2016 Postmortem

If you can find any, that is. The Republicans usually never uttered a peep about Sanders, who should have been their ideological worst enemy. Hillary was downright acceptable to them in the face of anyone who called themselves a "democratic socialist," both words being the political equivalent of blasphemy to any self-respecting right wing nut case.

The Republicans left Sanders alone not because they considered him less of an ideological foe than he indeed was, but because they saw Hillary Clinton as their likely opponent, and welcomed any chance to weaken her that they could get in advance of the GE campaign. Sanders provided them with plenty of help and ammunition. Certainly not because he wanted to help the Republicans--he had no illusions about them being the worst of all possible outcomes--, but because he was so narrowly focused on his anti-Hillary message that he never saw (or cared?) how useful he was being to his own worst political enemies until it was too late. While the "I-Hate-Hillary" crowd was spreading the mantra of "Killary is the lesser of two evils," the Republicans were preparing some real evil right under all our noses in peace and quiet and very much out of the scrutinizing eye of an all-too-complicit media.