Since Bernie Sanders is now officially in the race for President and the hit jobs are in full (fool?) bloom, I thought it’s appropriate to take on the latest fearmongering and Greatest Hits of Bernie Derangement Syndrome.
Of course, at the top of the hit parade is the refrain of “But he’s not a Democrat.” This is despite the fact that his voting record with Democrats and against Republicans is as strong as any and the Senate Dems made him 1) Outreach Chair and 2) the Ranking member on the Budget Committee, which means he’s a leading member of the caucus.
Does he find value in running as an independent in VT? You betcha. Patrick Leahy is the only Democratic candidate ever elected to the US Senate. Ever. Bernie has more appeal there because he declares himself independent of any party. That’s how Vermonters are. Sure, the state is becoming friendlier territory for Democrats with all the NYers who’ve moved up there since Bernie first started selling them on the idea of Vermont when Bernie was Mayor of Burlington. But, the current governor is a Republican.
Don’t hate on Bernie for being an Independent. It wins elections. And he does caucus with Democrats. His record in opposing GOP legislation is unsurpassed by anyone who identifies as a Democrat in their home state.
Then, there’s the various misrepresentations of the Russia story — the entirely fraudulent efforts to tar Bernie with a scandal that involved Russian operatives and maybe the Trump campaign, it’s data operation at Cambridge Analytica, and maybe the NRA.
1) Tad Devine — who according to a recent Rec List diary “is now being tied into the Russian interference in the 2016 election.” You see this stuff on Twitter a lot. It’s entirely without any grounding in any reality we know of.
Tad Devine is NOT tied to Russian interference in 2016. Nothing we’ve seen links him in any way. to that effort. He was called by the Mueller team to testify against Manafort, because Devine briefly worked with him after being suckered into the effort to elect Yanukovich. He was called because he presumably had insight into the history of Manafort’s work for Ukrainian Putin allies, at least, back in 2010. No public link has ever put them together since then.
No one except the Bernie Derangement sufferers — and probably a fair number of Russian and GOP bots and trolls — has suggested he was involved in any way in the Russian interference in 2016 election. There was a big spike of #NeverBernie tweets (along with #RunBernieRun), all prompted by a story that Bernie would be announcing. Many of these were identified as exhibiting the characteristics of automated activity. So, it’s probably not baseless to suggest that Russians are spreading the tales about how you can’t trust Bernie — that he’s linked to Russia either because he went there on his honeymoon 30 years ago, or because Tad Devine spent a few months in 2010 working with Manafort. Tony Podesta’s brother and the Podesta firm is far more mixed up in the Manafort affair than Tad Devine. They may even face indictment for failing to register as foreign lobbyists. Are we going to claim that 2016 was all an inside job in the Clinton campaign — that Tony Podesta actually intentionally enabled the hack of his own emails? Of course not, but it’s no more serious than the smears of Tad Devine.
If you want to talk about promoting Democrats, then you have to talk about Tad Devine. He’s been the most successful Democratic operative over the last 30 years. He was Dukakis Field Coordinator, helping Dukakis to win the nomination. He was chief strategist and/or campaign manager Al Gore’s Presidential campaign and John Kerry’s Presidential campaign. He made some of the finest, most memorable commercials including one for Ted Kennedy and a phenomenal ad for Bernie. He helped run winning campaigns for Democrats running for Governor and Senate. He’s also helped elect left-of-center leaders in the UK and Israel. The idea that he would try to hurt the party, or the country is...stupid.
This is one of a number of wholly fabricated tales and innuendo meant to suggest something sinister about the Sanders campaign, but without any basis. I see assertions online that Devine must be investigated. He testified on behalf of the Special Counsel against Manafort. You can bet your patooties the prosecutors investigated him and any conceivable involvement of the Sanders campaign. The fact that absolutely nothing has come out about any such link is pretty compelling. If there were a link, it’s virtually certain to have come out by now.
2. Russian activities in 2016 were generally directed at hurting Clinton. In so doing, they sometimes promoted Sanders. This is offered to claim that somehow that means Bernie’s campaign was involved.
Ok, duh — they attacked Clinton in the primary, and sometimes elevated Sanders. If O’Malley had emerged as a serious contender, they would have promoted him, in their efforts to take down Secretary Clinton. That wouldn’t mean that Gov. O’Malley was mixed up in any way with Russia.
It’s also true that Russian accounts played up attacks on Clinton and attacks on Sanders in efforts to inflame passions. Everyone who continues to traffic in these attacks and participates in spreading false narratives today is doing their dirty work by continuing to try to divide the Party. This diary is a fine example of that. The GRU couldn’t do a better job if they’d penned it.
3. One of the bogus narratives the Russian troll accounts and bots are pushing now is that Bernie was somehow compromised or otherwise in league with Russia and thus he vetoes sanctions against them.
This one’s a real hoot. If you look at the Senate, there’s no one more committed to opposing kleptocratic oligarchy than Bernie Sanders — but, sure, he’s made his bed with Putin…? They pull out his sanctions voting record. I’ve been debunking this sh*t on Twitter for months now. I guess it’s time to talk about it here…
In 2012, Sanders was joined by the 3 Dems who have been most hawkish on Russia. Levin and Reed didn’t like the GOP’s sanctions bill, because they didn’t think it went far enough. It should have applied to activities throughout the globe. Whitehouse didn’t say why he opposed it, but he did. Perhaps it was because the Obama Administration also opposed it and had aired the idea of vetoing it. Bernie didn’t explain his no vote, but it’s almost certainly because the bill was a classic GOP bait-and-switch.
It looked like a sanctions bill, but it also granted PNTR (permanent Normal Trade Relations) status to Russia, even though they weren’t in the WTO and entitled to what the WTO calls most favored nation status. Bernie’s not a big fan of free trade pacts, and this one wasn’t even a negotiation. It just gave Russia this plum without extracting any concessions for US business. One might ask why more Democrats didn’t oppose the bill, but big business wanted it and it was stealthy enough to not get real opposition. So, it’s no surprise he voted against it.
In 2017, Sanders and Rand Paul were the only Senators to vote “no: on a bill that ostensibly was meant to impose additional sanctions on Russia. Why? At least in Bernie’s case, the reason was abundantly clear. It’s because the GOP stuck in a second part to the bill, to reimpose sanctions on Iran, effectively killing the US participation in what had been the Obama Administration’s most important foreign policy achievement. Instead of asking why Bernie voted against it, we should ask why every Democratic Senator was so quick to erase Obama’s signature, the Iran nuclear deal. I mean, the answer’s clear. They do what the Israel lobby wants.
You can argue whether the Senators do this out of their own support for the Likud gov’t and, I guess, their apparent belief that we should be going to war against Iran. I’m not going into that debate, but that’s why no Democrat stood up to demand a clean Russia sanctions bill. They didn’t hesitate even though the bill also scuttled US participation in the inspections regime and support of the nuke deal The only Senator who stood up for Obama’s policy was the one some say isn’t a Democrat: Bernie Sanders.
Those critics of Sanders’ vote there supporting Obama’s initiative are many of the same people who rankle at his criticisms of the ACA and some other Obama policies he doesn’t find progressive enough. Yet, they have no criticism for the 47 Dems who did vote to scuttle the Iran deal — who didn’t stand with Bernie to demand a clean Russia sanctions vote.
Then there was the vote last month to block Trump’s attempt to lift sanctions on Deripaska. There were 57 votes to consider the motion — to begin debate. Bernie Sanders was one. Kirsten Gillibrand wasn’t because she went to NY to be on with Stephen Colbert. Even with the vote the next day, it was abundantly clear the cloture vote would not get the 60 votes it needed. Bernie had a prior engagement — with over 30 women who’d come to D.C. in the middle of the week to talk about sexual harassment and gender equity issues during the 2016 campaign. The vote --I’m not going to suggest that Sen. Schumer deliberately called it a time that Sanders couldn’t be there — but the vote was at a time when Sanders believed he needed to be across town to listen to the women who’d come to town to talk to him and his future campaign leaders. His spokesman made clear that Sanders would have voted if needed and would have voted to continue the sanctions if the cloture vote had won.
The idea that there’s some sinister connection with Russia or even that Bernie opposes the sanctions is made up — cut out of whole cloth — with no factual basis. Just innuendo, twisting his votes in a sinister, malicious way, frankly.
This is so typical of the smears on Bernie lately. They’re shameless misrepresentations of the circumstances, creating all sorts of innuendo. None of the elected Democrats think that Bernie was involved in anything sinister. All the other candidates speak very highly of Bernie. So, what the hell is it with so many Clinton supporters that they race to share the most malicious gossip, and present it as fact?
I mean, it could be mostly Russian bots and trolls, but when I see a Rec List diary promoting the same scandalous nonsense, I have to believe that there are a decent number of real Americans that are happy to believe this crap, or at least to help spread it to others.
This stuff is really on a par with Pizzagate level insanity. It’s not child molestation, but it’s about selling out the entire country...to kleptocratic, murderous billionaire oligarchs. Bernie and the Billionaire Oligarchs. That makes a lot of sense.
Yes. the Russians interfered and probably hurt Clinton’s campaign. It doesn’t follow that Sanders was involved in that. To imply that Sanders involvement is evident or can be presumed is an argument made in bad faith. It is as bad as or worse than any of the fake news that was deployed to hurt Clinton in 2016. That many Democrats are willfully and intentionally doing that now to hurt Bernie is just disgusting. Deplorable. I imagine that folks back in St. Petersburg are raising glasses of champagne to toast their handiwork — that it’s reached as far as the Rec List on Daily Kos.
Deplorable.