A Chief example of this, IMO, is Chris Cillizza.
Exhibit A is his latest attack piece on Sanders in the Washington Post. The piece is titled, with an utter disregard for both brevity and accuracy, Bernie Sanders just gave an amazingly condescending interview about Hillary Clinton.
To begin with, it isn’t an interview “about Hillary Clinton”. It’s an interview with Sanders. As for “condescending”, Cillizza seems to think that stating the obvious; that Sanders’ endorsement is far less important than how Clinton presents herself to the General electorate, qualifies as such.
A trip to the dictionary might be in order.
Here’s what Cillizza finds so egregious:
MITCHELL: In our polling today, in our NBC News survey, Monkey Online poll, there's an eight-point spread. Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump, but single digits, and not a big wave behind her, also in her NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll. So this could be a very close race. How long are you going to wait before you make a decision about endorsement? Will you decide before -- ?
SANDERS: I think -- you're asking, I think, with all due respect, Andrea, the wrong question. It's not a question of my endorsement. It's a question of the American people understanding that Secretary Clinton is prepared to stand with them as they work longer hours for low wages, as they cannot afford health care, as their kids can't afford to go to college. Make it clear that she is on their side, that she is prepared to take on Wall Street, the drug companies, fossil fuel industry. Deal with the global crisis of climate change. I have no doubt that if Secretary Clinton makes that position, those positions clear, she will defeat Trump and defeat him by a very wide margin.
According to Cillizza, this answer from Sanders is “stunning”. Again, how Sanders saying that his endorsement is less important than how voters at large perceive Clinton could be described as “stunning” isn’t at all clear. Nevertheless Cillizza attempts to make his case. He goes about it in the following fashion.
What he's saying -- if you read between the lines -- is that the ball is in Clinton's court when it comes to winning his endorsement. Not only does he think she needs to come to him, but he also believes she still has to prove that she is "prepared to stand with them [the American people], as they work longer hours for low wages, as they cannot afford health care, as their kids can't afford to go to college."
The pertinent phrase here is “if you read between the lines”. This, as any competent writer or critical reader knows, is a tacit admission by Cillizza that Sanders said nothing of the kind and that Cillizza is intuiting a meaning that was not actually expressed while presenting it as fact.
The most charitable description for this is projection. There are other, less charitable descriptions for it as well.
Having hoisted his straw man of choice, Cillizza proceeds to set fire to it. Again he quotes what he imagines to be an indictable offense by Sanders. He frames it as follows:
That was far from the only condescending/deeply unrealistic thing Sanders had to say about Clinton in his interview with Mitchell.
Here's his answer to why he has been reluctant to endorse Clinton given that he has said he will vote for her and that he will do whatever it takes to keep Donald Trump from being president:
I note in passing that Cillizza failed to demonstrate that there was anything unrealistic in what Sanders actually said any more than he demonstrated that it was condescending. Here’s the next quote that he finds objectionable:
I think many people -- I would respectfully disagree and suggest that many people do understand. Our job is to transform America, to end the 40-year decline of the American middle class. That is what I am fighting to do. And we are in that process right now. We did very well, I thought, in St. Louis, in terms of the first meeting of the platform committee. Now we go to Orlando, and then we go to the floor of the Democratic Convention. Politics is not a baseball game with winners or losers. What politics is about is whether we protect the needs of millions of people in this country who are hurting. That is my focus. And my job right now is to make the Democratic Party as open, as inclusive, as progressive as it possibly can be, and that's what we're working on as we speak.
Now this seems to be a pretty straight forward explication of what Sanders’ and Sanders Democrats’ goals are and how they are pursuing them.
Not to Cillizza though. As with the first quote, he ignores what was actually said in order to substitute his own “intuitions”.
Again, the belief undergirding Sanders's comments is that he alone -- and, therefore, not Clinton -- is the person who can bring transformational change to end the "decline of the American middle class." That Clinton is either insufficiently committed to doing so or simply incapable of bringing that sort of change about. That she sees politics as "a baseball game of winners and losers" while he sees it as "protect[ing] the needs of millions of people in this country who are hurting."
Again, none of this is actually said by Sanders in either of the quotes cited. Sanders doesn’t even make mention of Clinton in the second citation. This complete absence of any foundation doesn’t give Cillizza the slightest pause in foisting his bogus narrative. He simply piles unsupported assertion on unsubstantiated claim in the style of the ideologue or hack propagandist.
No where is this more apparent than where Cillizza seems to think he is presenting his final “proof”.
And, just in case you missed that point, Bernie made it again with Mitchell:
Here’s what Cillizza imagines makes his “point”:
To me, what politics is about is not just electing candidates. It's about transforming this country, about dealing with the decline of the American middle class, and massive levels of income and wealth inequality, dealing with climate change, dealing with the need to make sure that all of our young people have the opportunity to go to college, when we make public colleges and universities tuition free. Those are issues that have to be dealt with, in my mind, by the Democratic platform and by Secretary Clinton, and we look forward to working with the Clinton campaign to bring that forward.
Here Sanders simply reiterates his earlier remarks with the addition that he and his supporters are looking “forward to working with the Clinton campaign” to bring those issues forward. According to Cillizza, this is damning.
The contrast is remarkable: Sanders as white knight operating from conviction and righteousness, Clinton as craven politician doing and saying whatever it takes to win.
The truly remarkable contrast is between the actual statements by Sanders and the wildly fanciful, fact free narrative that Cillizza attempts to impose.
The disconnect between Sanders actual statements and Cillizza’s fabulations is so profound, so blatant as to border on the surreal. All the more so when one realizes that in order to make his argument Cillizza presents the quotes out of the actual order in which they were made. One has to wonder what possible motivation could have driven him to engage in so shoddy and transparent an attempt at gas lighting.
I can’t pretend to know the answer to that, since I don’t propose to ape Cillizza’s near hallucinatory “reasoning”.
However, I do think there is something to be gained from examining how he framed his piece. At the very beginning he admitted the following.
Clinton and her campaign have been generally fine with all of this, pivoting to the general election and assuming the Sanders thing would work itself out.
That approach may change after the interview Sanders gave to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday.
The first is a rough, if slanted, statement of fact. The second appears to be along the lines of a wish fulfillment. One that he circles back to at the close of his piece:
The Clinton team has been willing to allow Sanders his extended time in the limelight mostly because (a) they don't think it hurts her in any measurable way for the fall campaign, and (b) they don't want to anger his backers unnecessarily.
But, Sanders's condescension toward and dismissiveness of Clinton in the Mitchell interview was striking. It's hard for me to imagine Clinton, her allies and the broader Democratic Party remain as accepting of Sanders's continued candidacy if he keeps up anything like that sort of rhetoric.
At a guess I’d say that Cillizza is one of those Sanders critics who are unhappy with the fact that Clinton has chosen to tacitly accommodate Sanders rather than attack him. To essentially recognize the strength of the movement he represents both within and without the Democratic Party and its relevance going forward.
The motives of such folks are murky and undoubtedly mixed. Evidently they would prefer a continued partisan bloodletting to granting any legitimacy to Sanders or Sanders Democrats.
At this point, given the superior political acumen evidenced by Clinton and the Democratic Leadership, the only means available for achieving that goal is by aggravating existing antagonisms among rank and file Democrats through a conscious campaign of provocation and demagoguery.