If political battles left physical scars, many progressive activists would proudly carry jagged cuts from right to left across our faces.
We could tell you about them with a fierce and bitter pride.
"That one is from Hillary's support of free trade," we'd say with a wry smile. "This one: Her support of Wall Street deregulation. That deep purple welt that still bleeds from time to time? That's her Iraq vote."
Political battles do leave physical scars. It's simply that those who bear them are often society's castaways — the impoverished single mom, the shell-shocked vet, the alcoholic who, in the Crash of 2007, lost his business, home, and then his family — and are thus invisible.
Here to speak for them, finally — and for all of us who have felt the slice of the establishment's powerful, for-profit blade — is Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders does a remarkable job of pointing out the corruption, the immorality, the lunacy of a system that continues to feed the bloated machine that is destroying us while simultaneously starving innovation and justice and progress.
If political battles left physical scars, Senator Sanders would have those same scars across his face — and many would have come from the political blade of then-Senator Clinton.
Some Clinton supporters like to say, "What has Sanders accomplished in congress?"
A great deal.
But it is true that much of what he has proposed has gone down to defeat; or even more commonly, never come up for a vote. And much of the responsibility for thwarting that progress lay at the feet of Democrats like Hillary Clinton, via either passive acceptance of the status quo, or sometimes, outright sabotage.
Here is another line from Clinton supporters: "But she votes the same way as Senator Sanders ninety-five percent of the time!"
This is true.
But the only thing that has been necessary to keep the oligarchy intact is the other five percent.
By the way: That's a pretty good deal for her, isn't it?
"Hey, listen, it's pretty good deal," one imagines some shadowy figure from the Heritage Foundation saying thirty years ago. "You get to look like a liberal, a real champion of the people, ninety-five percent of the time! And if they call you out on the other five percent? Just say, 'hey, what about that ninety-five percent where I agree with BERNIE SANDERS'!"
That five percent is killing us. That five percent destroyed the public option and deregulated the banks and sent the jobs overseas and sent our kids off to an unjustified war.
Slash, slash, slash: Across our faces, across Sanders face, across the faces of the homeless and the imprisoned and the Iraq war dead and dismembered: the women, children, and elderly.
And yet, despite of all of this violence and treachery, Sanders refuses to call her out.
Oh, sure, her supports will cry bloody murder: 'But he's not being fair, he's attacking her!'
Those of us with the bleeding scars can only smile, and shake our heads.
You have no idea what a real attack on Hillary Clinton from Bernie Sanders would look like.
If he truly called her out — if he really pinned the dead and the maimed and the homeless and the mad for which she is responsible to her in a live debate — she would stagger from the stage afterwards, slink away into the shadows, and never be heard from again. Nobody could possibly withstand the shame, the humiliation of such unvarnished, scorching truth, of being revealed as responsible, directly or tangentially, for such atrocities.
It would seize for Sanders the presidency.
Yet, he doesn't do it.
Sanders has said again and again, "I have known Hillary Clinton for twenty-five years. We are friends. I like her, and I respect her."
I believe he is telling the truth.
I, like Sanders, am a liberal.
We trend towards empathy, towards wanting to understand those who oppose us, towards wanting to find compromise and common ground.
Sanders sometimes criticizes Obama for having this same impulse towards Republicans — who neither sought nor tolerated any compromise at all. They slashed and slashed and slashed. They wanted to see his guts laying in a steaming heap upon the White House floor. Physically, were it possible.
Sanders decency, his honesty, his kindness, his integrity in honoring the friendship he has with Hillary Clinton, is laudable. He does not take that eviscerating final step with her. She bears no scars across her face from Bernie Sanders.
But, at some point, he has to make a choice: Is that friendship more important than the lives and liberty of the rest of us?
I’m not seeking revenge. I’m seeking democracy. I’m seeking economic justice.
I'm not suggesting that he destroy her, in the way that he certainly could destroy her.
But, at the very least, he needs to help her to feel the pain that her votes have caused so many.
And he needs to point out that the 5% difference between the two of them has been the difference between life and misery for millions.