The Fall of Comrade Sanders

Val Perry Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 28, 2017

The marriage of Jane and Bernie Sanders has always been a love triangle. No, not the fantasy-rapists; Mother Russia holds a special place in both their hearts. They even honeymooned in the U.S.S.R., because what could be more romantic than standing in line for bread and toilet paper? Yes, yes, I know it was part of a delegation, but given his love for Castro and the Sandanistas, there seems to be something about totalitarian dictatorships that gives Comrade Bernout a real hardon.

And, damn, for such pure and uncorrupted folks, this salt-of-the-earth Everyman and Everywoman seem to be dogged by financial scandal. Mrs. Sanders 2.5 is now herself the subject of — oh the delicious irony — an FBI investigation into her own financial shenanigans.

The most charitable explanation is that then-president Jane Sanders ran Burlington College into the fucking ground through sheer ineptitude and hubris. That is, if you’re inclined to feel charitably toward someone who takes issue with “politicizing” a hundred thousand gun deaths every single goddamn year. I’m not. Do you know how hard it is for a single individual to fuck up a college that bad? I taught in high ed for 18 years, and I’m telling you it’s harder than it sounds. Apparently she “overstated” pledged donations when applying for a loan to purchase the college’s North Avenue campus. But hey, anyone can mistake $676,000 for $2.6 million, right? Anyhow, who cares about trivial details when your husband is a U.S. Senator who can twist arms to help you commit bank fraud.

The following year she abandoned ship with a $200,000 life preserver. After the college sank, the Vermont Agency of Education took possession of all its records and refused a request to turn them over pursuant to a federal probe, claiming it was “in the process of returning the records to the college.” Instead it destroyed them. That’s some shady shit, and it absolutely deserves to be investigated.

You’d think Bernie would be more concerned about his own wife corruption than Obama’s speaking fees, but as usual, he’ll say and do pretty much anything to deflect attention away from his own shady finances.

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Are you sick to fucking death of hearing about the tax returns yet? Me too. Are we going to stop demanding them? Not a chance in hell — not until Mr. Champion of the Common Man proves he pays taxes like the rest of us, Or, better yet, that he has no ties to hostile foreign powers bent on infiltrating our system of governance. No, I’m not talking about Trump.

Doublethink alert: demanding Trump’s tax returns but insisting Bernie’s don’t matter.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why someone — especially a self-styled socialist hero of the working class — would hide their tax returns:

They don’t want their adoring fan base to find out just how much cold hard cash they’re actually raking in, or They don’t want to end up in prison.

I’m pretty confident Mitt Romney was in the former category. He was slow to release his taxes too, but it never even occurred to me to suspect he might be a fucking traitor. It’s far more likely he wanted to avoid flack for his kajillions stashed offshore, exploiting a few barely-legal tax loopholes, etc. I was confident, however, that he wasn’t a foreign agent spying out our weaknesses to help a genocidal dictator stab us in our soft underbelly.

That concern isn’t as tinfoil-hatty as once it seemed. You know what’s a good way to prove you’re not an operative of a hostile foreign government? Releasing your fucking tax returns, asshat. [Edit: ALL OF THEM, not just page 2 of your 1040 from 2014.

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The Steele dossier states that “agents/facilitators within the Democratic party structure itself” played a key role in the sabotage of Clinton’s campaign. Assange has claimed that some of the Wikileaks documents were provided by a disgruntled DNC insider.

It might — might — be a stretch to claim Sanders himself directly colluded with Russia. Sure, he hired Tad Devine knowing he had a long history of working for foreign dictators, including the pro-Russian president of Ukraine (as had Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort). Sure, his campaign engaged in some Russian-style hacking of its own. And sure, yeah, one in four rabid Berniebots and trolls turned out to be actual literal bots and trolls based in Macedonia. Could they all be coincidence?

Sure they could. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine him actively cooperating with anyone. By every account of those who know him best, Sanders is for Sanders and no one else.

There’s evidence that the Sanders campaign was also targeted by Russian bots during the primary. Putin’s operatives “play all sides,” as former FBI agent Clinton Watts testified last month before the Senate Intelligence Committee. confirming reports that Russian intelligence used a sophisticated network of social media bots to spread disinformation

Others have observed that the ONLY time Sanders’s “supporters” beg him to shut up is when he starts talking about Trump’s Russian connections. It’s hard to tell the difference between an automated Berniebot and the real in-the-flesh thing, but sometimes there are clues. Like Jake here, who describes himself as “a democratic”:

Not politically illiterate, just grammatically.

It is not, however, a stretch to suspect he may be a poleznyy idiot, a “useful idiot” unwittingly doing Putin’s dirty work for him.

“Throughout the campaign and since…Trump advanced narratives…about U.S. intelligence reports on Russian interference being incorrect, about the election being rigged, and about mass voter fraud.”

If you drank a shot every time Bernie’s parroted those same narratives — and believe me, I’ve tried — you’d’ve been fucking dead of cirrhosis long before the election.

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Here’s my answer for the Unity Police, who are about to come a-knockin’: Democrats are happy to unite with people willing to call themselves Democrats. Nobody who’s pissed off millions of women has a future with our party. The ball is in our court until he shuts the fuck up about the Dems’ impurity, joins the party and fully discloses his finances. Seriously, all the best candidates do it. Maybe it’ll turn out that he isn’t a traitor, just a regular guy innocently making millions off his vote for dumping toxic waste on impoverished Latino communities while his wife sits the oversight committee.

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And to every Bernout with a masochistic need to read my stuff, who’s let me know I’m a crony capitalist paid Trump troll corporate whore Republican shill who should try harder to win their hearts and minds by shutting the fuck up like the stupid cunt I am, I have but one thing to say:

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Val Perry Rendel’s forthcoming book, Bust: Bernie’s 30-Year Plan to Destroy the Democrats, will be available this summer on Amazon.com. “Like” her Author page on Facebook and follow her on the Twitter: @WorstPrezEver29 .