Fighting Dirty vs. Playing It Straight

The main criticism of Bernie Sanders from the left is that he's too nice to survive in this cutthroat, backstabbing world of politics. He gallantly told Hillary Clinton at a 2016 primary debate that Americans are "sick and tired of hearing about your damned emails" and later he let bygones be bygones when it emerged that the Clinton-controlled Democratic machine had, indeed, rigged the process against him. He even appeared at numerous rallies for Clinton after she was crowned the nominee by undemocratic acclaim.

She just repaid that misplaced gallantry by trashing him once again, in what could be the opening salvo of a shadow campaign for a second nomination on a second ballot at a brokered convention.

Bernie needs to get over his dual loyalties in a hurry. He's always seemed to have one foot in the Senate and one foot in the rest of the United States. He is loath to criticize his opponents, even going  so far as to preface even mild criticisms of their often cruel policies with "So and So is a good friend of mine." When he says that Joe Biden is a good friend of his, that is an insult to everybody whom Biden has damaged throughout his overlong neoliberal career. When Sanders says he will even support Michael Bloomberg should he win the nomination, even appearing arm in arm with him on Martin Luther King Day, that is a slap in the face to every black or brown man who was ever rousted by cops on Bloomberg's direct orders, just for the crime of existing. It was an insult to all the desperate people that "Mayor Mike" had ordered fingerprinted when they began applying for food stamps in near record numbers after the 2008 financial collapse.

Since Sanders's campaign slogan is "Not me, us," he needs to define his terms. Too frequently, the "us" seems to include people like Biden. Sanders, by any standard of logic, cannot define Biden as a good friend at the same time that he rails against the billionaires that Biden has faithfully served. He certainly cannot, or should not, vow to support Bloomberg, whose obscene net worth is estimated at more than $50 billion.

At the same time, those urging Sanders to "fight dirty" are also wrong. Playing dirty implies engaging in smears and hit jobs, which are dishonest to the core. Criticizing Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Michael Bloomberg for their policies and history is not "attacking" them. Pointing out their lies is not trashing them. It is playing it straight and honest to say that Biden has always wanted to gut Social Security and that Elizabeth Warren was a life-long Republican who is a wholehearted proponent of American militarism and imperialism.

The Democratic machine is carefully keeping Sanders imprisoned in the Senate for the duration of its sham impeachment trial, which is nothing less than an extended campaign commercial for Biden and a gruesome propaganda  extension of the Russiagate excuse for Hillary Clinton's ignominious loss to Trump. It is an open declaration of the neoconservative bent of the Democratic Party, with Chief Prosecutor Adam Schiff channeling George Bush and actually saying that "we have to fight Russia over there so we don't have to fight them over here."

This kind of mendacious rhetoric is the very definition of playing dirty. It doesn't matter that the Republicans are a hundred times worse, when both parties come to the staged event with unclean hands.

The artificially restricted impeachment articles also tacitly assert that the president does not have the inherent right to formulate foreign policy. They nakedly assert that foreign policy is the sole purview of the permanent security and military apparatus, made up of the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon. They transparently claim that foreign policy is for the ultimate benefit of weapons manufacturers, oil companies and other extractors and exploiters and evictors.

That Trump was partying and bloviating at Davos, and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in Jerusalem crafting foreign policy even as the Senate trial was getting underway are testament to the corruption and widespread bipartisan complicity in the corruption. Each of these dirty plutocrats knows, or think they know, exactly how this show is going to end.

If Bernie Sanders does indeed win the nomination, and if he does indeed defeat Trump in November, his struggles will only be just beginning. He'd better consider who his friends are, and that for the most part, they do not reside in Washington, D.C. Martha's Vineyard, Hollywood, the Hamptons or Davos, Switzerland.

The CIA and the State Department and the congressional intelligence committees funding them and protecting them will still be exerting utmost control. We'll still be living under an oligarchy for the foreseeable future. 

We'll just have to wait and see whether a President Sanders repeats what Barack Obama did once he won the White House: disband his grassroots movement under very friendly pressure and non-refusable offers.

Now is the time to brace ourselves and to prepare for all kinds of dirty possibilities. As Howard Zinn said, it's not who's occupying the White House that matters, but who is out in the streets.