Desperate Clinton Campaign Resorts to Usual Dirty Tricks

When you're behind in the polls, then polls don't matter. That's what Hillary Clinton inferred on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon when she said "Polls are artificial".

But when you fall behind in the polls because you can't win an argument based on policy differences, and if you're seen as being too dishonest, and if people know you've been in the pockets of the big banks, then you can always resort to good old-fashion name-calling. There is nothing the Clinton campaign won't do in their power grab while running for the highest office in the land — as if 8 years in the White House wasn't enough already.

Now that Clinton is losing ground in the polls, her desperate campaign has resorted to ruthless Cold War tactics of red-baiting, The Red Scare and McCarthyism — by reemphasizing (over and over again) that Bernie Sanders is a "socialist". Similar tactics were once used by the Republicans against Democrats such as FDR, Truman and LBJ. Now the "moderate" Democrats are using this tactic against a fellow Democrat — a democratic socialist aka a progressive Democrat.

The Atlantic: "Some allies of Hillary Clinton are trying to pull out a red card. But with many Democrats feeling positive about the term, it may not have much effect."

And the Clintons will dig down deep into their big bag of dirty tricks if this one doesn't work. But it's very hypocritical to accuse Bernie of running a negative campaign when it was the Clinton campaign who fired the first shot over Bernie's bow with a fake claim that he was being sexist.

Pictured below is the dreaded socialist at his Vermont home, indoctrinating young people (his grandchildren) while plotting his sinister coup d'état — just as Obama once did back in 2008. The pictures of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin were removed from the wall for the purpose of this photo op and interview for Pravda People Magazine (sarcasm)

But if Bernie really poses any threat to America, then Obama must have destroyed the country by now — and Hillary Clinton will continue his "legacy" if she were ever elected (even though she claims she's not running for Obama's third term).

According to the New York Times, Hillary nee Rodham came to Wellesley College as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise. But in her junior year in 1968, Rodham became a supporter of Eugene McCarthy, a protest candidate who challenged incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary.

In 1969, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a 92-page senior thesis for Wellesley College titled "There Is Only the Fight . . . An Analysis of the Alinsky Model". It was a critique of the tactics of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, author of "Rules for Radicals".

Breitbart: "Throughout Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency and his subsequent time in that office, two things have been said again and again: 1) He has a grudge against America 2) He takes his marching orders from Saul Alinsky, particularly as encapsulated in the book "Rules for Radicals".

Years later, while Hillary was First Lady, access to her Wellesley thesis was restricted at the request of the White House and it became the subject of some speculation. According to NBC News, Wellesley's president approved a broad rule with a specific application: The senior thesis of every Wellesley alumna is available in the college archives for anyone to read — except for those written by either a "president or first lady of the United States." So far, that action has sealed precisely one document: Hillary Rodham's senior honors thesis in political science.

Wiki: "Interest in the thesis and in Clinton's relationship with Alinsky continued during the Democratic Party presidential primaries in 2008 as Clinton battled Barack Obama, who had also been reported to have been exposed to Alinsky-style ideas and methods during his time as a Chicago community organizer. Interest was renewed again in 2014 with the discovery of correspondence from 1971 between Hillary Clinton and Alinsky at the University of Texas at Austin. Alana Goodman of The Washington Free Beacon interpreted the letters as suggesting that Alinsky, who died in 1972, had a deeper influence on Clinton's early political views than the thesis had stated.

According to the Washington Free Beacon (September 21, 2014) in a post titled The Hillary Letters: "Clinton met with Alinsky several times in 1968 while writing a Wellesley college thesis about his theory of community organizing. Clinton’s relationship with Alinsky, and her support for his philosophy, continued for several years after she entered Yale law school in 1969. Clinton opponent turned Clinton defender David Brock referred to her as 'Alinsky’s daughter' in 1996’s The Seduction of Hillary Rodham." (David Brock is the one who is now asking for Bernie's medical records.)

The National Review: "Saul Alinsky was a democratic socialist. He worked closely for years with Chicago’s Communist party and did everything in his power to advance its program. Alinsky was smart enough never to join the party, however. From the start, he understood the dangers of ideological openness. Alinsky supported the central Marxist tenet of public ownership of the means."

You know who else was a democratic socialist? Martin Luther King Jr. (More about that here at the Huffington Post)

Bernie is not a "Socialist" — but then again, the Soviet Union was not really Socialist either. Counter Punch: "Nor did it reflect the philosophy of Marx in any meaningful way. It constituted some form of authoritarian state socialism in which one set of elites that control the economy (capitalist elites) are replaced with another set of elites that control the economy (political elites). In both systems, workers are effectively reduced to laborers serving the interests of the elites. In contrast, in "democratic socialism", the workers would have had a meaningful democratic voice in the economic sphere of their lives."

Salon: "Sanders is a Democrat in every way but the name. Running in Vermont, Sanders had to distinguish himself from Democrats to establish his own brand. But once he got to Congress in 1990, he voted with the Dems nearly 100 percent of the time. The Democratic establishment funded his 2006 senate campaign, including $10,000 from HillPAC, Hillary Clinton’s funding arm. He caucused with the Democrats in the Senate. And by the way, he’s running as a Democrat."

Actually, Bernie is running as a "progressive" Democrat, not a "moderate" Democrat. Even the DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz could not explain the difference between a Democrat and a socialist.

In his book "Dreams from my Father" President Obama wrote: "To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." Every since then, the Republicans called him a Marxist/Socialist (and a Muslim, and a sympathizer for the defunct Weather Underground — and also asked for his birth certificate, even though he was born to an American citizen in the State of Hawaii (2 years after it became a State). When will Hillary's campaign also ask for Bernie's birth certificate?

During President Obama's reelection bid in 2012, he said: "I believe that in a society as wealthy as ours, we should have a commitment to our seniors and to the disabled. That's not a sign of weakness. That's not socialism." And more recently in 2014, when explaining how he'd fund new education initiatives, Obama said, "We'd pay for it in part by closing tax loopholes for companies that are shipping their profits overseas. It's not crazy, it's not socialism."

But with Democratic voters increasingly rallying around Bernie Sanders, the phrase "socialist" could soon appear out-of-date. A new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll showed that 43% of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers saw themselves as socialists compared to just 38% who called themselves capitalist. (That puts Hillary and her supporters in the minority with most other Americans.)

Now Bernie Sanders is being compared by some to Eugene McCarthy — because he has been doing so well in the polls. But that's not all. It's not just Republicans doing the red-baiting on Bernie, but now the Democrats are doing it as well. But no matter, Bernie has made his message loud and clear, and it resonates with the American people — so maybe all Democrats are socialists now.

FrontPageMag: "Democrats have largely shed conservative and white working class voters. That was a deliberate program by Obama and his left-wing CAP allies. Obama was DSA, so the only difference between him and Bernie Sanders is that the latter is open about being a Socialist. The Democratic Party has been Socialist for the better part of the century. They just don't like the label. Just like they don't like the liberal label. That's a stylistic choice. Attacking Bernie Sanders as some kind of lunatic because he has the same position on health care as Ted Kennedy is more than a little strange." [Note: Here's my post about the "socialist" Obama, and what happened to the economy under his watch so far.]

Breitbart: "As socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) surges 16% to a tie in Iowa and a massive +27 point lead in New Hampshire, David Brock, founder of the left-wing propaganda site Media Matters and a key Hillary Clinton ally, gave us a preview of the future as Hillary faces a repeat of her worst nightmare scenario of 2008. In an interview Tuesday night, Brock ripped Sanders as a "socialist wackadoodle."

The establishment politicians on both sides on the aisle are petrified that Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump could become our next President, and doing away with the status quo.

Wall Street Journal: "Clinton allies may be preparing to target Mr. Sanders’s socialist views. A key member of the larger Clinton political network is David Brock, founder of a pro-Clinton super PAC called Correct the Record. Mr. Brock gave an interview Tuesday and put Mr. Sanders’s socialism front and center. Appearing on Bloomberg TV’s "With all Due Respect", Mr. Brock got a question about how to stop Mr. Sanders’s momentum. Rather than mention Mr. Sanders’s voting record, Mr. Brock brought up what he called "the elephant in the room."

"He’s a socialist … He’s got a 30 year history of affiliation with a lot of whack-doodle ideas and parties. Think about what the Republicans will do with the fact that he’s a socialist in the fall.” But Trump ain't no whack-doodle :)

Michael Briggs, spokesman for Sanders campaign, responded: “That might be a remotely interesting observation if Senator Sanders had not been identified as a democratic socialist thousands and thousands of times in the past year alone on television, on the Internet and in print. Despite that, polling now shows Senator Sanders is a far stronger general election candidate against any and all the Republicans than is Secretary Clinton."

This is David Brock

Clinton surrogate Senator Claire McCaskill recently told NBC's Kasie Hunt that it would "be absolutely impossible for a self-declared socialist to win states like Missouri." And Donald Trump again called him a "communist-slash-socialist" at a recent rally. Last year McCaskill said Bernie Sanders was TOO liberal (She is one of the 13 Democratic Senators who gave Obama fast track for trade deals that would offshore more jobs). McCaskill also had complained that the media was being too nice to Senator Bernie Sanders because they weren't calling him a "socialist" often enough. McCaskill must not read very much, because Sanders' political leanings as a "Social Democrat" or "socialist" had already been mentioned in the media about 1,000 times by then.

This is Senator Claire McCaskill

The New York Times recently reported that Clinton allies (such as McCaskill and others) are increasingly making the case that Sanders’ self-avowed socialism makes him unelectable in a general election — even though all polls show Bernie beating any Republican candidate, and by wider margins than Hillary (Hillary actually loses to some, making her LESS electable than Bernie).

The Washington Post writes: "The Clinton camp has not meaningfully addressed the fair point that she made similar “electability” arguments against Barack Obama in 2008, which turned out (obviously) to be very wrong. All of which is to say that the dispute over “electability” deserves serious treatment.

Acton: "Sanders is a Democratic Socialist — Sanders does not identify with the Marxist-Leninist wing of socialism (and no, he’s not a communist), but self-identifies as a "democratic socialist". In Democratic Socialism: A Global Survey, Donald F. Busky explains the term this way:

"Democratic socialism is the wing of the socialist movement that combines a belief in a socially owned economy with that of political democracy. Sometimes simply called socialism, more often than not, the adjective democratic is added by democratic socialists to distinguish themselves from Communists who also call themselves socialists…democratic socialists wish to emphasize by their name that they disagree strongly with the Marxist-Leninist brand of socialism."

Sanders advocates for an American-style of socialism, which was almost what we had in the 1950s and 1960s before the Powell Memo.

From a Letter to the Editor: "Although a registered Democrat, I’m not as much a diehard Democrat as I am an absolute diehard non-Republican for a multitude of reasons. This perhaps explains why I can identify so well with Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic-socialist."

Remember when Hillary Clinton said all those really nasty things about Obama in the 2008 election — before he gave her a job as Secretary of State? Now, in the last Democratic debate, she had nothing but fond things to say about Obama. Maybe one day (after Bernie is the President) she'll say nice things about him too! (It's odd though, that Obama won't even endorse her. What does THAT say?)

In the very end, if Hillary were ever elected, what can she do that Obama or Bernie can't? Nada.

* Full Disclosure: To be fair and balanced, compare Bernie on the issues to Hillary on the issues. Does Bernie look like an evil Socialist?