Category: Bernie Sanders

Elizabeth Warren’s Media Helpers Try to Revive Her Campaign at Bernie’s Expense

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Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate was so white that Antifa would punch it in the face, and moderators for CNN made it clear who they favored among the six white Democrats assembled on the Des Moines stage. We haven’t seen the memo from CNN chief Jeff Zucker, but it was obvious that the assignment was to (a) attack Bernie Sanders and (b) boost Elizabeth Warren. Perhaps many Sanders supporters — who saw their candidate get cheated out of the 2016 nomination by DNC insiders working for Hillary Clinton — will now agree with President Trump’s assessment of the media as “the enemy of the people.”

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass:

What CNN did to Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Democratic presidential debate — stabbing him with the gender card on behalf of a weakened Elizabeth Warren — was cheap and unfair.
And it was shameful. . . .
What happened on CNN in Iowa was bad for journalism. But it sure was good for Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.
Sanders, the authentic candidate on the left in this cycle, as he was in the last, was surging in the Iowa polls. Warren, also on the left, was fading, desperate and in full panic. She began waving her gender card on that dangerous Intersectionality Highway where Democrats, addicted to identity politics, often crack up.
Just before the debate, CNN ran a story portraying Sanders as misogynist who thinks a woman couldn’t be elected president. That’s ridiculous. He doesn’t believe that.
And at the CNN debate, moderator Abby Phillip took Warren’s gender card, fashioned it into a knife and stabbed Sanders just weeks before the Iowa caucuses.
“Sen. Sanders, CNN reported yesterday, and Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that?” Phillip asked of Sanders.
“Well,” Sanders said, “as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it.
“I don’t want to waste a whole lot of time on this, because this is what Donald Trump and maybe some of the media want,” Sanders added. . . .
Before Sanders was shivved, Democratic establishment candidate Biden looked lost and frail and unsure.
Biden was like some elderly Uncle Joe retiree in line at 4 p.m. for the early bird dinner with the free Jell-O.
But who remembers that after Warren pointedly refused to shake her “friend” Bernie’s hand? Biden wasn’t even touched by CNN’s debate moderators. His questions were wrapped in pillows.
You might think all this is a coincidence, but then, you might be a moron. . . .

Obviously it was not a coincidence: The CNN moderators were there to trash Sanders, support Warren and — by ginning up conflict between these two left-wingers — thereby help “moderate” Joe Biden in the Iowa caucuses, by preventing Bernie from surging to a solid victory on Feb. 4.

It’s media malpractice like this that causes people to believe in conspiracy theories — the fix is in and the game is rigged — because it doesn’t require any evidence to see what is happening in front of our eyes and realize that it could not be happening by mere coincidence. No, some actual human beings at CNN decided that this would be the script for the Iowa debate, and it’s plainly obvious that CNN is against Bernie Sanders just as much as it is obvious that CNN is against Donald Trump.

Elizabeth Warren to Bernie after debate:
“I think you called me a liar on national TV”

Was this narrative of Bernie being a sexist who doesn’t believe a woman can be president manufactured by the “fake news” media? It doesn’t matter — Bernie’s supporters recognize it as a dirty trick. Whatever it was that Bernie actually said to Warren in that meeting, the timing of the story in the run-up to Tuesday’s debate was clearly not a coincidence. The people in charge at CNN want Biden as the 2020 nominee, and anyone can look at the polls as an explanation of what happened Tuesday.

 

In early September, according the Real Clear Politics average of Iowa polls, Biden had a commanding lead in the state, 28.5%, with Warren and Sanders neck-and-neck in second place at 18% and 17.5% respectively. A month later, Warren moved into the lead (23% to Biden’s 18% by Oct. 1) but then, over the next six weeks, however, Warren faded badly while Pete Buttigieg surged to first place in Iowa. Then in December, Buttigieg began fading, and Bernie moved into first place as Warren dropped into fourth place. Who benefits from CNN’s promotion of Warren at the expense of Sanders? It’s not just Warren they’re helping, it’s Biden — the Democratic establishment candidate in the same sense that Hillary was the establishment candidate four years ago.

As I say, this kind of blatant manipulation by the media feeds into the paranoid mentality of the left-wing populists who support Sanders. Regardless of who wins Iowa, Bernie’s supporters now have more reason than ever to believe that a corrupt establishment is attempting to prevent their candidate from winning. If the only way Biden can get the nomination is to have CNN and other establishment media do his dirty work for him, what will that mean for Democrats in November?



 

Who Is Funding Anti-Semitism?

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One of the most remarkable claims the Left has made recently is that criticism of George Soros is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Yet it is not a theory, but a matter of fact that Soros is an enemy of Israel, and that the left-wing billionaire has funded efforts to undermine Jewish conservatives and sabotage critics of radical Islam:

A massive hack of socialist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations [in August 2016] suggests that his various nonprofit organizations are little more than fronts for his many political activities. . . .
The hack by a group called DC Leaks, includes 2,576 files from various Soros groups from 2008 to 2016. . . .
In one of the purloined memos from 2011, titled “Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civil Discourse,” a nonprofit Soros group proposes conducting opposition research on a number of highly prominent American critics of radical Islam, including Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney and Robert Spencer. It also targeted conservative activists and intellectuals David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Cliff May and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney. All of them are strongly pro-Israel and have warned about the threat of radical Islam.
The memo suggests that the research was outsourced to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a leftist think tank that has “received millions of dollars in grants from Soros’ groups,” the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports.
Oh yes, CAP also happens to have been founded by John Podesta, Hillary’ Clinton’s campaign chief. . . .
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post notes that some of the hacked emails show that the Soros Open Society Foundations’ stated goal was “challenging Israel’s racist and anti-democratic policies,” in part by “questioning Israel’s reputation as a democracy.” This is an old Soros trick: He spends money to delegitimize governments and others with whom he disagrees. . . .
In yet another revelation from the doc-dump, a memo called the “List of European Elections 2014 Projects” details the elaborate efforts of Soros’ well-funded global network to manipulate election outcomes in Europe. The memo includes over 90 Soros projects in Europe to influence election outcomes.

If it hadn’t been for Trump winning the 2016 election, Soros would have an ally in the White House, and much of the extremist rhetoric from the Left — smearing Trump supporters as anti-Semites and racists — is driven by the propaganda machinery that Soros has funded. Ace of Spades has remarked, “It’s weird that George Soros funds antisemitism and then cries ‘Antisemitism!’ when he’s criticized.”

Despite this well-documented history, no one on the Left criticized the Soros-funded, Clinton-connected Center for American Progress until they made the mistake of attacking Bernie Sanders:

Presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is slamming the Center for American Progress (CAP) for its ties to big banks and big corporations and claims the leftist think tank that supported Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign is trying to derail his 2020 bid for the White House.
“The Center for American Progress is an organization whose massive annual budget is bankrolled by billionaires and corporate executives that profit from finance, pharmaceutical companies, fossil fuels, and sending American jobs overseas,” the statement from the campaign says. . . .
“They also took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel pumping United Arab Emirates while the country was bombing innocent civilians in Yemen — a war Bernie has led the fight to end,” the statement says. . . .
The email says, in part:

This week, an organization that is the epitome of the political establishment — the Center for American Progress (CAP) — unleashed and promoted an online attack video against Bernie. . . .
CAP’s leadership has been pretty upfront about their disdain for Bernie — and for all of us. They see our political revolution as a threat to their privilege and influence.

 

Establishment Democrats are freaking out that Bernie might get their nomination, but why? He’s not more left-wing than, say, Pete Buttigieg. Is it because Bernie is old? Joe Biden is old, too, but there’s no “Stop Biden” movement. Or could it be because Bernie is Jewish? And notice who gets quoted by the New York Times:

“There’s a growing realization that Sanders could end up winning this thing, or certainly that he stays in so long that he damages the actual winner,” said David Brock, the liberal organizer, who said he has had discussions with other operatives about an anti-Sanders campaign and believes it should commence “sooner rather than later.” . . .
Mr. Brock, who supported Mrs. Clinton’s past presidential bids, said “the Bernie question comes up in every fund-raising meeting I do.”

Yes, David Brock, head of the Soros-funded Media Matters, but far be it from me to suggest that this is a conspiracy against Bernie.



 

War Between Bernie and the Clinton Machine Going Thermonuclear

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Back story: Bernie Sanders believes he was cheated out of the 2016 Democrat nomination because the fix was in at DNC headquarters. Meanwhile, Hillary blames Sanders and his supporters for sabotaging her election chances against Trump. It doesn’t matter whether these beliefs are actually true, what matters is that each side is filled with a profound hatred of the other, and so the war between them is still raging:

The New York Times published an article Monday about Neera Tanden — a former top aide and adviser for Hillary Clinton who currently leads the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank. The story focuses largely on Tanden’s relationship with Faiz Shakir, former chief editor of ThinkProgress (which is owned by CAP), and whether there’s any indication that Tanden has a physically aggressive way of interacting with people.
The Times reports that when Tanden set Clinton up for an interview with Shakir back in 2008, she thought the interview would be an easily handled softball. Instead, Shakir asked tougher questions than Tanden anticipated, so they ended up having a confrontation where she touched him in some way.
From the report:

Ms. Tanden responded by circling back to Mr. Shakir after the interview and, according to a person in the room, punching him in the chest.
“I didn’t slug him, I pushed him,” a still angry Ms. Tanden corrected in a recent interview

Shakir has left his old job to run Sanders’ 2020 campaign, but tensions between Shakir and Tanden rose up again after ThinkProgress published a critical article about Sanders in light of the news that the senator is a millionaire.

In case you didn’t know it, the Center for American Progress was founded by key Clinton aide John Podesta, with funding from George Soros, and thus the whole operation is part of Team Clinton. So what this New York Times article represents is Sanders going thermonuclear in a bid to destroy every remnant of the Team Clinton infrastructure.

All the “experts” on the Democrat side (most of whom are connected to the Clinton machine, in one way or another) believe Bernie Sanders can’t possibly defeat Trump, so they’re doing everything they can to stop him. Ask yourself why there’s been so much enthusiasm in the liberal media for Pete Buttigieg. That’s got all the hallmarks of a Team Clinton propaganda operation. After the attempt to launch Beto O’Rourke as a “rock star” candidate fizzled, Team Clinton looked around for some other available weapon to hurl at Bernie — they really hate Bernie — and apparently Buttigieg got the nod. Another hallmark of a Team Clinton operation? It’s failing. Despite everything his enemies have done to try to boost other candidates, Bernie’s support keeps growing. He’s gained more than five points, from 16.5% to 21.7% in the Real Clear Politics national average, in just the past couple of months.

This is very good news for Republicans, by the way. Team Clinton’s meddling in the Democrat primary campaign will only add to the paranoid cult mentality among Bernie’s supporters, intensifying their commitment to their candidate, so that if anyone else gets the 2020 nomination, at least one-fifth of Democrats will believe that Bernie got cheated again. Anything that convinces the rank-and-file that the Democrat Party is essentially corrupt — yeah, that helps Trump.

“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”



 

News Media: Our Moral Superiors

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David Sirota is a “journalist” in the same sense that George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews are “journalists,” i.e., Democrat political operatives employed by the liberal media. Like all members of the media elite, journalists think of themselves as Our Moral Superiors. They’re better than us, and expect us to be grateful for their tutelage, as they condescend to share their enlightenment with us.

In his role as a columnist for The Guardian, Sirota played the grassroots populist, taking aim at “corporate-friendly Democrats” who “protect the status quo and serve corporate donors,” naming two potential 2020 Democrat presidential candidates — Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — among these villains. In December, Sirota twice wrote Guardian columns attacking Beto O’Rourke, first for having “frequently voted for Republican legislation” in Congress and then for being the favored candidate of “Washington elites.”

Remember, David Sirota is morally superior to you and me. He cares about the Little People. He’s got journalistic ethics:

Shortly before he gave speeches launching his 2020 campaign earlier this month, Bernie Sanders emailed his supporters, urging them to “do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents — talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space.”
What he didn’t include was that one of the people already advising him and helping him write those launch speeches is one of his most famously aggressive supporters online.
Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents — all without disclosing his work with Sanders — and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.
Sirota’s hiring as a senior adviser and speechwriter was announced by the Sanders campaign on Tuesday morning after The Atlantic contacted the campaign and inquired about the undisclosed role Sirota held while attacking other Democrats.
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, confirmed in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that Sirota had been in an advisory role prior to his hiring on March 11. “He was advising beforehand,” Shakir said, explaining that Sirota’s informal work for Sanders goes back months.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.) In other words, Sirota has “informally” been a member of the Sanders campaign team since last fall and, while this doesn’t necessarily mean that Sanders was paying Sirota’s bills, it does mean that Sirota’s attacks on O’Rourke and other 2020 Democrat hopefuls were disingenuous and unethical, as his conflict of interest was undisclosed. Notice also that as soon as The Atlantic started asking questions, Sirota was “announced” as a campaign staffer. What this tells you is that Sirota’s services were considered sufficiently valuable to the Sanders campaign that they couldn’t afford to dump him, so they were forced to be honest about his role as a hired attack dog.

They are Our Moral Superiors.



 

Sanders Aide Who Used ‘Dual Allegiance’ Smear Against Jews Is an Illegal Alien

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Interesting developments:

A spokeswoman for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign apologized Tuesday after questioning whether the “American-Jewish community has a dual allegiance to the state of Israel” — a comment condemned by Jewish leaders across the political spectrum as having anti-Semitic overtones.
“In a conversation on Facebook, I used some language that I see now was insensitive. Issues of allegiance and loyalty to one’s country come with painful history,” Belén Sisa, Sanders’ national deputy press secretary, told POLITICO. “At a time when so many communities in our country feel under attack by the president and his allies, I absolutely recognize that we need to address these issues with greater care and sensitivity to their historical resonance, and I’m committed to doing that in the future.”

Belén Sisa is an illegal alien “who says she was brought to this country illegally from Argentina by her parents at age six [and] is currently protected from deportation under President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.” So whose “allegiance” is really at issue here? Doesn’t her defiance of American law bring Belén Sisa’s “allegiance” into question? Can we have her deported now, please?

By the way — and I guess this as good a place as any to insert this caveat — I don’t consider it automatic proof of anti-Semitism to criticize Israel or to question the U.S.-Israel alliance. Modern conservatism’s intellectual godfather Russell Kirk famously said in a 1988 Heritage Foundation speech: “Not seldom has it seemed, as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Kirk’s remark could be seen as directed toward the obsession with Middle East policy typical of some Jewish conservatives, which subsequently were pushed to the fore in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War. In both of those conflicts, of course, Republicans rallied in support of U.S. military intervention for reasons not necessarily related to Israel, although this didn’t stop the Left from smearing the GOP as captive to “neocon warmongers.” My own opinions in this regard are nuanced. I am, and always have been, strongly pro-Israel, dating back at least as far as the 1967 Six-Day War, when I was only 7 years old.

Even as a boy, I understood that Israel was fighting for its existence against implacable enemies and, being raised in a Southern Baptist church on Bible stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Daniel and other Old Testament heroes, certainly I cheered the Israelis in their defense of their ancient homeland. Furthermore, the 1967 war and the subsequent 1973 Yom Kippur War were fought in the shadow of the Cold War struggle against communism, and we knew what side the Commies were on, because Israeli’s enemies were armed with Soviet weapons.

To put it quite simply: If being a Zionist is a crime, I plead guilty, and if killing Communists is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Nevertheless, I understand that debates about public policy require me to consider that people who disagree with me (and who are therefore wrong) may be motivated by sincere concerns that must be taken seriously. One of these concerns is that, in our zeal to prevent Israel from being destroyed by its enemies, the United States has adopted a sort of latter-day imperialism, waging “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace,” as Russell Kirk warned in a 1991 Heritage speech. Unless conservatives are willing to disavow Kirk, we cannot go around demanding that anyone who voices similar concerns be fired or purged. Obviously, in an age where the likes of Ilhan Omar are embraced by Democrats, there is reason to be alarmed by evidence that dangerous anti-Semitic tendencies are emerging on the Left. At the same time, however, we must be careful not to conflate reasonable policy criticisms with irrational hatred.

Nothing is more likely to provoke anti-Semitic paranoia than efforts to banish from public discourse anyone who questions U.S. policy toward Israel. It is predictable that Jew-haters will point to such attempted suppression as evidence of a sinister Zionist conspiracy. And I would be amiss if I did not warn my readers to beware of agents-provocateurs who provoke online conflicts around such issues. There are all kinds of shadowy “false-flag” trolls out there, who may be political activists or partisan operatives seeking to create evidence of right-wing anti-Semitism. It is also known that various law-enforcement and intelligence agencies engage in undercover operations online, so that for all you know, the Internet account that constantly spews Jew-hating nonsense is an FBI informant or an intelligence agent for a foreign government.

Speaking of things I learned growing up as a Southern Baptist, did you know the Bible repeatedly warns us not to be deceived? Satan is a liar and a false accuser (cf., Revelation 12:9), and the Christian therefore should always be vigilant about deception. “Beware of false prophets,” Jesus warned his disciples (Matthew 7:15) and Paul warned: “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit” (Colossians 2:8).

We live in dangerous times, and deception is everywhere. Be vigilant!



 

Iowa Poll Shows More Than Half of Democrat Voters Support Old White Guys

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Former Vice President Joe Biden leads the latest Iowa poll with 27%, followed by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders with 25% — between them accounting for more than half the support among likely Democrat caucus voters in the 2020 presidential field. Biden is 76, Sanders is 77, and so the Iowa results may damage the idea that Democrats are the vibrant, young, inclusive party of women and minorities. And even though the third-place candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (9%), is female, her minority status has been shown to be bogus and she’s 69 years old. These three old white people are supported by 61% of Democrats in the Iowa poll.

Sen. Kamala Harris has 7% and another white guy, former Texas Rep. Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, has 5% and every other Democrat candidate is down there at the bottom of the Iowa poll, gasping for air.

It’s still very early, and Biden is not yet even an official candidate, although it has been reported that he’s “95% sure” he’s in for 2020, but Democrat strategists must be starting to worry about whether they can stop President Trump’s re-election with any of the candidates now in the field. This continues a problem that became apparent for Democrats in 2016. The Obama years were a wipeout for Democrats at the state and local level. Beginning in November 2009, when Republicans captured the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, continuing through the Tea Party election of 2010 and on into 2014, the GOP defeated scores of incumbent Democrats in House, Senate, gubernatorial and legislative elections. The damage was particularly brutal on so-called “Blue Dog” moderate Democrats, forced to defend Obama’s unpopular policies in swing states like Ohio and Florida. This had the effect of depleting the “bench” of Democrats who might have contended with Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination, so that only the socialist Sanders, with his fanatical base of young left-wing supporters, was able to challenge the anointed establishment front-runner in the Democrat primary campaign.

Once the candidates start having televised debates — the first are scheduled for late June/early July — we can expect these early poll numbers to shift substantially, but there is a larger and deeper problem for Democrats. While the nation is rather evenly split, with Trump’s support around 45% and the hardcore anti-Trump vote at about the same level, the anti-Trump vote is unevenly distributed. Six states — California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland — accounted for more than 22 million (about one-third) of Hillary’s votes in 2016. In those states, Hillary won by an average margin of nearly 2-to-1 — 65.6% to Trump’s 34.4% — but in the remaining 44 states, Trump’s vote total (51.3 million) easily exceeded Clinton’s total (43.6 million).

Because Democratic voters are mainly concentrated in a few urban states, there is a disconnect between the party’s message and the rest of the country, including states like Iowa, which Trump flipped from blue to red in 2016. Despite every disadvantage Trump may face in his re-election bid, the 2020 race will ultimately come down to a head-to-head contest between the Republican incumbent and his Democrat challenger — unless, of course, the networks decide that a third-party candidate like Howard Schultz deserves a place on the debate stage. Frankly, that’s the best hope that Democrats have. None of their 2020 candidates is likely to defeat Trump in a two-way race, and in fact, he could win re-election by an impressive margin. Democrats who still believe they are on “the right side of history” may be in for another ugly surprise in November 2020.


 

Hiroshima for the DNC: @DonnaBrazile Devastates Democrat Corruption

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Democrats don’t just deceive, cheat and swindle the voters and taxpayers, they also deceive, cheat and swindle each other:

My predecessor [as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee], Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.
Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party — she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. . . .
The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt. . . .
Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt — $15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign — and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance. . . .

There’s a lot more where that came from. This is devastating beyond words. Everybody’s talking about how Brazile has confirmed the suspicion of Bernie Sanders that the Democrat primary process was basically rigged for Hillary, but the larger revelations are even worse:

  1. Democrats have been squandering their donors’ money in much the same way they routinely squander taxpayers’ money;
  2. The triumph of Obama’s two-term presidency, which should have yielded a fund-raising windfall for the DNC, instead left the party more than $20 million in debt;
    and
  3. The DNC’s indebtedness was exploited by the Clinton campaign to defraud Democrat primary voters.

It was this perception of a rigged nomination process that made Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” charge resonate with working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. And so the corruption of the Democrat Party — profligate spending, irresponsible management and insider favoritism at DNC headquarters — was a major cause of their devastating defeat last year. These revelations confirm the suspicions that a lot of grassroots Democrats have had all along, and will make the party’s recovery a very difficult prospect. If an appealing left-wing third-party candidate emerges before 2020, that might be R.I.P. for Democrats.