Summary: New York’s decision to cancel the Democratic primary, while unexceptionable given the suspension of the Bernard Sanders presidential campaign, and given the fact that Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee, may nevertheless come across as tantamount to that “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” that Imperial Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto v. Bismarck-Schöhnausen, presciently predicted would lead to the general European war we now call World War I.
The cancellation of the New York primary, intended as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been damned by the heretofore suspended Sanders campaign as an “outrage.” Knowing full well what perfidy that Independent Vermont Senator’s perfervidly, perpetually angry, perpetually indignant followers perpetrated against Hillary Clinton in 2016, we should expect the same kind of perfidy from the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist schnorrer, the mendacious misogynist, the loudmouth Leninist loser, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik, Bernard Sanders. It is long past time for the Democratic Party to conduct a comprehensive, thorough, purge and prophylaxis of the Sanders cancer in its midst.
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Die Politik ist die Lehre vom Möglichen. (Politics is the art of the possible.)
-Otto, Fürst v. Bismarck, Herzog v. Lauenberg, (then Minister-President [Prime Minister] of Prussia), Interview of 11 August 1867 with Friedrich Meyer v. Waldeck of the St. Petersburgische Zeitung, also attributed to Aristotle, , John F. Kennedy, and William Jefferson Clinton.
L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu. (Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.)
-François, Duc de la Ruchefoucauld, Maxim CCXVIII c. 1670Ils n’ont rien appris ni rien oublié. (They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.)
-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, sometime Bishop of Autun, Prime Minister and several time Foreign Minister of France under the Empire, the Restoration, the Hundred Days, the Second Restoration, and the July Monarchy, describing France’s Bourbon Dynasty.
Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.
-Attributed to Bismarck, allegedly sometime between 1888 and 1890.
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
-Theodore Roosevelt(then Governor of New York) to Henry L. Sprague, letter, January 26, 1900
Loyalty binds me.
-Personal motto of King Richard III of England (r. 1483-1485)
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Cathedral City, April 30, 2020 — New York State canceled its Democratic presidential primary the earlier this week. It did so largely because there did not appear to be any good reason for conducting a primary in a plague year in which every candidate except one had dropped out of the race and either endorsed presumptive nominee Joe Biden or given clear indications of an intent to do so.
But, that was not good enough for the perfervid partisans of the sour, superannuated, shtetl Stalinist Schnorrer, the mendacious misogynist, the loudmouthed Leninist loser, the bloviating blowhard Burlington Bolshevik Bernard Sanders.
In a statement reeking of sore-loserness, sour grapes, and Trumpian animus, Sanders campaign manager Jeffrey Weaver issued a statement, which would have been more appropriate in the German of Bismarck’s Empire, damning the state of New York, calling the cancellation of the primary a quote outrage,” and demanding that the Democratic National Committee refuse to seat the New York delegation at whatever Democratic convention may wind up being held in this plague year.
Now, since Bernard Sanders has suspended his campaign, we know the cynical reason behind his desire to remain on the ballot. Sanders has admitted that the only reason he is still in the race is to accumulate delegates so that he and his redeless, cargo-shorts communist followers can hold hostage the Democratic Party’s national platform. While politics may be the art of the possible, as Bismarck so famously opined, the Anglo-American political tradition usually requires that its more cynical excesses at least to be cloaked a serape of palatable hypocrisy.
We usually expect that vice will pay its due homage to virtue. Unfortunately, three years of Donald Trump have normalized a politics of lies, deceit, fraud, and extortion. By demanding to remain on the ballot after suspending his campaign, Bernard Sanders has essentially acknowledged what loyal Democrats around the country all knew to be the case; Bernard Sanders is nothing but a spoiler for the Republicans. His campaign effort is increasingly being revealed as a de facto fifth column for Donald Trump.
One who has chosen to end his campaign cannot be heard to complain, after his withdrawal, about the way the campaign shakes out. Other candidates, who do not choose to end their campaigns, may potentially be heard to complain, but, having unequivocally suspended his campaign and unambiguously endorsed Joe Biden, Bernard Sanders has absolutely no right to complain, either in person or through surrogates. Indeed, we may legitimately ask why, having suspended his campaign, Bernard Sanders even still has a campaign staff. Clearly, Sanders nation, like the French Bourbons, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
Now, granted, New York’s cancellation of its primary, notwithstanding the dangers of COVID-19, can seem, to onlookers of a particular political disposition, to lack good sense optics. Even among Biden supporters, there is a certain body of opinion which considers New York’s decision to cancel its primary, coming relatively soon after Bernard Sanders suspension of his own campaign, to be a “slap in the face,” to both Sanders and his redeless followers. To the extent that New York State’s decision may have started another confrontation between the presumptive nominee of the Party and the non-Democrat outsider who had wanted to run a hostile takeover of that Party, we may perhaps apply in retrospect, with due homage to Bismarck, the descriptor “some damned foolish thing in New York State” to the decision to cancel the New York presidential primary.
What we can predict, at all events, is that the irreconcilable, intransigent, Japanese-holdout-on-Pacific-island Sanders bitter-enders will use the cancellation of the New York presidential primary as another excuse to prosecute their political warfare campaign and agitprop against Joe Biden and against his loyalists in the desperate hope of overriding of the will of a substantial majority of the Democratic primary electorate and foisting Bernard Sanders on the Party as its minority candidate.
This they will do while loudly protesting that they and they alone represent true democracy, notwithstanding the substantial majority of voters who pulled the lever, punched the holes, marked the ballot, or otherwise registered their preference for Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.
For it cannot be gainsaid that the ultimate goal of the Sanders campaign is in fact to substitute their candidate and their political judgment for the presumptive nominee and for the political judgment of a clear majority of Democratic primary voters who weighed Mr. Sanders in the balance and found him wanting.
In short, the Sanders campaign has been trying, and is trying, to mount an internal coup within the Democratic Party. While Joe Biden has learned, masterfully, the art of speaking softly and carrying a big stick, and thus of going far, the Berners, like the redeless fascist followers of Donald Trump, seem not to have appreciated the importance of moderating of their transports and not throwing temper tantrums (tantra?) when things don’t turn out their way. So, the Berners, to facilitate their coup, have been promiscuously casting about to find some kind of deus ex machina that will disqualify Joe Biden and somehow deliver the nomination to Bernard Sanders.
The Berners tried this tactic before, trotting out Lucy Flores, a so-called Berniecrat candidate for lieutenant governor of Nevada. Ms. Flores made a series of allegations that the quondam Vice President had touched her hair in a way that made her feel “uncomfortable.” When Ms. Flores’s credibility was questioned because of her perfervid support for the Independent Vermont Senator, Sanders nation had a conniption, but ultimately was powerless to derail Joe’s march toward the nomination.
Having, pace Talleyrand, learned nothing and forgotten nothing, the Berners are trying again with an even less credible claim from Tara Reade, a vocal Sanders follower and Putin groupie. Now Ms. Reade’s claims, which only surfaced within the last month, after ostensibly lying dormant for the better part of three decades, attracted immediate critical scrutiny, as did her sycophantic pro-Putin Internet blog posts. To try to keep her claims alive, she is now dredged up some sort of “interview” that her late mother supposedly gave to Larry King.
While journalists and shit stirrers, notably people like CNN’s Chris Cilizza and the Berner brigade at The Nation, the Intercept, Jacobin magazine, and similar “left-wing tea party” outlets, have crowed that this interview is “damning evidence” against Joe Biden, any second year law student studying the law of evidence can tell you that the interview purportedly given by Ms. Reade’s deceased mother is not “evidence” at all.
First, mom’s purported evidence falls afoul of the hearsay rule, and does not fit within any of the numerous exceptions thereto.
Second, even if mom’s purported evidence could be shoehorned into some kind of exception to the hearsay rule, it is still subject to exclusion because no one can attest to the authenticity of the recording. Ms. Reade says that she is “certain” that the voice on the recording is that of her late mother, but her own credibility is subject to impeachment.
It is almost impossible to see how any trial judge, presented with this “evidence,” would ever rule in favor of its admissibility. In short, the “evidence” the Berners and the chattering classes are seeking to set up as some kind of deus ex machina to facilitate their desired Sanders coup, well, that “evidence,” in the words of a rather astute Illinois corporate lawyer named Abe Lincoln, is “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made from the shadow of a pigeon that had starved itself to death.”
In short, the Berners, and their latest straw woman, are running out of vehicles to override the will of the Democratic Party. From the Militant Tendency among them, we may expect a repetition of the perfidy of 2016: endless attacks on the Party’s candidate, eager and uncritical repetition of the Trump talking points, eager and uncritical repetition of bullshit from WikiLeaks or other foreign disruptors, and an ongoing stream of disinformation and agitprop, aided and abetted by Trump supporters like Mark Zuckerberg.
But for Democratic loyalists, bound by their loyalty to the Democratic Party and to its nominee, the vials of wrath are full to overflowing. It is time that the Democratic National Committee strapped on its balls, put on its big boy pants, and met the Berners head on. The Berners will try to use against The Democracy our traditional reluctance to “descend to their level.” Unfortunately, the “when they go low, we go high” strategy will not work against people who believe that Tara Reade is a vehicle by which they can run their left-wing coup against the Democratic Party. Instead, when they go low, loyal Democrats must be prepared to meet them in the metaphorical basement with a switchblade.
For when pressed, members of the Sanders left will acknowledge a preferential option for Donald Trump on the double-barreled theory that things have to get absolutely horrible before they can get any better, and that four more years of Donald Trump will accelerate the coming of some kind of “political revolution.” In short, as always, the Sanders intransigents are willing to bern the country down if they cannot achieve utopia in a day.
The Democratic Party cannot afford the luxury of tolerating such a Militant Tendency. Now is the time for the party to conduct a rigorous, comprehensive purge of the Sanders cancer in its midst.
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Paul S. Marchand, Esq. Is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He has never forgiven Bernard Sanders or his redeless, cargo shorts communist, Trump fifth column followers for their perfidy against Hillary Rodham Clinton. The opinions contained in this post are his own, unless you like them, in which case, they can be yours, too.
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