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Bad Bernie takes: ‘He’s never been vetted’
№5 of a multi-part series deconstructing the worst bad-faith arguments against Sen. Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders has been essentially running for president non-stop since April 2015, and he’s been constantly in the public eye ever since. In the last go-round he went up against Hillary Clinton who had on her side people like David Brock, a veteran political operative who has at his disposal one of the largest and most sophisticated oppo-gathering apparatuses ever built. Since then, he’s been a bogeyman for rightwing media—Fox News, Daily Wire, the Washington Examiner—and scrutinized heavily by center-left outlets, such as the New York Times, Politico, the Daily Beast.
News outlets have watched every single episode of his Burlington cable access show while an army of freelance opposition researchers aligned with his primary opponents have spent the last few years monomaniacally combing through old clips of interviews and speeches hoping to find something that will tank his campaign.
In spring last year, Democratic powerbrokers and mega donors (and Pete Buttigieg, apparently) held a closed-door meeting to brainstorm about how to best deal with Sanders’ campaign, which no doubt involved mobilizing resources to gather and deploy political intelligence against…
