Bernie Sanders is the Devil

Bernie Sanders is the Devil.

I had a conversation this afternoon with a loved one of mine who reads the New York Times, and Bernie Sanders is the Devil.

I’ve just had it with these Bernie Bros. And Bernie Sanders is the Devil.

Bernie Sanders may have been endorsed by AOC. And Pramila Jayapal. And Sean King. (Among many, many others.) He may have drawn a crowd, with AOC, of 26,000 in Queens. But his only supporters are the White Bernie Bros (who cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election), and Bernie Sanders is the Devil.

Hillary Clinton may have supported destroying Libya and, de facto, handing it over to warlords. The War in Iraq. The 1994 Crime Bill. She may have failed to campaign in Michigan during the general election (and there may have been outright Jim Crow tactics employed to suppress the Black vote in Detroit); run a terrible campaign; and only secured the Democratic nomination through a highly-corrupt (one might almost say rigged) Democratic primary process, but Bernie Sanders is responsible for her loss (and the President it gave our great nation), and for that reason, among others, he is the Devil.

Bernie Sanders is the Devil. That is why he can be hands down the most popular politician in the United States and still barely get covered in the corporate media, until, in desperation, with Sanders leading the polls in the lead-up to the Iowa Caucus, that media at last turns on him in the open, because he is the Devil.

Bernie Sanders might barely pass for a moderate social democrat in the Scandinavian countries at which US Americans so love to marvel, but he is, nonetheless, the Devil.

The Democratic Party may be imploding (have already imploded?) as the Democratic Establishment seeks frantically, in a McCarthyite frenzy, to pin responsibility for its abject failure (in 2016; all across the country; in the Courts; morally) on anything (Russia! Please Russia!) or anyone (primarily Bernie) other than itselves. Not on its utter abandonment of the working class. Or on its wholesale neoliberalization. Or on its promulgation of false solutions to economic distress; inequality; racial injustice; the climate crisis.

Bernie Sanders is the Devil. In truth, I never really liked him personally. But I never met him personally either.

Bernie Sanders is the Devil, and he’s also very old. Even older than the other leading candidates, who are all old (in our gerontocracy, Amy Klobuchar, at 59, seems downright youthful!). In our white supremacy, he doesn’t look any whiter than our other leading candidates, who are all white. (Andrew Yang can’t even get a mention these days.) He doesn’t look less white than Joe Biden, who, um, “come[s] out of the Black community.”

Bernie Sanders is the Devil, which is why, devil that he is, he tempted Elizabeth Warren in private with his outrageous claims (claims which stand in clear contradiction to his own public statements, his past actions, and, in fact, his whole record) that courageous CNN was left to heroically publicize, sans evidence, only coincidentally, the night before the final (and CNN-broadcasted) Democratic debate.

But I think you get the point. Bernie Sanders may (still) be the most popular politician in the United States. He may stand the best chance of defeating the omnicidal buffoon in the White House. He may have, by far, the most consistent record of principled commitment to social justice of any of the remaining Democratic candidates; and the most compelling vision for confronting the climate crisis; and the clearest position in support of, among other things, Medicare for All. He may be the best available answer to all that ails a Democratic Party that has abandoned everything it once stood for in an unwinnable race to the bottom with a Republican Party increasingly intent on the destruction of the human species.

He may be all that (and a bag of chips, to use an expression not half as dated as every other sentence that comes out of the current Democratic “frontrunners” mouth), but he’s a socialist, and so the Devil, and for that reason, must be stopped. The New York Times told me so.

So just remember, about Bernie Sanders (aka, the Devil): “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done.” I look forward to the CNN interview when, challenged with this assertion, Bernie Sanders defends his record, only to have the interviewer turn to Hillary Clinton (waiting in the wings) to ask, “And when Bernie was getting nothing done… ?”

But this isn’t about Hillary Clinton and getting the War in Iraq, and the PATRIOT Act, and regime change in Libya done. This isn’t about Elizabeth Warren, who, among the current candidates, is the person I would second most like to see become our next president, and who will have my full support should she win the Democratic nomination. This is about Bernie Sanders, the socialist Jew from Brooklyn who for 40 years has been a voice of relative sanity in the wilderness of our toxic politics.

Bernie Sanders. The Devil. That’s who.

Postscript: No matter that the 2016 Sanders campaign sparked nationwide movements that number among the few authentically hopeful signs in our national politics. Devil!

No matter that Sanders actually vigorously campaigned on behalf of Clinton after losing the 2016 Democratic primary. Devil!

No matter that even Sanders is a creature of the military-industrial war machine, and has his own crimes in Iraq for which to account. Devil…