Here’s how Bernie Sanders can get me to back off

| 8:15 pm EST February 23, 2020
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We’re at a tricky point in the 2020 Democratic primary race. Only three states have voted out of fifty, and Bernie Sanders has only won two out of the three of them. The math says we’re very likely headed to a brokered convention, where someone other than Sanders will likely emerge as the nominee. But the media is ignoring all of this and crowning Sanders the nominee already, even as he and many of his supporters become even more divisive and toxic.

I’ve been trying to spell all of this out as clearly and accurately as possible, because that’s what an honest political analyst does, regardless of how it impacts that analyst’s popularity. I’ll take the heat; I’ve taken a lot of heat in the past for things that I’ve routinely turned out to have been entirely correct about. But some folks out there, even if they view the Sanders mess the same way that I do, have expressed concern about my decision to call him out.

So I’m gong to put it on Sanders himself, and let him decide how this goes. If he wants to me to back off, he can take the following steps – all of which he should be taking without me having to ask him:

– Bernie must rein in (or part ways with) his toxic senior campaign advisers, who keep pulling stunts like going on TV and falsely claiming that another candidate had a heart attack, or going onto Twitter and directing pro-Bernie trolls to attack this or that pundit. He must also part ways with the most toxic of his campaign surrogates. Bernie needs to stop hiding behind bad people who do his dirty work for him.

– Bernie must stop demonizing the Democratic Party and pretending it’s no different than the Republican Party.

– Bernie must come clean with everything he knows about Russia’s attempts at rigging the 2020 Democratic primary race in his favor. He must also pledge to immediately disclose any additional information about Russian interference that he learns going forward.

– Bernie must immediately release his detailed medical records, instead of asking us to take his doctor’s word for it. He just had a heart attack.

Again, Bernie Sanders should be doing all of these things simply because they’re the right thing to do, not because I’m asking him to do them. If he continues refusing to do the right thing, I’ll have no choice but to keep vetting him, in order to ensure he doesn’t end up being the nominee. Bernie has forty years of embarrassing and bizarre political and personal history, all of which is public knowledge, most of which is not in dispute. The media has simply never publicized it, and Bernie’s opponents have been afraid to use it. But we all know Trump and the GOP will use this dirt to destroy Bernie if he’s the nominee. Better to put it out there now, than wait until we’re stuck with him as a nominee.