she stood by her comments in an upcoming documentary that "[n]obody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It is all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."

She then twisted the knife by refusing to say if she would support Mr. Sanders if he gets the nomination: "I will say, however, that it is not only him, it is the culture around him. It is his leadership team. It is his prominent supporters. It is his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women.

And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture - not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it."

So she thinks Mr. Sanders is a sexist too.

There are a lot of things Mr. Sanders could have said in response.

He could have pointed that the Clinton Foundation has raked in $10 million or more from Saudi Arabia, a country that keeps women in something close to slavery, and that, as secretary of state, she backed a Saudi-financed jihad aimed at enslaving women in Syria as well. But all he could muster was a weak joke: "On a good day, my wife likes me, so let us clear the air on that one."

It is all too reminiscent of Mr. Corbyn, the now-disgraced leader of Britains Labor Party, who failed to fight back against cooked-up charges of anti-Semitism and instead responded with one timid apology after another.

It did nothing to appease his rightwing attackers and only left his followers feeling demoralized and confused.

If Mr. Sanders continues on the same path, the results will be similar. He will look frightened and indecisive, his followers will lose heart, and he will end up in a dispiriting second or third place in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If so, a few of us more skeptical sorts will reply that by running as a socialist for the Democratic nomination, Mr. Sanders was attempting to straddle two very different worlds and, as a result, ended up tumbling in between.

Instead of fighting the Democrats, he set out to make nice and has gotten in the back in return.

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