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Democratic Pundits Are Starting To Blame Hillary’s Spectacular Failure On Bernie Sanders [Opinion]

By Caitlin Johnstone
Published on: 09:55 PST, Nov 15, 2016

They’ve realized that they can’t blame the Green Party candidate for their horrible candidate’s loss, so now they’re blaming Bernie Sanders.

In what is easily the single most infuriating thing that I have read since the election, TIME has published a pernicious scapegoating smear piece titled “And The 2016 Ralph Nader Award Goes To… Bernie Sanders,” wherein the author, Gil Troy, attempts to blame the colossal blunders and deceitful manipulations of the Clinton campaign and the elites of the Democratic Party on the very man these people and their pundits actively labored to sabotage, who also happens to be the very man who we all know (whether we admit it or not) would most certainly have crushed Donald Trump in a general election.

Troy, author of unapologetic corporate hack pieces published by TIME with such titular gems as “Understanding ‘Clintipathy’: A Pathological Hatred of the Clintons” and “Hillary Clinton Should Embrace Her Centrism,” seems to have done the math and realized that there’s no way to realistically blame Clinton’s epic crash and burn on the only progressive in the race, Jill Stein, who did not garner a significant number of votes that would have otherwise gone to Clinton. Rather than simply abandon that insipid strategy in favor of something anchored in truth and reality, however, Troy opts to travel back in time and retroactively blame Clinton’s pathetic flop as a candidate on Senator Bernie Sanders, who relentlessly campaigned for Clinton from the time he endorsed her in July until the general election last week.

Ironically twice using the word “vampire” to describe Sanders’ effect on the Clinton campaign, this individual attempts to spin Bernie’s highly effective appeal to the political left (called “the Democrats’ extreme flank” by Troy in a convenient omission of the reality that Sanders is essentially a centrist by global standards) as having had a negative impact upon Hillary’s campaign by forcing her to come across as somewhat less of a henchman for the one percent than she already is, heaven forbid.

“This dynamic followed a classic historical pattern. Sanders drew Clinton from the center toward the Democrats’ extreme flank,” Troy bloviated. “That shift paralleled Jimmy Carter’s leftward lurch when Ted Kennedy ran in 1980, and George H.W. Bush’s rightwing swerve when Pat Buchanan rebelled in 1992. Each time, the frontrunners felt forced to placate loyalists they should have been able to take for granted, while embracing extreme positions that haunted them during the general election campaign.”

“Placate loyalists they should have been able to take for granted.” Right, Gil. Because your elitist tribe of neoliberals are entitled to our votes, aren’t you? Progressives are just vote cattle that you herd into the polling slaughterhouse in November and then forget about, aren’t they?

Not once anywhere in his entire appalling article does Troy mention the vote-repressing tactics the Clinton campaign employed in the primaries or the illicit and Charter-violating collusion against Sanders by the DNC with the Clinton campaign and the corporate media, nor the stunning amount of corruption revealed in leaked documents from WikiLeaks, nor the fact that Clinton was under multiple FBI investigations, nor the leaked recording of her scoffing at progressives as naive basement dwellers, nor the fact that her feigned deference to the political left could never be believed by a population that knows she has “both a public and a private position.”

Not once did he mention any of these things. It can’t possibly have been that, could it Gil? It can only be that she tried to move too far to the left? Because it’s the year 2000 again and the progressive revolution hasn’t happened yet, right Gil?

Gil seems to think so. He must, or he wouldn’t be attempting to resurrect the obsolete disinformation tactic Democrats employed after their failures in the 2000 election cost them the White House in order to shore up party loyalty and kill their competition to the left in the Green Party. In a deluge of lies that have been thoroughly debunked time and time again by sources like this article by Disinfo, the Democrats and their bought-and-paid-for media muppets pounded home over and over again the bizarre narrative that Al Gore lost to George W. Bush not because he was an uninteresting Bill Clinton Mini-Me who ran such a horrible campaign on such an out-of-touch platform that millions of Democrats voted for the Republican candidate, but because Green Party candidate Ralph Nader got a few thousand votes in Florida. By hypnotizing the American people into this perspective through sheer rote repetition spoken by talking heads in an authoritative tone, they were able to stop U.S. politics from moving to the left and catching up with the rest of the western world in healthcare, education, infrastructure, social security, and wealth distribution.

In both cases, with Nader and with Sanders, the Democratic Party has attacked the political movement to the left with a barrage of deceit in order to keep those who as Troy says they “should be able to take for granted” from developing a spine and insisting on getting their way, like the Christian Right does with the Republicans.

And if Troy is spinning this lie, we may be sure that other neoliberal pundits will follow suit, just like they did in 2000. But I call this tactic obsolete for a reason; it’s not the year 2000 anymore. People can communicate with each other to an entirely unprecedented extent at an entirely unprecedented speed; as quickly as these lies are circulated, they are debunked. The internet has forever changed the way politics happen, and alternative media, social media, and WikiLeaks are wrestling more and more control of the public narrative away from the legacy media that used to monopolize it.

It’s kind of hilarious that they expect this tactic to work, honestly. They don’t realize that their ridiculous think tank brainchild will be memed to death before the weekend.

[Featured Image by Jacquelyn Martin/AP Images]

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