Was Bernie a witting Trump/Putin agent?

Do you recall Cassandra Fairbanks, the curvaceous BernieBot superstar who whipped up so much Hillary-hate during the primaries? Louse Mensch wrote the following of her:

Meanwhile, Ms. Fairbanks was promoting every anti-American hacker, defined by the IC as Russian state hackers, known to mankind. She “loved” Guccifer 2. She fangirled over Wikileaks and the Russian asset Julian Assange. Fairbanks also pushed out co-ordinated Russian propaganda from Infowars and others during the election, including pizzagate and other Russian-organized propaganda spread by Mike Flynn and other Russian agents of influence. But with CWA she held personal meetings, photographing herself with Liverman and helping fund his defense in court.

She had a pretty good act going. For months and months, she whammied college-aged bros with two messages designed to capture their attention: Bernie or bust and Bust.

A former KGB agent once told an American: "We're a lot like you. You ask your young men to stand up for their country. We ask our young women to lie down for theirs." I'm not accusing Cassandra of "lying down" on the job, but she clearly appealed to similar instincts, and for a similar cause.

The "journalist" who wrote these "police the police" pieces for Addicting Info, now offers her wholehearted support to Donald Trump, the man who thinks that cops should employ harsh "stop and frisk" polices in black communities.

Check out her most recent photo:

That's Roger Stone, protege of Roy Cohn and king of the dirty tricksters, standing with her. Yes, a former Bernie-lover is palling around with the same guy who accused the Khan family of being part of a hideous Muslim conspiracy.

Has Stone ever before looked so cadaverous? Gotta admit, I dig the skull-n-crossbones braces. But Roger seems to have picked up Donnie's penchant for neckties that hang past the "meat" (to use a Stonian term, although I suspect that "green bean" might be more appropos). Roger considers himself an expert on sartorial elegance, yet most observers agree that he dresses the way Bozo the Clown might dress if he worked for the Genovese family. I fear that the hand on Cassandra's shoulder may have left a stain that defeated the dry cleaner's best efforts.

We now know that Russia was behind the Hill-hate flooding the BernieBro movement.

Professional presidential campaign staff for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) confirmed to the Huffington Post that Russian trolls were responsible for pushing out anti-Hillary Clinton memes and social media content.

The shocking series of interviews revealed large Facebook groups supporting Sanders were inundated with content from people with no ties to the regions in which the pages were located. Former reporter John Mattes explained that his San Diego page became overwhelmed with anti-Clinton memes with messages he’d never heard coming out of the Sanders campaign. Instead, they were memes alleging Clinton used body doubles and murdered political opponents.

I used to admire the hell out of Mattes. (Some of you may recall him from the Iran-contra days.) How could such a smart guy not see through Bernie? Sanders was obviously and demonstrably filthy dirty, as I proved here. If nominated, he would have lost all 50 states, as I proved here.

How filthy is he? This filthy:

Throughout the Democratic primary, the Sanders campaign was cited for FEC violations on three separate occasions including a mysterious $10 million donation from a single address in Washington, DC. Despite consistent calls for financial transparency on the campaign trail, the Sanders campaign was exceedingly secretive when it came to its own finances. After twice filing for extensions from the FEC, the Sanders campaign ultimately decided to forgo its final financial disclosure statement in June citing the fact that campaign was no longer active. This decision was accompanied by the news that Sanders himself had purchased a $575,000 home in August, much to the dismay of his loyal followers. The home would be the third residence for Sanders, someone who railed against a system that increasingly favored the millionaires and billionaires of our country.

Yet these financial gains for both Devine and Sanders would never have been possible had it not been for the millions of campaign contributions that came their way. And the only way to get campaign contributions is to convince your supporters you might actually have a chance to win. Luckily for Devine and Sanders, they had some foreign friends who were willing to step in. As reported by Rachel Maddow late on Tuesday, there existed an army of Russian bots who were weaponized to influence our election. Many of them took to various social media sites to discredit and disrupt Hillary Clinton's campaign and thus, energize potential Bernie Sanders supporters. Knowing that Clinton had been a target of right-wing media smears for a quarter-century, all the bots had to do was plant this seed to potential Sanders supporters, many of whom had no experience in politics, to get them onboard with the Sanders campaign. By doing this, Sanders and Devine were able to successfully pocket millions of dollars all while pretending to be champions of the common man.

In other words, Filthy Bernie personally profited from all of that Putin-brand Hill-hate. That's why the admirable guy who said "Nobody cares about your damned emails" morphed into the unprincipled huckster who wailed "EEEmails EEEmails EEEmails" like a European ambulance siren.

Here's the big question: Was Bernie in on it all along? Did he know he was helping Team Trump?

The question remains relevant, because Sanders now has insanely high approval ratings. Joe Biden calls Sanders "the conscience of the Senate." The conscience? I don't think that Jiminy Cricket would have hired Tad Devine after Devine knowingly worked to keep a murderer in power. Only a louse would have done a thing like that.

I think that Bernie knew the score. He's too smart not to have known. At no point has he ever denounced scuzzy operatives like Cassandra. At no point did he ever do anything to dissuade the BernieBros from erecting a cult of personality. At no point did he denounce the fake news stories that flooded Bernieland.

All of which brings us back to Roger Stone, the man with the death's head suspenders. I remind you once again of this precis of a passage from Stone's unpublished autobiography -- and as you read, keep in mind that these words were published in early 2014:

The fourth, and one of the most effective, is through fragmentation of the vote. There is, say, overwhelming support for candidate A, who will raise the minimum wage, versus candidate B, who won’t. You split this overwhelming vote by funding another candidate, who wants to raise the minimum wage even higher, and who chastises candidate A for compromising their principles and being beholden to business interests for not asking for a higher wage. Through a vote split, candidate B, the one who says he believes the condition of workers must be improved, but not through easy sounding solutions like a higher minimum wage, scores a victory.

A friend to this blog tells me that a radio personality in California recently referred to Stone as Roger Rock. I guess someone out there appreciated my comic strip "Roger Rock Meets the Bernie Bros."

Added note: I checked out Cassandra's twitter stream. As of this writing, her last tweet was issued in response to Jake Tapper. In my view, her message was quite defensible:

NO MORE INTERVENTIONS. Every time we do we leave a different mess. We do not need to be the world's police.

That was on April 5; she has not tweeted since. The next day, April 6, Dear Leader Donnie launched Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airbase.

Question: Will Cassandra instantly change her tune on Syria, after the robotic fashion of the American communists of the 1930s who stopped insulting Hitler the moment Uncle Joe signed the pact? Or will she retain her noninterventionist principles? If she chooses the latter path, I'll gain a certain respect for her, and may even apologize for some of the things I've written here. If she pivots on command and spews the new party line, she might as well start wearing a t-shirt bearing the word "WHORE."