Thursday's Washington Post editorial, "Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign," is kind of fun.
Sanders "is playing the role of uncorrupted anti-establishment crusader." But actually he "is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it."
The Post says "Wall Street has already undergone a round of reform," "The evolution and structure of the world economy" rather than policies are responsible for inequality, Sanders "admits" that people will pay more taxes for Medicare-for-All and healthcare would have to be "rationed", and his claim that spending on infrastructure will grow the economy ranks up there with Republican claims that tax cuts pay for themselves. And finally, telling people they can change the corrupt governance of the country through mass engagement "ignores the many legitimate checks and balances in the political system that he cannot wish away."
Right.
They (like Clinton) frame the Wall Street problem as risking another collapse. Sanders says that the very size and power of these companies is the problem because of their influence on the economy and country.
They present the world economy as a given that we have to live with and adjust to. Sanders says this is a system rigged by the power and influence of great wealth and democracy has to regain power to fix that.
They present the cost problem in health care as paying doctors and hospitals. Sanders says we pay double what the rest of the world pays for health care because the size and power of the insurance and drug companies is yielding rents. And we don't "ration" health care? What world of premium insurance do they live in?
Saying government spending on infrastructure would bring higher growth is the same as saying cutting taxes will pay for itself? Really? YES - because in the WaPo "beltway" elite media world "both sides are the same".
As they say, we can't wish away the plutocratic control of our economy and it is "fantastical" to think otherwise and try.
Honest disagreement with a candidate's position is one thing – condescension toward people who hold that position for principled reasons is another.
Also see Charles Pierce at Esquire, "What The Washington Post (and Nearly Everyone) Gets Wrong About Bernie Sanders," referring to the paper now owned by Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos:
It seems that, over at The Washington Post, a once-great newspaper now doing business as an adjunct to the home delivery industry, Fred Hiatt's Workshop For Ghastly Writing is getting a little run for this editorial in which Bernie Sanders is posed as the Lord Mayor Of Munchkinland. There's nothing like the scorn of the Church Of The Savvy.
