As Steve M. has noticed, suddenly the Right-Wing Noise Machine is very much taking Bernie Sanders as a real threat.
Maybe I just haven’t noticed it, but this seems new to me. It’s as if Sanders topped Hillary Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire in one poll and the word went out on the right to scramble the jets and start trying to take Sanders down.
I’d have thought the wingers wouldn’t worry about a wild-haired old lefty, but they know it’s a crazy year and a significant portion of the public might go for a candidate who’d have been deemed unacceptable even a year or two ago. They also know that even in defeat Sanders might have a real influence on the way we talk about taxes and government programs and economic inequality.
Right-wingers don’t let grass grow under their feet. I guess they’re going to try to address this threat now.
The Wall Street Journal, FOX News, even the Daily Mail are all going after Sanders this week, doing everything from saying his policies would cost $18 trillion dollars over ten years to Krauthammer attacking him as “insignificant” (why attack him then, Chuck?) Add too the meatheads at Power Line, who literally are reduced to repeatedly screaming “Bullshit” at lines of Sanders’s speech at Liberty University.
Suddenly attacking Bernie is really, really popular in the epistemic closure bubble. Yeah, I’m still not sold on the Sanders 2016 train (or Hillary for that matter) yet, but if Bernie’s making enemies like these pay attention to what he’s doing, he’s probably on the right track in some fashion.