Bernie Is Stuck Between Bullshit and a Pile of Doo-Doo

What's a politician to do when, after joining the Joe McCarthy wing of the Democratic Party and criticizing Donald Trump for his Russiagate denialism, he is then himself accused of not condemning the alleged cyber-infiltration of his own campaign by Russian bots and trolls?

If your name is Bernie Sanders, the last thing in the world you do is finally come clean, admit the error of  your ways, and declare your independence from the whole phony Narrative of Russian meddling in our "democracy." Sanders, who had thrown in his lot behind the original instigator of Russiagate - Hillary Clinton - is the latest victim of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who gratuitously smeared both him and Jill Stein in his "indictment" last week of three Russian companies and thirteen of their grossly underpaid Internet meat puppets. 

Sanders's pathetic response to this smear was to take a page right out of Hillary Clinton's playbook, and blame Hillary Clinton herself for not doing enough to stop the Russian "attack" on the United States.

Sanders either didn't know, or has chosen to ignore, the fact that Russiagate is not only about weakening and punishing Donald Trump, but also about weakening and punishing - and censoring - what still remains of the contemporary American Left. And that includes Bernie Sanders, still considered the dangerous front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders is only the latest in a long line of American leftists throughout our history to be targeted by the right-wing plutocracy for the sin of not being able to prove a negative. The centrist Washington gossip rag, Politico, gleefully joins the latest attack via its pro-Clinton reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere:

Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election. Then his 2016 campaign manager, in an interview with POLITICO, said he’s seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller's assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders' campaign.
The remarks showed Sanders, running for a third term and currently considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, deeply defensive in response to questions posed to him about what was laid out in the indictment. He attempted to thread a response that blasts Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge that Russians helped his campaign — but then holds himself harmless for a nearly identical denial.

Got that, Bernie? Since Donald Trump denies that the Russians helped him, and you now deny that the Russians helped you, then you are really no better than Trump. You might even secretly support Trump. Hell, you probably are Trump. At the very least, you are un-American, which is the same thing.

In doing so, Sanders and his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe.
“The real question to be asked is what was the Clinton campaign [doing about Russian interference]? They had more information about this than we did,” Sanders said in the interview with Vermont Public Radio.
After being contacted by POLITICO about the interview, Sanders issued a lengthy statement calling the Russian involvement a “direct assault on the free democratic systems that stand in contrast to the autocratic, nationalistic kleptocracy of Vladimir Putin and his backers in the Russian oligarchy” which “deserves unconditional condemnation.”

When it comes to enhancing and amplifying the Russiagate narrative, mainstream journalism has given up all pretense at objectivity. If you deny that Russians infiltrated your brain and your operation, you are being "self-serving."

The more that you deny something, the more guilty you are deemed to be. Off with your head!

  Bernie is certainly not helping himself by buying into the Narrative at the same time that he denies culpability. He is fully on board with it, his only quibble being his own lack of involvement and personal benefit. He cravenly declares himself a true believer in the Mueller Dogma, and is now reduced to begging his inquisitors for mercy. He'll even name names, most prominently the name of Hillary Clinton herself!  He's willing to testify that his campaign warned the Clinton campaign way back in September 2016 of Russian infiltration. What more do they want - that he drape himself in the American flag and carry an autographed photo of Ronald Reagan around with him whenever he delivers one of his anti-billionaire diatribes?

After correctly observing that Mueller's cut-and-paste revelations about a Russian oligarch's troll farm were really nothing new, Bernie "was adamant that he did not benefit from Russian bots," according to the Politico article, while acknowledging that said bots were there to turn his supporters against Hillary and not to specifically bolster his own campaign.

As Dovere pontificated, this pathetic defense will not and cannot stand:

Sanders has repeatedly condemned President Donald Trump for not acknowledging the Russian attack on the 2016 election alleged in the Mueller indictment and being investigated by congressional committees. But he has refused to say that his campaign benefited from the activities. (my bold)

I have here in my pocket a list of 200 names.... Have you now, or have you ever been, an Internet subscriber who benefited from reading Tweets from bots and trolls? Has a Russian ever visited or written a comment on your website? Guilty, guilty, guilty!

Sanders said the key point was that he was campaigning hard for Clinton after losing the nomination to her, and “at this point we were working with them.”
Sanders has faced questions since Friday about why he has not more strongly condemned the Russian actions that benefited his campaign. On Wednesday, liberal writer Joan Walsh of The Nation tweeted in response to Sanders’ comments about Clinton: “Seriously, this could be the end of Sanders 2020. Someone who cares about him ought to tell him how badly he stepped in it today.”

If Bernie Sanders thought that the Democratic establishment would forgive and forget, if not openly embrace him, for ultimately ditching his base of supporters and groveling to Hillary Clinton, he is bound feel confused and betrayed. It's so sad when the ditcher becomes the ditchee. Oftentimes, the betrayed one is reduced to lashing out at the very person for whom he sacrificed everything. Joan Walsh is right that he's stepped into a pile of doo-doo, but she is wrong about the consistency and the quality of it. His mistake is not that he is blaming Hillary. His mistake is that he has wallowed with the corrupt duopoly in the Russophobic bullshit for so long that he just can't find a face-saving way out of it.

So despite the utter unfairness of the establishment's treatment of Bernie, I find it impossible to feel sorry for him or come to his defense. He's a washout, not for the lack of patriotism that the corporate media are impugning, but for his utter lack of courage and principles in failing to repudiate the latest Big Lie.