by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
The core of Bernie Sanders’s maverick campaign was “not business as usual.” For a year he offered a comprehensive critique both of status quo Democratic politics and the corrupt culture of elite Washington in uncompromising fashion.
In an era of Never Trump publicity, daily harsh critiques from some conservatives of the Trump campaign, and various signed letters from Republican luminaries distancing themselves from Trump, where is the commensurate Sanders outrage over various email disclosures?
One consistent theme from the DNC and Podesta troves is that the Sanders campaign was sabotaged by the Democratic National Committee, prompting the resignation of its chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (and perhaps soon her successor as well); that the Clinton campaign worked hand in glove with the Obama administration; that Sanders himself was sandbagged in perhaps more than one debate by Donna Brazile, who undermined the integrity of the forum by providing John Podesta and team Clinton with some of the debate questions in advance; and that the transcripts of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street six-figure compensated speeches confirm Sanders’s indictment of Clinton’s quid pro quo, wink-and-nod accommodation with big money, along with her admission that she has a public facade that should not be confused with her private (and real) sympathies. All of this is quite aside from the Clinton campaign’s banal disparagement of everything Sanders, from leaking unflattering photographs of him to attacking his purported atheism, as they dismissed his followers as prolonged adolescents who never left their parents’ basements.
What transformed Sanders from a supposedly principled muckraker and uncompromising tiger into an obsequious and mostly silent mouse who shrugs that stuff just happens in politics?
No answer needed.
