Sanders: Hillary Clinton Has Foreign Policy Chops–But So Did Dick Cheney!

“You’re never going to have a chance to vote for somebody who is better prepared for the demands of this time”, Clinton said of his wife, Hillary Clinton. “The trouble is, many progressive voters who work with progressive organizations believe they are the grassroots”. “[HRC] has proudly taken on the establishment & fought for LGBT people for 30 years”, Human Rights Campaign added.

Planned Parenthood endorsed Hillary Clinton earlier this month and Bernie Sanders is really salty about it. “How can you say that groups like @PPact and @HRC are part of the “establishment” you’re taking on? -H”. And, while Sanders designating MoveOn.org and Democracy for America as “grassroots”-perhaps in contrast to Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign-surely rankled some, “grassroots” is not synonymous with “good”, and Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign are each among the largest and most influential organizations of their kind”. That’s not even close to fair to apply to the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood.

So what was Sanders getting at, if he wasn’t expressing a sudden seizure of reactionary sentiment?

Look, there is a case to be made that the Human Rights Campaign and, to a lesser extent, Planned Parenthood are part of the progressive “establishment” in that they have the ear of Democrats in Congress and make high-profile endorsements.

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, whose campaign has largely focused on domestic issues, is touting his foreign policy judgment in a new television ad, which began airing Wednesday in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Planned Parenthood’s political arm, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, has million on hand to spend in the 2016 presidential and Congressional races.

Statistics, however, are enough to convince anyone that Planned Parenthood is “fighting like hell” to protect their financial interests – women’s health be damned.

One of Sanders’s overarching themes in his campaign is a critique of the neoliberal economic consensus that politicians in both parties have agreed to and the financial sector helps enforce – a consensus that he doesn’t feel any other candidate in either party would think to criticize, let alone do so adequately.

When campaign spokesperson Michael Briggs was asked to clarify Sanders’ comments on the Rachel Maddow Show, Briggs declined, noting that Sanders had already “said it better than I could”, according to MSNBC. But that’s all secondary now, and to nobody’s real benefit.