RUTHFULLY YOURS

2008 was supposed to be Hillary’s year – except that she was overtaken by a charismatic, young black man unburdened by her decades of scandals. Hillary swallowed her resentment and made nice with Obama.

By 2016, her time had come. She’d earned it.

This time, though, an open socialist who looked like a crazy uncle, but appealed to hard-left young voters, threatened to end her inevitable coronation. Hillary and the DNC, however, worked together to rig the system so Bernie didn’t have a chance. Fortunately for America, it turned out Hillary didn’t have a chance either.

What may have helped Hillary’s defeat was that passionate Bernie supporters – the “Bernie Bros” – weren’t good sports. With Bernie gone, they didn’t throw their support to Hillary. Instead, they sat out the election. To conservatives, Hillary lost because she was an arrogant, tin-eared, corrupt candidate. Hillary, though, thinks she lost in part because of Bernie and misogyny.

These themes emerged in a lengthy interview Hillary gave to the Hollywood Reporter, while shilling a new documentary about herself. Hillary was plain mean about Bernie:

In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” That assessment still hold?

Yes, it does.

If he gets the nomination, will you endorse and campaign for him?

[snip]

I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren].

It takes chutzpah for Hillary, who called half the American population “deplorables,” to castigate Bernie for being insulting. Hillary also had to embellish the misogyny card and throw in some Orange Man Bad:

Speaking of, he allegedly told Sen. Elizabeth Warren in 2018 that he didn’t think a woman could win, a statement he vigorously denies. How did you digest that?

[snip]

I think that both the press and the public have to really hold everybody running accountable for what they say and what their campaign says and does. That’s particularly true with what’s going on right now with the Bernie campaign having gone after Elizabeth with a very personal attack on her. Then this argument about whether or not or when he did or didn’t say that a woman couldn’t be elected, it’s part of a pattern. If it were a one-off, you might say, “OK, fine.” But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me. I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who’s going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we’ve seen from this current administration.

To be fair to Hillary, when she says Bernie is unpleasant, she’s not alone. Back in 2015, those who worked for Bernie agreed:

According to some who have worked closely with Sanders over the years, “grumpy grandpa” doesn’t even begin to describe it. They characterize the senator as rude, short-tempered and, occasionally, downright hostile.

[snip]

“As a supervisor, he was unbelievably abusive,” says one former campaign staffer, who claims to have endured frequent verbal assaults. The double standard was clear: “He did things that, if he found out that another supervisor was doing in a workplace, he would go after them. You can’t treat employees that way.”

[snip]

“Bernie was an asshole,” says a Democratic insider who worked with Sanders on the campaign trail. “Just unnecessarily an asshole.”

Hillary may not have political heft anymore, but with everyone else going after Bernie too, those words may hurt.