The Bernie menace: It never stops!

A tweet from the "Mueller, she wrote" podcast:

The house judiciary and intelligence committees have officially CLOSED the three-year investigation into Hillary’s emails

ZERO indictments
ZERO felonies
ZERO arrests
ZERO convictions

Mueller has nabbed 38 people or entities with over 200 felonies. 52 are “collusion” #winning

To this day, I keep running into people who say that those emails contained classified information. The only message accidentally marked "classified" at the time was a piece of piffle concerning Malawi -- a message which contained no information not available online.

It is perhaps history's greatest irony that Hillary was defeated because so many people (including Bernie Sanders) accused her of treating classified information carelessly. Trump was the pick of Vladimir Putin, and virtually all of his cronies are tied to or beholden to Russian oligarchs. (The latest example.) His administration has communicated in hilariously insecure ways. The acting Secretary of Defense will soon be Patrick Shanahan, whose own stance toward Russia is unnerving.

Clinton-hate is a disease that has cost this country much. A recent DU post reminded us of this important post-election 2016 piece by Kurt Eichenwald: "The Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them the Presidential Election."

A certain kind of liberal makes me sick. These people traffic in false equivalencies, always pretending that both nominees are the same, justifying their apathy and not voting or preening about their narcissistic purity as they cast their ballot for a person they know cannot win. I have no problem with anyone who voted for Trump, because they wanted a Trump presidency. I have an enormous problem with anyone who voted for Trump or Stein or Johnson—or who didn’t vote at all—and who now expresses horror about the outcome of this election. If you don’t like the consequences of your own actions, shut the hell up.

Which leads back to the main point: Awash in false conspiracy theories and petulant immaturity, liberals put Trump in the White House. Trump won slightly fewer votes than Romney did in 2012—60.5 million compared with 60.9 million. On the other hand, almost 5 million Obama voters either stayed home or cast their votes for someone else. More than twice as many millennials—a group heavily invested in the “Sanders was cheated out of the nomination” fantasy—voted third-party. The laughably unqualified Jill Stein of the Green Party got 1.3 million votes; those voters almost certainly opposed Trump; if just the Stein voters in Michigan had cast their ballot for Clinton, she probably would have won the state. And there is no telling how many disaffected Sanders voters cast their ballot for Trump.

It has been established beyond the point of reasonable debate that the Russians supported Sanders and Jill Stein. Why presuppose that Stein and Sanders were unaware of what was going on? Why aren't we investigating bird-brain Bernie and "Pig" Stein for collusion?

Sanders' choice of Tad Devine and his ongoing refusal to reveal his taxes certainly give us legitimate grounds for suspicion. We all know that Stein was there when Michael Flynn gave a dinner serenade to Vladimir Putin. She misappropriated funds intended for the 2016 recount.

Bernie Sanders, if nominated, would lose all 50 states, including Vermont. That's why the Trumpers (and the Russians) are doing everything they can to insure that Sanders wins the nomination.

Eichenwald's 2016 piece includes some important words about Bernie -- words which deserve more attention:

I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

In my own piece, written before the election, I predicted that the Republicans would get hold of such a video. Looks like I was right. Please note: Bernie Sanders has never challenged this Eichenwald claim, first published two years ago.

Before you try to take me to school on this topic, know this: Back in the '80s, I opposed Reagan's various interventions in Central America, and participated in several stateside events. I know that rhetoric tended to get out of hand during that era. But even then, when I had all the impetuousness of youth, I would never have lingered at a rally where things like that were shouted. Any American who appeared on camera on such an occasion should have understood that he had just forfeited any chance of running for high office in this country.

I'm surprised that Bernie has made it this far without that video coming to light. Trump is no doubt holding it in reserve. And that's not the only piece of ammo...

The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick.

Five damning videos. One of them, I suspect, will place him in support of the Iranian revolution.

That's why the Trumpers (and the Russians) are doing everything they can to insure that Sanders wins the nomination. I'll say it again: Sanders will lose all 50 states, including Vermont. He will tarnish the Democratic brand forever.

If Bernie gets the nod, I will support Trump. Better obvious treason than the sneaking kind; better a wolf in wolf's clothing than a wolf in sheep's clothing.

In an ideal world, Donnie and Bernie would share the same cell.

The Sanders movement continues to work tirelessly to undermine the Democratic party. Tellingly, Sanders has done absolutely nothing to leash his mad dogs; he has never denounced Cassandra Fairbanks and Lord H.A. H.A. and all the other Sanders supporters who have outed themselves as Trumpers.

Remember when the Berners smeared Kamala Harris? In 2017, Sanders led the charge to smear Al Franken.

And now the Berners are going after Beto O'Rourke.

“Reading Karl Marx is cool,” said Nomiki Konst, a Sanders loyalist and candidate for New York City public advocate, to NBC. “Doing a livestream while you’re doing your laundry is a gimmick.” The comment sums up the left’s well-grounded fear that Sanders’s hard-core ideological appeal can be easily disarmed with personal charisma.

Has Konst or any other leading Berner actually sat down and read Capital? I did so circa 1980, at a time when displaying any sort of intellectual curiosity was considered the opposite of cool. (To see what I mean, watch pretty much any movie or TV show produced that year.) I also read The Wealth of Nations and a whole lotta John Kenneth Galbraith.

Intellectual curiosity has nothing to do with coolness, and praising Karl Marx has nothing to do with winning elections in the United States. Sorry, but that's the way it is. Either these dimwits refuse to comprehend political reality or they genuinely want Trump to win. Probably the latter.

Me? I'm a Beto fan -- now. Wasn't before. But when the Berners went after the guy, I knew who deserved my support. Bernie fan David Sirota recently tried to smear Beto as a tool of Big Oil, even though the accusation is a canard. (I can recall when Sirota was an honored guest on Al Franken's radio show. What happened to that guy?)

As for that livestream "gimmick": In the current era, all politics is digital. Sorry, but that's the way it is.