On Sanders and Propaganda

The establishment's sniveling propagandists have redoubled their efforts to debase Bernie Sanders with attempts to discredit him and the virtues he has always displayed. Lately, in between whining about the lack of a Sanders endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President, they are crying that he still has a Secret Service detail assigned to him, as if it were done at his insistence, and only for his vanity. It is not. That detail is provided to him as it is to everyone who is still a candidate, and, in Sanders' case, who will remain a candidate until at least the Democratic National Convention.

To be charitable, I will suppose that these propagandists are playing stupid, as opposed to actually being so (which is not beyond the scope of the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence), when they ask where Sanders expects to go, and what he expects to gain from what they characterize as stubbornness born of his vanity and his desperate clinging to celebrity. I guess they missed it, seeing how he can't have articulated it more than several hundreds of times over the past year. Of course, in fairness, despite that repeated articulation, most people are unfamiliar with Sanders' program, and especially journalists and news organizations that prefer to be on the cuff instead of doing the job that the framers sought to protect in the First Amendment.

What Sanders has repeated so frequently that it sounds like a mantra, is that while he has been in this race to win the Democratic nomination, that outcome was not as important to him as building a sustainable political movement that he characterized as a "revolution". He has succeeded in initiating that progressive political revolution, and that is why these partisans to empire are whistling past the graveyard as they struggle to undermine it in its infancy.

Regarding the lack of an endorsement for Hillary Clinton, Sanders has said that he has not heard her say what she needs to say in order to secure that endorsement. She has not made any commitments, even in a half hearted fashion to progressive principles, other than her customary triangulation around them. That is no more than making the noise without the meaning or intent. But, of course, she clearly understands what is required to secure that endorsement. She evidently doesn't think that she needs it. That's her choice, and Sanders is not to be faulted for being as good as his word.

Where Sanders expects to go is to return to his seat in the Senate expressing a preference for a committee assignment in Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, unmistakably illustrating his priorities in the next Congress. Recalling Sanders' effectiveness in his service to the Veterans' Affairs Committee, the scribes for empire become alarmed, and so bark out, "Let's you and her fight, " in reference to his seeking to displace the current ranking member, Sen. Patty Murray, even groveling so low as to suggest that it is Sanders' sexist proclivities, as he supposedly demonstrated by campaigning against Hillary Clinton, that lead him to oppose Murray for the ranking member position.

Sanders will be a much more powerful senator than he was before this campaign. Where before, his base of support extended a bit beyond his home state of Vermont, it is now national, with a sizable contingent in every state. These are the people who struggle to lift themselves above poverty, above discrimination for their race and their gender, and their sexual preference. They are people who have been mired in poverty and long to escape the past and those who once enjoyed prosperity and long to return to the prosperity that they once had.

All of these needs can be consistently and compatibly addressed by the progressive programs that Sanders has outlined in this campaign, which are, in essence, a return to the New Deal, with its evolution to apply to the present.