Why does she do this?
Politifact on Clean Power Plan
This angers me much more than smears and half-truths about 30 year old policy and 10 year old votes on obscure amendments. This is current, this is right now.
Sanders voted for Obama’s Clean Power Act, Sanders verbally supported it. This is what Clinton had to say about it last night:
“The Clean Power Plan is something that Sen. Sanders has said he would delay implementing, which makes absolutely no sense.”
You’re right, Clinton. It does make no sense, because it is a flat-out lie.
Politico was too generous. They should have given it Pants-on-Fire. The campaign’s argument, absent as it was in the debate itself, has to do with Sanders wanting to go beyond what’s in the current version of the Plan — to further emphasize renewable energy over gas, for instance. This is an unqualified Good Thing that he wants to do this, and anybody who disagrees should give up any claim of giving a shit about climate.
Apparently the Clinton campaign scavenged up an expert or two who argued that trying to change the current Plan could wind up delaying it. I don’t know if they’re right; I further expect that if they are, Sanders would take a pragmatic tack and fight for his goals separately, just as he modified his 2013 health care plan’s administration in light of later revelations about potential Supreme Court issues.
But she can’t make a debate talking point about that. That’d be too close to criticizing Sanders for supporting an unqualified Good Thing, something that Democrats care about, and apparently she learned her lesson from doing that exact thing in the health care debate, because she won’t go there.
Instead she simply omits every bit of the logic chain, as tenuous as it is, leading to the conclusion that Sanders’ ideas of improvement would delay the Clean Power Plan, (leaves out anything about improvement, for that matter,) and simply states it as unsupported fact, in an attempt to make Sanders look bad in voters’ eyes and leave him sputtering.
But it’s even worse than that, and here’s where I think it should have gone from Politifact’s “false” to “pants on fire” … she didn’t just say “Senator Sanders’ ideas would delay the Clean Power Plan”. She said “he said he would delay” it, leaving the clear implication behind that delay is his objective. That his aim is to keep any of it from happening, at least not now. And needless to say, he never said any such thing.
Total Outright Lie.
This isn’t a game, climate change plans, to be turned into pointy little sticks to make political jabs with. But that’s what she just did.
And people wonder why we’re angry.
