Loser SC Democrats Trash Sanders, AP Pretends It's News (Updated Below)

No Good Deed Dept. - This week, some Democratic Establishment figures in South Carolina decided to bitch about a planned trip to their state by progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Meg Kinnard of the Associated Press decided to pretend as if this was a real news story, write it up and send it out to the world.

The tone of Kinnard's piece is reflected in its headline, "South Carolina Democrats: Better If Sanders 'Got Lost'". These Democrats "say [Sanders'] visit isn’t wanted or helpful to their candidates in advance of next month's election," that his "left-leaning, progressive message doesn't resonate" in the state. "I just think it's extremely selfish of Bernie Sanders to think he could walk into South Carolina without an invitation from a candidate and think he's going to be welcomed with open arms," sniped Amanda Loveday, who had served as executive director of the state Dem party. "It's hard for me to think of an actual, legitimate Democratic candidate who would stand on stage with him here." Former Democratic state representative Boyd Brown insisted, in the words of the article, that "Sanders' messaging is too extreme":

"'Bernie does not resonate in South Carolina,' Brown said. 'He'd be doing us all a favor if he just got lost.'"

Charleston County Democratic Party Chairman Brady Quirk-Garvan characterized Sanders' appearance as, in the words of the AP, merely "a revival of Sanders' 2016 effort" that "does nothing to help voters who want to put the bruising primary process behind them":

'Even back then, most Democrats were not on board with what he was pitching,' Quirk-Garvan said of Sanders’ primary campaign. 'For many, even people who backed Sen. Sanders in the primary, they're looking for some new ideas... If he comes to South Carolina, he'll have his 15 people will show up,' Brown said. 'I hope it’s worth it to him, because he's doing greater damage to the party overall.'"

And with that, Quirk-Garvan gets the article's last word.

Kinnard notes that, according to a press release, the South Carolina chapter of Our Revolution had invited Sanders to speak at a rally on 20 Oct. in Columbia but she doesn't quote a single Sanders supporter. Her article is just stenography of these party insiders' bitching.

It's no secret that the Democratic party Establishment doesn't like Bernie Sanders. Covering this--or at least just mentioning it--would have provided some vital context here. While bashing Sanders, Brady Quirk-Garvan pretty straightforwardly tries to promote other 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. As the article notes, several will be visiting the state around the same time as Sanders but the likelihood of the Associated Press deciding to hunt down those candidates' detractors and write a piece like this, wherein those candidates are portrayed as selfish bastards doing harm to the party and who should just go away, seems rather remote.

While Kinnard offers the 2020 presidential race as the context for Sanders' visit, it's also the case that, for the last 2 1/2 years, Sanders has been almost constantly touring the U.S. on behalf of Democratic causes and candidates. The senator has forcefully argued that it's foolish for Democrats to ignore what have traditionally been Republican strongholds. He's been taking the progressive gospel to deep red states that are typically neglected by Democrats--taking on Trump on his own turf and trying to revitalize the often moribund state parties there. The other 2020 contenders only discover a few of these states when they're about to run for president (SC in particular is situated early in the Democratic primary process), whereas Sanders has been visiting them as part of this project for years. His appearance in Columbia is much more a part of this than of any potential presidential race; he's speaking at a rally in support of Medicare For All healthcare reform. Kinnard doesn't mention any of this.

Most egregiously, in covering one state party insider after another pontificating on how Sanders isn't what's best for the party and harms the party, Kinnard never questions how qualified these insiders are to render such a judgment, though their record in this regard is as stark as it is unflattering. In South Carolina, Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the legislature. The Republican advantage in the state House is nearly 2-to-1; they control over 60% of the Senate. In the 2016 election, the Republican contender defeated the Democratic candidate there by nearly 15 points. In short, the state Democratic party is a complete joke, and these insiders trashing Sanders have demonstrated no competence whatsoever in estimating what South Carolinians want. They're perpetual losers who are content to sit on the ash-heap they've made of their party and repeat the same errors that got them there while expecting a different result and sniping at someone who suggests there may be a better way.

Their record, alone, is enough to send this Associated Press article up in smoke. As it stands, it's just anti-Sanders propaganda, as worthless and inappropriate as it is ugly.

--j.

---

UPDATE (Mon., 22 Oct., 2018) - In that AP smear-piece, Charleston County Democratic Party Chairman Brady Quirk-Garvan said Sanders will "have his 15 people will show up." Amanda Loveday, former executive director of the state Dem party, thought it ridiculous that Sanders could "think he's going to be welcomed with open arms." Former Democratic state representative Boyd Brown said "Bernie does not resonate in South Carolina." From the Columbia Free Times' coverage of Sanders' event:

"However, the Vermont senator seemed to resonate with those at the Koger Center, receiving a thunderous standing ovation when he took the stage."

The Free Times notes that the event drew a crowd of not 15 but about a thousand people.

"Something Better": The Wall Street Journal Keeping It Fashy

As fascism and protofascism continue to rise around the world, Brazil, the 4th largest democracy, now stands right on the brink of becoming the latest straight-up casualty. In the first round of voting on 7 Oct., proto-Nazi Jair Bolsonaro, often called "the Brazilian Trump," came within a hair's breadth of winning the Brazilian presidency outright. Stopping him now is going to be very difficult. The Wall Street Journal has just offered an approving editorial on Bolsonaro. Though appalling, longtime observers of the paper won't really be surprised by this. Still, for the neophyte, comparing the real Bolsonaro to the version the Journal's editors have just offered their readers offers an eye-opening glimpse of the ethos of the largest circulation conservative newspaper in the U.S..

Jair Bolsonaro

Historian and fascism expert Federico Finchelstein has just written a piece in Foreign Policy, "Jair Bolsonaro's Model Isn't Burlusconi. It's Goebbels." It offers a nice, compact profile:

"[Bolsonaro] combines promises of austerity measures with prophesies of violence. His campaign is a mix of racism, misogyny, and extreme law and order positions.

"He wants criminals to be summarily shot rather than face trial. He presents indigenous people as 'parasites' and also advocates for discriminatory, eugenically devised forms of birth control. Bolsonaro has warned about the danger posed by refugees from Haiti, Africa, and the Middle East, calling them 'the scum of humanity' and even argued that the army should take care of them.

"He regularly makes racist and misogynistic statements. For example, he accused Afro-Brazilians of being obese and lazy[1] and defended physically punishing children to try to prevent them from being gay. He has equated homosexuality with pedophilia and told a representative in the Brazilian National Congress, 'I wouldn't rape you because you do not deserve it."

Finchelstein notes that insofar as Bolsonaro hasn't rhetorically called for an end to democracy, he isn't quite at full Nazi stage yet:

"However, things could change quickly if he gains power. Recently, Bolsonaro argued that he would never accept defeat in the election and suggested that the army might agree with his view. This is a clear threat to democracy.

"He implied the possibility of a coup. He endorses the legacy of Latin American dictatorships and their dirty wars and is an admirer of Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet and other strongmen.

"And like the Argentine Dirty War generals of the 1970s and Adolf Hitler himself, Bolsonaro sees no legitimacy in the opposition, which for him represents tyrannical powers. He said last month that his political opponents, members of the Workers' Party, should be executed."

Bolsonaro is openly nostalgic for the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 (he was an army captain then)[2] and openly indulges in such political murder fantasies:

"Bolsonaro famously declared in 1999 that the Brazilian dictatorship also 'should have killed 30,000 persons, starting with Congress as well as with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso [then the president of Brazil].'"

From Buzzfeed:

"'I am in favor of a dictatorship,' he said in a speech in 1993. 'We will never resolve serious national problems with this irresponsible democracy.'

"In 2015, he was quoted as saying the military rule of Brazil was 'glorious.' He's also said that if he ever became president he would stage a military coup on his first day."

Vox:

"In 2016, Bolsonaro voted to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff, and indicated he did so in honor of the then-deceased chief of the secret police in Sao Paulo, who oversaw the torture of hundreds under military rule. It was a disturbing act, as Rousseff herself had been imprisoned [Editorial note: and tortured] by the dictatorship.

"For his presidential run, Bolsonaro chose a retired military general as his running mate who’s also made disconcerting statements about military power, including that the return of military rule in Brazil could be justified under some circumstances."

Progressive columnist Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, has called Bolsonaro "the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the democratic world." His account of the reactionary pol is equally grim:

"[Bolsonaro's] primary solution to the nation’s crime epidemic is to unleash the military and police into the nation’s slums and give them what he calls 'carte blanche' to indiscriminately murder anyone they suspect to be criminals, acknowledging many innocents will die in the process. He has criticized monsters such as Chile's Pinochet and Peru's Fujimori--for not slaughtering more domestic opponents. He has advocated that mainstream Brazilian politicians be killed. He wants to chemically castrate sex offenders. In all respects, the hideous Brazilian military dictatorship that took over Brazil and ruled it for 21 years--torturing and summarily executing dissidents, with the support of the US and UK in the name of fighting Communists--is his model of governance."

This is the creature about whom the Wall Street Journal editors have just written that approving--even adoring--editorial. Under the headline--no kidding--"Brazilian Swamp Drainer," the Journal editors present Bolsonaro as merely a "conservative presidential candidate." Here's how they summarize him:

"Mr. Bolsonaro, who has spent 27 years in Congress, is best understood as a conservative populist who promises to make Brazil great for the first time. The 63-year-old is running on traditional values and often says politically incorrect things about identity politics that inflame his opponents. Yet he has attracted support from the middle class by pledging to reduce corruption, crack down on Brazil’s rampant crime and liberate entrepreneurs from government control."

To offer this characterization, the editors decline to share with their readers any of the appalling facts outlined above. Of Bosonaro's call to free up police to indiscriminately murder suspected criminals,

"On crime he has promised to restore a police presence in urban and rural areas that have become lawless."

The editors dismiss the notion that Bolsonaro is any sort of threat to democracy with a single line, insisting simply that "he isn’t proposing to change the constitution, which constrains the military at home." Well, that certainly settles that, doesn't it? Clearly uncomfortable with this line of thought, the piece immediately proceeds to attack Bolsonaro's Worker's Party opponent Fernando Haddad as working "from the Hugo Chavez playbook."

The editorial mocks "global progressives," who, is says, "are having an anxiety attack" over Bolsonaro's near-win.

"After years of corruption and recession, apparently millions of Brazilians think an outsider is exactly what the country needs. Maybe they know more than the world’s scolds."

Its conclusion:

"After so much political turmoil and corruption, it’s hardly surprising that Brazilians are responding to a candidate who promises something better."

The Wall Street Journal has a decades-long history of backing fascist movements and dictatorships, acting, over the years, as apologists and propagandists for even the worst of the lot, and it isn't surprising that its editors think of such horror shows as "something better." But it is something to keep in mind.

--j.

---

[1] From NPR (30 July, 2018): "Last year, he caused an outcry by declaring that in his view the inhabitants of Afro-Brazilian communities known as quilombos are 'not even good for breeding any more.'"

[2] In the Summer, he told NPR that dictatorship was "a very good" time for Brazil.

Politico Promotes Another False Anti-Sanders Story On Russian Trolls

Thursday, this writer performed an autopsy on Politico's latest hatchet-job on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, using its own cited sources to expose it as a fraud and a lie. On Saturday, Edward-Isaac Dovere, the unethical hack responsible for that atrocity--and Politico's chief Washington correspondent--returned for another round. Beneath another false, click-baity headline, "Bernie Sanders Promoted False Story On Reporting Russian Trolls," he continued the fictional narrative from his first story while adding new misrepresentations.

In an appearance on Vermont Public Radio, Sanders had related how, toward the end of the 2016 presidential race, John Mattes, a staffer on his campaign in California, noticed and began to investigate strange activity on pro-Sanders Facebook groups. Mattes came to believe it was being carried out by Russian trolls and took this information to the Clinton campaign. Sanders acknowledged he didn't personally know Mattes and former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver later clarified that Sanders only knew of this incident via press reports, citing a piece from NBC's San Diego affiliate, which had, in fact, reported that "Mattes said he took his findings to the Clinton Campaign as well as the Obama Administration last September"--that being September 2016.

To challenge this, Dovere edited out Sanders acknowledgement that he had no firsthand knowledge of Mattes and tried to make Weaver's later statement sound like Sanders had changed his story. Dovere then turned to an anonymous "former Clinton campaign staffer," who denied the incident had ever happened. Since Mattes had reportedly told that NBC affiliate it had,[1] the implication was that Mattes was a liar. If Dovere ever talked to Mattes himself--which would have been the first step for any competent journalist investigating this matter--he gave no indication of it.

I talked to Mattes on Saturday--he's not hard to find--and he confirmed that Dovere had never contacted him prior to writing that first article. Dovere never contacted Mattes at all, in fact, until Mattes, who wasn't at all pleased with how he and his activities had been portrayed in that article, contacted Politico. "It's disheartening," Mattes told me, "to see inexperienced reporters peddling phony stories." Mattes sees the broad circulation of Dovere's article--it has gone all over the internet, its false narrative picked up by many other outlets hungry to bash progressives in general and Bernie Sanders in particular--as further cause for dismay. "It is even more distressing that a phony story is picked up and amplified by other so-called reporters who don't do the most basic thing in journalism: check your sources."

Dovere's second article, which focuses much of its attention on Mattes, is a train-wreck from its opening:

"Bernie Sanders is taking credit for action to combat the Russian incursion into the 2016 election that he didn’t have anything to do with--and didn’t actually happen."

The "action" in question is Mattes' investigation into alleged Russian internet activities, which did actually happen, but while Dovere twice accuses Sanders of "taking credit" for this--later in the article, he gets ambitious and says Sanders is "taking all the credit"--Sanders hasn't, in fact, taken any credit for it in any venue at any time. In the radio interview that started all of this, in fact, Sanders described Mattes as "a guy on my staff who I don't know personally." Devore, who heard this comment but cut it from his own account of that interview (inserting ellipses at the break), continues to lie to his readers, pretending as if Sanders never said it. Even without Sanders' own words, Jeff Weaver pointed out, days ago, that Sanders' only knowledge of Mattes' activities re:the Russia business came from press reports and Devore knows this too, because he quoted Weaver on it in his previous story, yet he now pretends as if he's uncovered something new; "it turns out," he writes, "that the purported Sanders' staffer who said he tried to sound the alarm was a campaign volunteer who acted on his own, without any contact or direction from the Vermont senator or his staff." And then he quotes the same remarks from Weaver as before ("All [Sanders] knows is what was reported.").

Sanders definitely misspoke in saying Mattes was "on my staff"--Mattes jokes that "Bernie gave me a promotion"--but Devore can't resist belaboring even this utterly inconsequential error. In a Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, Sanders described Mattes as "one of our social media guys out in San Diego"--a more accurate description. Dovere compares this to Sanders' radio description of Mattes and writes that "Sanders told two versions of the false story." He writes about "a purported Sanders staffer" and continues to dwell on this until Sanders spokeswoman Arianna Jones "eventually acknowledged that Sanders 'misspoke' in calling Mattes a member of his staff."[2]

Mattes has been around. Among other things, his distinguished career as a litigator and investigative reporter has netted him a pile of awards that would blot out the sun. Devore, whose career is unlikely to ever imperil his own sun-tan, makes Mattes sound like someone who just fell off the turnip truck, writing that when Mattes "said he communicated with the Clinton campaign in local press accounts, he was confusing it for a super PAC supportive of Clinton."

"I guess I'm that clueless," Mattes told me, "and I'm glad that Politico pointed it out to me." But Mattes didn't sound particularly sincere on this point.

Mattes' story is straightforward and he's been telling it for a year now. Late in the 2016 campaign, he noticed a sudden influx of new people into the various Facebook groups that had grown up around the Sanders campaign, an odd development, as Sanders was long out of the race by then. He began to investigate and eventually came to believe this was the work of the Russians. "From September through the election, I shared what I was uncovering on a daily basis with the research arm of the Clinton organization," that being David Brock's American Bridge.

It's on this last point--about which Mattes was never for a moment confused--that Dovere hangs his assertion that Mattes' story is false:

"[Mattes] said he never talked to anyone on the Clinton campaign itself, though he believed that the researcher he spoke with at the pro-Clinton American Bridge PAC, run by David Brock, was tantamount to reaching the campaign... Mattes is adamant that anyone who claims that American Bridge was not tantamount to the Clinton campaign is being naive, though campaign finance laws prohibit interaction between entities such as those."

Reading that, one wonders if Dovere is being really dishonest (again) or if he just slept through the entire 2016 campaign then couldn't be bothered to do basic research (again). While he's correct on the point of law, David Brock's operation openly flaunted that in order to coordinate directly with the Clinton campaign. American Bridge's specialty was opposition research. Shortly after Clinton entered the presidential race, one of its subsidiaries, the Correct the Record Project, made a show of breaking with the parent org, announcing it was "reorganizing so it can coordinate with Clinton’s campaign and devote all of its resources to her." That's as reported in--wait for it--Politico. The Washington Post reported that:

"Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to work in tight conjunction with an independent rapid-response group financed by unlimited donations, another novel form of political outsourcing that has emerged as a dominant practice in the 2016 presidential race.

"On Tuesday, Correct the Record, a pro-Clinton rapid-response operation, announced it was splitting off from its parent American Bridge and will work in coordination with the Clinton campaign as a stand-alone super PAC. The group’s move was first reported by the New York Times.

"That befuddled many campaign finance experts, who noted that super PACs, by definition, are political committees that solely do independent expenditures, which cannot be coordinated with a candidate or political party. Several said the relationship between the campaign and the super PAC would test the legal limits.

"But Correct the Record believes it can avoid the coordination ban by relying on a 2006 Federal Election Commission regulation that declared that content posted online for free, such as blogs, is off limits from regulation."

The "break" with American Bridge was essentially a paper separation; they remained, for all intents and purposes, the same org. They shared the same address in the Capitol--455 Massachusetts Ave. NW, the 6th floor--the same founder and, simultaneously, a lot of the same employees. American Bridge and Correct The Record are both represented by the same law firm (Perkins Coie), which also happens to be the firm that represented the 2016 Clinton campaign. In April 2016, the Center for Public Integrity noted how CTR, Bridge and two other pro-Clinton PACs that were incestuously intertwined

"regularly shuttle millions of dollars in cash and resources among themselves. This means an initial, anonymous contribution to one super PAC can flow through any of the rest before it’s finally used to help Clinton. Consider the $1 million Priorities USA Action gave Correct the Record in December. Correct the Record, in turn, gave American Bridge 21st Century $400,000 later that month."

The Clinton campaign worked openly with CTR, a fact that, yes, Politico noted over and over again throughout the 2016 cycle. The hacked John Podesta emails offered a wealth of detail on this coordination. On at least one occasion, the campaign directly paid American Bridge for some "research," something that only became public because of an apparent filing error.

So when Mattes calls this "the research arm of the Clinton organization," he's not blowing smoke, talking smack or revealing state secrets. Clinton's open coordination with the Brock operation was, in real time, a significant and much-discussed controversy.

Dovere writes that "Mattes shared with POLITICO email exchanges he had with an American Bridge researcher, whom Federal Election Commission records show was on staff through the end of 2016." Mattes describes his contacts with American Bridge on this issue as extensive, continuing on a daily basis for the last months of the campaign, "and at no point in time in the hundreds-plus conversations and the hundreds-plus emails did anyone say 'John, you've called the wrong place. Please contact the Clinton campaign.'" As Mattes told Dovere, "if they weren’t sharing it with Hillary, that is their responsibility."

Mattes doesn't mince words on the sort of dope Dovere is peddling.[3] "It's fraud. It's journalistic malpractice, period." He feels strongly that Russian interference in the political process is a serious business that is done a serious disservice by this sort of nonsense, as is journalism itself. "If journalists can't be responsible with our own stories, then why would anybody depend on them for any factual analysis?"

--j.

---

[1] Dovere also writes at one point that "Sanders and staffers offered numerous and conflicting answers in the span of a few hours on Wednesday about what he did about Russian meddling." This is a reference to Devore's own false narrative from his previous article. He digs in further, writing that "Sanders and his top aide were at turns defiant and defensive during and after his interview with a Vermont radio station, even initially disputing special counsel Robert Mueller's finding in his indictment last week that the Russians backed his campaign." As I covered in my response to it, Sanders and co. have been telling the same story, and never disputed Robert Mueller's findings. Rather, Sanders pointed out that Mueller's indictment, which doesn't, in fact, substantiate any specific example of support for Sanders' campaign, outlined the goal of the Russian conspiracy as sowing chaos and discord, not "supporting" Bernie Sanders. Dovere tied himself in such a knot with his misrepresentations of Sanders that he was insisting Sanders, who has always strongly supported the Mueller investigation and insisted it must go forward, wherever it leads, was somehow echoing Donald Trump's efforts to undermine same.

[2] It's completely ridiculous that Dovere would slam Sanders for accurately relaying a story that had been reported in the press and as Dovere pretended as if the Mattes story isn't true, Jones got in two good digs at him:

"Asked to explain why Sanders would repeat a story he didn't know was true and turned out not to be, Sanders spokesperson Arianna Jones said he's 'not a great fan of reporters who try to provoke controversy where none exists.'... Asked why the senator relayed the Mattes story without checking it, Jones responded, 'It sounds as if you're suggesting that we should no longer trust the reporting of outlets like NBC and that the information they provide requires independent verification?'"

[3] And Dovere's dismal work is only one of multiple egregious examples with which he's recently come face-to-face (and which may be covered here in the near future).

In Effort To Mangle Bernie On Russia, Politico Mangles the Facts

When it comes to life's inevitabilities, an item that seems to take its place beside death and taxes is corporate press hostility to progressives in general and Sen. Bernie Sanders in particular. Politico is becoming quite notorious for its stream of tendentious, anti-progressive and anti-Sanders editorials masquerading as news reports and Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico's chief Washington correspondent, has just excreted another one. "Bernie Blames Hillary For Allowing Russian Interference," screams his sensational headline. His opening is hard-hitting:

"Bernie Sanders on Wednesday blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election. Then his 2016 campaign manager, in an interview with POLITICO, said he’s seen no evidence to support special counsel Robert Mueller's assertion in an indictment last week that the Russian operation had backed Sanders' campaign.

"The remarks showed Sanders, running for a third term and currently considered a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, deeply defensive in response to questions posed to him about what was laid out in the indictment. He attempted to thread a response that blasts Donald Trump for refusing to acknowledge that Russians helped his campaign--but then holds himself harmless for a nearly identical denial.

"In doing so, Sanders and his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe."

But readers digging through Dovere's article and its source material will struggle in vain to find anything that supports Dovere's fuming assertions. Rather, the only story here is that an alleged "journalist" has decided to misrepresent the facts in order to libel the progressive senator. Again.

The principal exhibit here is an interview Sanders had just given to Vermont Public Radio. At the 11:30 mark, Sanders begins fielding a series of questions about the Russia matter. Dovere distorts its content beyond recognition:

"Sanders said that his campaign had shared information with the Clinton campaign about suspected Russian anti-Clinton trolls on a campaign Facebook page. But Weaver later acknowledged that the Vermont senator had no firsthand knowledge that this had happened. Weaver said Sanders based his remark on an article published by NBC’s San Diego affiliate over the weekend about a campaign volunteer who claimed to have conducted his own investigation and brought the findings to the Clinton campaign in September--an assertion flatly denied by a former Clinton campaign aide.

"'A guy who was on my staff … checked it out and he went to the Clinton campaign, and he said, "You know what? I think these guys are Russians,"' Sanders said. Weaver said Sanders had not verified the information in the article himself before stating it as fact."

In order to make Weaver's later comments look like after-the-fact dissembling, Dovere has edited out a portion of Sanders' own wherein Sanders conceded he had no firsthand knowledge of this; within those ellipses Dovere dropped in, Sanders actually described "a guy on my staff who I don't know personally, his name was John Mattes out in San Diego." Further, though Sanders didn't mention the NBC San Diego report, both he and Weaver accurately relayed its contents:

"After a lengthy investigation, Mattes said he took his findings to the Clinton Campaign as well as the Obama Administration last September."

If this report turns out to be incorrect, it's hardly a mark against them. To refute it, Dovere turns to an anonymous Clintonite and acts as an uncritical stenographer:

"A former Clinton campaign staffer said it was nonsense that Sanders' campaign had reached out to Clinton's about potential Russian interference. 'No one from the Sanders campaign ever contacted us about this'--not in September, and not in 'April and May.' Sanders said in the radio interview that he noticed 'lots of strange things' during those months in 2016."

So what do we have here? It may be that the NBC San Diego report didn't accurately relay what Mattes said. It may be that Mattes isn't telling the truth. Or it may be that this "former Clinton campaign staffer" is acting in the usual custom of that campaign, which rarely told the truth about anything. Dovere's project is falsely presenting Sanders and Weaver as offering a series of self-serving fictions, so he never ever tries to disentangle the matter. He never gives any indication of having tried to contact Mattes, which should have been any real journalist's first step and as if to intentionally obscure the matter, Dovere never even identifies Mattes by name.

Worse, either Dovere or the staffer is flatly lying about Sanders' "April and May" comment. Not only did Sanders never say he "noticed" anything unusual in those months, he specifically said he didn't know anything that early in the game. Sanders was describing Mattes noting strange activity on Facebook in September 2016, during the general-election campaign, and said "we did not know early on" about any Russian activity but subsequently, "what we found out was that in April and May, it appeared that there were lots of strange things happening attacking Hillary Clinton." Sanders never even claimed he knew in September; he was merely referencing that NBC San Diego story, an article that had appeared in the press a few days before his interview. Dovere's wording makes it unclear whether he or the anonymous staffer added the bit about "April and May" but it ran under his name and it's false.

In the radio interview, Sanders repeatedly pointed out that the alleged Russian activity wasn't aimed at supporting his candidacy but rather was carried out with the goal of sowing chaos and discord in the electoral process, which is the position taken by the Mueller indictment. The indictment offers a narrative wherein the Russian conspirators began putting in place the initial infrastructure for their eventual project as early as 2013, years before anyone even dreamed of a Sanders--or Trump--candidacy. The indictment repeatedly outlines the conspirators' goals: they "had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election," were "interfering with the U.S. political system," were "interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with the stated goal of 'spread[ing] distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.'" No one who has read it can miss this.

Sanders echoes it. "[A]ll they want to do is sow division in this country, bring people against each other," he said. "This was not supporting me, any more than they were supporting groups like Black Lives Matter that are fighting for social justice," a reference to the Russians targeting messaging toward BLM activists, another matter covered in the Mueller indictment. "Trust me, that's not what they were doing--they were trying to cause division."

In order to set up a false equivalence with Donald Trump's comments regarding this matter, Dovere omits all of this, quoting only Sanders' denial that the Russians were supporting him then engaging in further fabrication:

"The Vermont senator was adamant that he did not benefit from Russian bots urging voters to support him... Sanders has repeatedly condemned President Donald Trump for not acknowledging the Russian attack on the 2016 election alleged in the Mueller indictment and being investigated by congressional committees. But he has refused to say that his campaign benefited from the activities."

At no point in the interview did Sanders deny he benefited from Russian bots. He was, in fact, never even asked if his campaign benefited, nor, if he had been, would he even be able to say; the Mueller indictment's allegations of Russian activity during the Democratic primary are too nebulous and unspecific--barely even a blip. The indictment references a memo circulated among the Russian conspirators on 10 February, 2016, describing it as "an outline of themes for future content to be posted to ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts" in which "specialists were instructed to post content that focused on 'politics in the USA' and to 'use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump--we support them).'" While concealing from his readers what the indictment says about the Russians' motives and how it relates to Sanders' comments, Dovere partially quotes this in an effort to refute Sanders but while the indictment covers an extensive range of specific activities carried out by the conspirators, nearly all of those activities occurred after Sanders had already lost the Democratic nomination in early June 2016. Sanders' name and campaign, in fact, are only even mentioned in the few lines regarding that memo; the indictment contains no other information on any support for him.

Weaver is on top of this:

"'The factual underpinning of that in the indictment is what? Zero,' Weaver said. 'I have not seen any evidence of support for Bernie Sanders... Two dudes sitting in a hole somewhere support Bernie Sanders--tell me what they did to support Bernie Sanders,' Weaver added later."

Dovere can't tell Weaver that but instead of noting Weaver is correct, Dovere equates these remarks with Donald Trump's:

"Sanders' and Weaver's argument mirrors that of Trump, who has argued in a days-long series of tweets that the Russians were not supporting him."

But as gratifying as this anti-Sanders "journalist" no doubt found it to tie Sanders to the deplorable Trump, nowhere in this recent tweet-storm does Trump say the Russians weren't supporting him. Rather, he says his campaign didn't collude with the Russians and that their activities had no impact on the ultimate outcome of the election.[1] Neither Sanders nor Weaver have said anything of the sort. In the past, Trump has suggested the entire notion of a Russian conspiracy to interfere in the election was a hoax.[2]

While the existence of an online Russian "troll army" that follows Kremlin policy was a matter of public record well before 2016, it wasn't particularly well-known in the U.S.. After allegations emerged that Russians were behind the hacking of the John Podesta emails, which Wikileaks began releasing shortly before the Democratic convention at the end of July 2016, Russia became subject to more scrutiny but online activity attributed to Russia and aimed at interfering in the presidential election only really came to be scrutinized toward the end of the campaign and only became a major story after the election. By the time this heightened scrutiny was brewing, Sanders was out of the race and working with the Clinton campaign, and it's to the Clinton campaign that Sanders deferred when asked, in that radio interview, why he didn't alert his supporters of these alleged Russian activities. "I would say the real question to be asked was 'what was the Clinton campaign [doing]?' They had more information about this than we did and at this point, we were working with them."

Interviewer Jane Lindholm persisted: "So did the Clinton campaign say 'don't talk about this'?

"No, of course not, but who do you think would be raising that issue?"

Sanders was acting as a Clinton campaign surrogate and it isn't the place of a surrogate to go off-script with allegations that, at the time, could be perceived as crackpotism, thus harming the candidate. The candidate calls the script, and in such a situation, Sanders is right to defer. Lindholm didn't like that: "Why not take that directly to your supporters, many of whom really hung on your every word?" But, of course, what Sanders was saying at every stop during the timeframe in question was "vote for Hillary Clinton." If his supporters really hung on his "every word," why would words regarding Russia allegations carry more weight in the election than those? It's an utterly bizarre--and empty--criticism, Blame Bernie-ism run amok. If the campaign messaging on this subject is found to be wanting--and that's a dodgy proposition anyway[3]--it's the campaign that should be questioned.

That's not, of course, a position that's going to find a warm reception among Clinton's personality cult, as one of its defining characteristics is an absolute conviction that Clinton is correct when she insists she has no real responsibility for anything.

Dovere certainly doesn't like it. He roasts Sanders for failing to call out this Russian activity during the campaign and contrasts this with Clinton, writing "Clinton's campaign regularly raised suspicions of Kremlin-backed activity during the home stretch of the race." But Clinton's attacks on Russian interference during the campaign were directed toward the hacking and subsequent releases of Democratic emails. As far as I've been able to ascertain,[4] she never said anything about Russian-directed internet troll activity, which really only became a big story after--and because--she lost the election. General-election debates produce the single largest audience a presidential candidate will ever have but even during the 2nd debate with Trump, when Clinton went on an extended anti-Russia tear, she focused on human rights and the hacking and didn't raise the issue. Criticizing Sanders, a surrogate, for failing to speak out when the candidate herself remained silent is self-evidently absurd.[5]

Dovere doesn't ask that "former Clinton campaign staffer" or anyone else from ClintonWorld about the campaign messaging. Instead, he uses Sanders' deference to Clinton as the basis for the charge in his lede that Sanders "blamed Hillary Clinton for not doing more to stop the Russian attack on the last presidential election," which is entirely fictitious. Sanders has assigned no "blame" in this matter other than to the Putin regime, nor, other than that, has he even said there's any blame to be assigned. These alleged activities were carried out by a foreign power, beyond the control of anyone in the U.S.. Dovere's truncated headline claim that Sanders has blamed Clinton for allowing Russian interference--the headline everyone on the internet will see--is a particularly egregious lie. This activity was based in Russia and there was never any question of "allowing" it to go forward or not.

Though Dovere has done nothing to establish that these Russian activities benefited Sanders' campaign or made any case for why, beyond providing fodder for trolls, it would matter if they had, he writes that "Sanders has faced questions since Friday about why he has not more strongly condemned the Russian actions that benefited his campaign." But Sanders has categorically condemned Russian interference and Dovere's only example of those with such "questions" is Joan Walsh, a positively rabid Clinton supporter/Sanders basher--no better a source on this matter than some random Twitter troll. Dovere identifies her only as a "liberal writer" and gives her space to assert that Sanders has made such a misstep that "this could be the end of Sanders 2020."

Dovere ends on what he seems to think is a snarky "gotcha":

"On Wednesday evening, Sanders took to Twitter with additional statements.

"'Mueller's indictment provides further evidence that the Russian government interfered in 2016. It also shows that they tried to turn my supporters against Hillary Clinton in the primary and general election. I unequivocally condemn such interference,' he wrote.

"A Sanders spokesman declined to explain the senator's apparent change of heart over the course of the day."

But that statement merely reflects what Sanders has already said, no "change of heart." In that radio interview, in fact, Sanders said, "They were attacking Hillary Clinton's campaign and using my supporters against Hillary Clinton." Dovere knows this; he directly quotes it in his own article. And, of course, Sanders has condemned Russian efforts to interfere in the election from his earlier public comments on the subject.

Dovere began by insisting Sanders and Weaver had " presented a series of self-serving statements that were not accurate, and that track with efforts by Trump and his supporters to undermine the credibility of the Mueller probe," but the only thing that wasn't accurate was Dovere's own assertions and, in reality, Sanders has been a stalwart defender of the Mueller probe. Sanders, in fact, repeatedly called for an independent inquiry into the Russian matter months before the independent counsel was appointed and has consistently defended the Mueller probe against attacks by Trump and his allies, insisting it must continue. To insinuate Sanders into the Trump camp of undermining Mueller, Dovere declines to share this with his readers.



A few things on this issue beyond the immediate matter of Politco and its asshat "reporter": These are troubled times, and an entrenched political Establishment in such times will latch on to just about anything to keep people from catching on to the fact that it is part of what troubles them. "Russian interference" is its current shiny object. Those in the Democratic Establishment, using it to avoid any assessment of their own epic-scale failures in the last decade, have built it up into a scandal of monumental proportions.[6] The right has embraced it as well but insists the real makes-Watergate-look-like-stealing-a-Snickers outrage is a series of fake counter-scandals they've manufactured that blame the other side. For over a year now, both have insisted that, any moment now, the other shoe will drop and the resulting public outrage will forever wash away the opposition in a flood of ignominy. And here's one of the few guarantees in all of this: that's never going to happen. Further, here are some truths about this particular species of Russian "interference" that neither of these players want you to hear.

--This sort of thing is the price of living in a free society. One can, of course, prosecute any crimes that occur and one should always try to expose sources that attempt to conceal their origins but when it comes to much of the activities with which these Russians were involved--setting up discussion-groups on the internet, commenting on social media, organizing rallies, etc.--there's little a free society can do about it.

--The U.S. presidential electoral process is a multi-million-dollar behemoth. When standard operating procedure involves candidates trading their souls to Wall Street sharks, oil billionaires and the like for campaign contributions, worrying over a few dozen people buying Facebook ads from a warehouse on the other side of the world--or worse, presenting them as having stolen an election--is completely ridiculous. Which brings me to perhaps the most important item,

--It doesn't even matter. Whether anyone wants to hear it or not, Hillary Clinton lost the election because she was astonishingly unpopular. Not unpopular as a consequence of a few foreign trolls on the internet but as a consequence of an entire lifetime of shiftiness, dishonesty and corruption. And the only reason Donald Trump, the most unpopular major-party candidate in the history of polling, won the election is because he was facing Hillary Clinton. Even in a worst-case scenario, any impact these activities alleged by Mueller may have had is microscopic.[7]

In closing, here's some food for thought from just abut the most unlikely source imaginable:

Chill out, folks.

--j.

---

[1] The Tweet flurry in question:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964594780088033282
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964944088696049666
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964946611502747649
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964949269374529538
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964955496137535488
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/964956781670694912
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965075589274177536
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965079126829871104
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965199840471810049
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965202556204003328
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965205208191168512
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965212168449941505
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965676314576543744
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/965930611272712192

[2] It is, however, worth noting that according to the theory advanced in the Mueller indictment, the Russian conspirators' "support" for Trump, which is detailed at great length and with much specificity, was a result of their (correctly) perceiving him as a chaos figure who would serve their goal of disruption. After the election, they organized both pro- and anti-Trump rallies. Chaos.

[3] There's really no reason at all to question the campaign messaging on this; it's an entirely manufactured "controversy." If one just insists on charting the many problems the Clinton campaign needed to address and didn't (or couldn't), any perceived shortcoming on this matter would be so minor in comparison to the rest--both individually and in bulk--it would barely even register.

[4] Clinton certainly never made a major issue of the troll activity. To ascertain whether she'd ever mentioned it, I went to Google news, set the search date parameters to cover the entire general election campaign then spent far too much time conducting a series of searches for every relevant word combination of which I could conceive. I found nothing in which Clinton addressed the troll activity.

[5] It's entirely possible Clinton didn't know about these activities until after the election. If one wanted to make an ugly partisan dogfight about it, that report about John Mattes, who "said he took his findings to the Clinton Campaign" in September--the report Dovere declined to properly examine--potentially looms large. But whatever the case may be, there really just isn't any "blame" to cast here; if Russians were carrying out these activities, it's beyond the control of anyone in the campaign.

[6] The "Russiagate" scandal pimps have used this "interference" story to insist on a needlessly belligerent posture toward Russia and to attempt to scandalize any effort at a more reasoned approach. To the extent that this has any impact, it's dangerous, and in recent days, they've escalated their rhetoric into the realm of irresponsible by insisting the "interference" amounts to "an act of war." It isn't, and that's not something responsible people should even suggest.

[7] The major activity attributed to Russia and that may have had an impact was the hacking and release of the Democratic emails but even there, the scandal was only a consequence of Democratic misbehavior; releasing those emails was much more akin to a public service than an offense meriting condemnation. The Mueller indictment doesn't deal with the matter of those emails.

Correcting Korecki: Politico vs. Progressives

Politico's reactionary anti-progressivism was on ugly display in a recent article on the brewing Democratic primary fight in Illinois' 3rd District. Marie Newman, a marketing consultant running a crowdfunded campaign on a straightforward progressive agenda, is looking to unseat Dan Lipinski, a legacy incumbent of the Chicago machine and one of the most conservative Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Progressive groups, weary of Lipinski's socially conservative views, have been lining up behind Newman and Reps. Luis Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky have just endorsed her. In explaining all of this, senior Politico reporter Natasha Korecki leads with a tendentious headline--"Chicago Democrats Throw Lipinski Under the Bus--And Blame Trump"--and seems personally offended by the joint endorsement, describing it as "an unprecedented act... the unthinkable, plunging a knife into the back of a neighboring Chicago-area congressman whom they'd served with in Congress for over a decade."

In contextualizing the primary contest, Korecki immediately reaches for--and constructs her entire article around--the tired conservative Clintonite narrative about crusading progressives, unreasonably obsessed with ideological purity, branding "pragmatists", "moderates" and "centrists" as heretics and trying to drive them from the party. Her outrage obvious, Korecki doesn't spare the hyperbole--she describes this as a violent act:

"The act of throwing Lipinski under the bus was an exercise in bare-knuckled Chicago politics, and it was also a tale of a party that is an increasingly awkward fit for centrists like Lipinski."

With that "centrist" label in place, Korecki turns the floor over to Lipinski himself, who offers the usual progressive-trashing line:

"'There's an effort that is very detrimental to the Democratic Party, in that there's the Tea Party of the Left that some people said they wanted to create. That's bad for the party. That's not going to be helpful in growing our numbers,' said Lipinski, who noted that the Tea Party movement was responsible for Trump's ascendance. 'I think we have to acknowledge that the way to get back into the majority into the Congress and pick up seats is to make sure we are a big-tent party and reaching out to people are moderate and not just push to the left.'"

While positioning Lipinski as a "centrist" is essential to this anti-progressive narrative, the 3rd District is strongly Democratic--over 60%--meaning it's likely that Lipinski's conservative views are directly at odds with those of most of his constituents.[1] This gives him no claim on the political "center" there.[2] Korecki knows how to get around this problem; she attributes the view that Lipinski is out of step with his district to Gutierrez and Schakowsky, the people she describes as back-stabbers unconscionably putting the knife to their colleague. Gutierrez is further besmirched when Korecki gratuitously suggests that his endorsement of Newman may be merely his "settling a score with the powerful state party chairman Mike Madigan, a longtime ally of the Lipinski family" (a few paragraphs are then devoted to this ad hominem rabbit-hole).

Korecki also suggests that wanting a more reliable Democrat representing a reliably Democratic district isn't "pragmatic." The Newman endorsements, she writes, "put [Gutierrez and Schakowsky] at odds with a more pragmatic faction of Chicago Democrats," those being Lipinski's supporters, who, in Korecki's telling, get that "pragmatic" label merely by being Lipinski supporters. Korecki is beside herself over the fact that this race is happening and megaphones the views of this "pragmatic faction":

"In other words: why is the party spending precious resources to oust an incumbent from a safe Democratic seat? Especially when Democrats are busy trying to oust a Republican governor from office and nearby GOP congressmen from their seats?"

Democracy, perhaps?

Korecki turns the mechanics of the race on its head, writing that in endorsing Newman, "Schakowsky and Gutierrez joined powerful national groups that have already coalesced behind the challenger, including NARAL, MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Human Rights Campaign." How appropriate is Korecki's violent language and invocation of "bare-knuckled Chicago politics" to describe Newman's support given the fact that Lipinski, not Newman, is the candidate backed by the powerful Chicago Democratic machine noted for its bare-knuckling tendencies? Dan Lipinski's father held this same seat for 22 years. In 2004, Daddy Bill ran for the Democratic nomination for the 12th time, won it, then just gave it to son Dan, who hadn't even regularly lived in the district for 15 years. In such a safely Democratic district, Dan didn't even have to compete for it. He's held it ever since. Newman is a political novice who entered the race with very low name-recognition while Lipinski is a dynastic incumbent backed by the Chicago machine, with all the extraordinary advantages that confers, yet in Korecki's telling, the reader could be forgiven for believing Lipinski is the besieged underdog taking on the unscrupulous Establishment.[3] It's an inversion of reality that is simply impossible to justify.

It's also worth noting that while Korecki ties this race to the larger ongoing conflict within the Democratic party, it's hardly representative of it. There are, this year, a quite large number of Bernie Sanders-inspired crowdfunded progressive candidates around the U.S., an army of them unlike anything this not-inexperienced writer has ever seen. They should make this political year very interesting. Newman is drawing a lot of Democratic support in her race but the Democratic Establishment typically stands against these up-and-coming liberals, choosing, instead, to throw support behind conservative Clintonite figures. This---a problem for many years and a perpetual complaint among activists--is finally beginning to get some press. Perhaps the spectacle of some prominent Democratic pols and groups backing Newman--a man-bites-dog story, really--is partly what draws Korecki's fury.

That ongoing Democratic conflict is between progressives who are attempting to make the party better reflect the left views of its constituents and Clintonites who push a more conservative, business-friendly, war-hawkish line. While that conservative line attracts big-money donors (as it's intended), it's at odds with the views of the party's voters, and the Clintonites have attempted to obscure and avoid addressing this by, among other things, crafting the narrative Korecki has deployed here,[4] an indefensible narrative that amounts to an attack on not just liberals but liberal democracy itself. Its a gross misrepresentation of what's actually happening, its underlying assumption is that it's entirely unreasonable to want one's elected representatives to reflect one's own views and it heaps personal abuse on anyone who takes any real measures to make that the case,[5] all in the service of defending unrepresentative conservative pols in a progressive party and country. The great passion Korecki displays is offered in defense of an utterly disreputable cause and does a disservice to her readers.

--j.

---

[1] That's what Newman's internal polling from a few months ago suggested; support for Lipinski within the district begins to collapse when voters are informed of his conservative record. Take that for what it's worth.

[2] Even looking at the race from the national perspective, Lipinski's views on, for example, abortion and gay rights--he's opposed to both--are wildly outside the broad American political center.

[3] Though Korecki does note, almost in passing, that the AFL-CIO--hardly a bit player--has endorsed Lipinski.

[4] Arguably, this race isn't even an example of this sort of progressive-vs.-Clintonite fight that prefab narrative was meant to cover and to obscure--Lipinski is a labor-backed candidate with backwards social views, while Newman's commitment to progressive policies has yet to be demonstrated.

[5] It's worth noting that while progressives holding to any sort of minimal standards for an elected official are treated by the narrative as engaged in entirely unreasonable purity politics, Clintonites exempt themselves from this when its their favored issues in question.