Virginia Heffernan declares that Bernie's a red for the millionth time

I quoted Virginia Heffernan the other day when she blatantly lied in her column by declaring that Bernie Sanders was definitely lying when he said that he did not tell Elizabeth Warren that a woman could not win the presidency. It's obvious that she's lying because there were two people present for that conversation in 2018, and neither of them was Virginia Heffernan.

Now she's giving us another example of dishonesty in the corporate media. She tweeted out that she "heard" that it's "possible" that the Russian government would love to see Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee against President Trump in the 2020 election.

Virginia Heffernan @page88

A possibility I've heard: By at least one calculation Sanders is almost exactly as good for the Kremlin as Trump is. If it's Trump v Sanders in the general, the Russian Federation has no need even to put a thumb on the scale. Thifty use of resources by the new Kremlin monarch.

The problem with this feigned objectivity is that she's been pushing that exact narrative on Twitter for years.

Virginia Heffernan @page88

Worth remembering that the Kremlin also stumped hard for Bernie Sanders (whose campaign was of course managed by Manafort-linked Tad Devine).

Virginia Heffernan @page88

Right on. Also maybe not great for the Bernie Sanders brand that he’s named as a beneficiary of Russia’s IRA disinfo campaign in February Mueller indictment.

Molly McKew @MollyMcKew

Pro-tip for 2020 Dem candidates: it's probably best if your chief political strategist didn't previously work for for Kremlin-aligned interests. Gonna be a hard one to defend this cycle. https://t.co/sPlZmEtptV

Virginia Heffernan @page88

I mean, the Bernie bots and bros — even the ones who believed they were acting on principle — certainly gave Trump and the Kremlin a mighty assist.

Virginia Heffernan @page88

A thread about the possibility of Bernie Sanders as a very 2016 Kremlin-Trump operation.

Threader @threader_app

@MelissaMermaid Hey, thanks for sharing this thread from @page88. Read the whole version here: https://t.co/03z1G6claT

Virginia Heffernan @page88

I plan to sic my kids on Bernie to ask him to sign something binding saying he supports the Magnitsky Act and then play the video of him getting red and huffy and saying fuck you, children

Virginia Heffernan @page88

Can we just see this as simple: without foreign interference there was no Trump. Or Bernie.

Dave Weigel @daveweigel

Arik Bjorn, a 2016 Bernie organizer, with an extremely subtle 2020 message. https://t.co/uug2v1yEkJ

So it's completely credible that she heard that Bernie is a Manchurian candidate, because she's been openly saying it all along. But why is she pretending as if this is a completely new revelation to her brought up by a presumably disinterested third-party?

Framing her tweet this way, rather than simply declaring it to be true herself, makes it seem more credible to someone unfamiliar with the issue or with her prior history. This is the tweet that will be disseminated by the rest of the corporate media to make the claim seem unbiased rather than the ravings of a hack pushing a debunked narrative that has made the American corporate media a laughingstock since before Trump was inaugurated.