by Michael Snyder, End Of The American Dream:

The Democratic establishment has officially shifted into panic mode.  In 2016, they watched a bold political outsider shred a divided field of establishment Republican candidates on his way to winning the White House.  Now they have one and only one shot of denying Donald Trump a second term, and the same thing that happened to the Republicans in 2016 is now happening to them.  So far, Bernie Sanders is trouncing a divided field of establishment Democratic candidates, and that is a huge problem for party leadership for a number of reasons.  For one thing, most top establishment Democrats absolutely detest Sanders.  Secondly, most of them don’t believe that he has a prayer of actually beating Trump in November.  So they are desperate to find a way to deny Sanders the nomination, but with each Sanders victory that is going to become increasingly difficult to do.

At this point, an all-out civil war has just about erupted on the left.  Establishment Democrats are all in a tizzy about potentially nominating a “socialist”, but of course the truth is that America has been drifting toward socialism ever since FDR first entered the White House.  Yes, there have been a few times when we have attempted to change course (the Reagan administration for example), but in general the federal government has just gotten bigger and bigger over the decades.  Today we have the biggest government in the entire history of the planet, and the Democrats are primarily to blame.

Ultimately, what this conflict is about is power.  Bernie Sanders may have won the hearts of the voters, but he isn’t supposed to actually win the nomination, and the Democratic establishment will pull out all the stops in order to keep that from happening.

All of a sudden, operatives on the left can’t stop talking about how the Russians want Bernie Sanders to win.  This is coming from the same people that spent years trying to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election and that accused Tulsi Gabbard of being a “Russian operative” in order to derail her quest for the Democratic nomination.

Are there people out there that actually believe this stuff?

Apparently there must be, because establishment Democrats just keep going back to the same playbook over and over again.

In the weeks ahead, we should expect the attacks on Sanders to continue to escalate.  The following are 11 of the most outrageous things that establishment Democrats have said about Bernie Sanders so far, but this is probably just the beginning…

#1 Rahm Emanuel: “Putin and Trump are picking their opponent.”

#2 Joe Biden: “The Russians don’t want me to be the nominee,” Biden said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” later adding, “they like Bernie.”

#3 James Carville: “Right now, it’s about 1:15 Moscow time. This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He’s probably staying up watching this right now. How you doing, Vlad?”

#4 MSNBC’s Joy Reid regarding the tremendous enthusiasm of Bernie’s voters: “Democrats need to sober up, and figure out what the hell they’re going to do about that.”

#5 Democratic House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn: “If you know how well we did the last time and look at the congressional districts, these are not liberal or progressive districts. These are moderate and conservative districts that we did well in. And in those districts it’s going to be tough to hold on to these jobs if you have to make the case for accepting a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.”

#6 NPR’s Maria Hinojosa: “As somebody who has been around for a while…I want receipts. What has he done in all his time to actually deliver for Latino/a voters?”

#7 Pete Buttigieg: “Before we rush to nominate Senator Sanders in our one shot to take on this president, let us take a sober look at what is at stake for our party, for our values and for those with the most to lose.”

#8 Joe Lockhart: “In any political campaign, candidates need to know what they stand for, and who — or what — they’re up against. At this stage in the game for Bloomberg, that enemy is not Trump. It’s Sen. Bernie Sanders and the election calendar.”

#9 James Carville: “If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool.”

#10 Hillary Clinton: “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” Clinton said of Sanders in a documentary about the campaign, released this year. “He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”

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