Bernie Sanders at war with the Democrats
In these ludicrous days of the seniority of the American Republic, the mind-numbing mediocrity of the liberal, fat-cat media and their failure to recognize the obvious continues to defy belief.
With a fine impartiality to patriots of true principle on the Right and Left alike, all the exceptionally well paid media pundits of the TV networks and the Washington and New York political pages refused to take either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders as serious challengers to a national consensus on policies that has impoverished and ruined the lives of scores of millions of Americans over the past 40 years and now threatens the well-being of hundreds of millions more.
Now, once again they cannot see the evidence as plain as the noses on their faces – Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is not going to give up his presidential campaign in July.
If – as now seems inevitable – Hillary Clinton and her soul-sister Debbie Wasserman Schultz continue to treat him and his millions of followers with complacent and condescending contempt, Sanders will simply walk out of the Philadelphia national convention and away from the entire Democratic Party and make an independent run for the presidency himself.
The evidence for this is so overwhelming, so abundant and so obvious that it would take many columns to detail it all.
Note simply for now this: In the face of the endless wheedling, passive-aggressive, and nauseatingly patronizing chorus from pundits and supposed party elders alike to abandon his crusade for the good of Democratic unity, Sanders has done the opposite.
He has doubled down and gone for broke.
The Vermont senator has intensified his criticisms not just of Hillary Clinton but of the entire Democratic Party establishment.
He has done so to a degree far beyond any criticisms supposed firebrand Donald Trump ever made against the GOP political establishment.
Sanders already has gone far, far further than Trump.
He has publicly and repeatedly criticized Wasserman Schultz and now he is about to cross the ultimate Rubicon – unleashing his own direct funding to boost her primary challenger in her safe Florida seat in the House of Representatives.
Even Donald Trump has not given a hint of going that far against House Speaker Paul Ryan in his remote Wisconsin eyrie.
Ryan, a classic passive aggressive backstabber if ever there was one, might yet face that fate if he plays his usual, preferred behind-the-scenes tricks to try and undermine Trump at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland come July.
For most of the past year, I confidently assumed, as did most others, that if there were to be protests, upheaval and chaos at either major national party convention this summer, the Republicans in Cleveland would be in the crosshairs.
Not so.
Live and learn.
The GOP rank and file has been happily – more or less – flocking behind Trump to a remarkable degree and while the old, setting–sun party elite loathes this development, they have, at least publicly, recognized they have to go along with it.
The elements bolting the party – neocons and Romney-Bush Dynasty elitists – are the very people who led it to ruin in 2008 by outraging every genuine conservative and Republican principle imaginable, and at least three-quarters of GOP core activists unite in saying good riddance to them.
But on the Democratic side, we see precisely the opposite dynamic occurring.
A political chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon is opening.
Hillary Clinton is too arrogant, rigid and stupid to take any of the actions needed to close it.
And Bernie Sanders does not want to.
Next: Why Bernie Sanders’ obsession with 1912 is the key to what he will do in 2016.
Top photo. Senator Sanders campaigning in Santa Monica, CA (YouTube)
Martin Sieff is a former senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and former Managing Editor, International Affairs for United Press International. Mr. Sieff is the author of “That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman’s Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs” (Wiley 2012) and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East” (Regnery, 2008). He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting.