I'm not a fan of Bernie Sanders. Indeed, I'm quite sure that Mr. Sanders, a Marxist socialist of the sort whose ideology has wrecked Venezuela and numerous other nations where it has been implemented, would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States were he to be elected president.
Yet I feel compelled in the name of fair play, reason and simple common sense to come to his defense in the contretemps over his alleged "sexism." His rival in the race for the Democratic nomination, Elizabeth Warren, has accused Mr. Sanders of the sin of sexual bigotry on the basis of an alleged remark he made to her in a private conversation two years ago.
Ms. Warren's surrogates are claiming that Mr. Sanders opined to Ms. Warren, whose ideology is much the same as Mr. Sanders' and which would have much the same baneful effects were she to become president, that "a woman could not be elected president in the United States."
When Ms. Warren's supporters alleged earlier this week that Mr. Sanders was a shocking bigot the progressive media went into a tizzy, wondering if the old socialist war horse really was as awful a human being as the allegation made him sound. It's hard to believe that these folks in the media often esteem themselves the intellectual elite of our society because even if Senator Sanders had actually made this remark - he denies having done so - it is on the face of it, perfectly innocuous.
There's a vast difference, as anyone floating about in the intellectual cream of society should know, between saying that a woman could not be elected president, and saying that a womanshould not be elected president. The former is a purely sociological observation, the latter is a statement that would indeed reflect a bias against women on the part of the one who makes it.
If what Mr. Sanders said, assuming he said it at all, is that a woman could not be elected president and meant it in the same sense that someone back in the fifties might've asserted that an African-American, or a gay, or a bachelor, or a Catholic could not be elected president, it suggests a prejudice on the part of the electorate, perhaps, but not on the part of the person making the observation.
For Warren's supporters to seek to make hay over what appears to be a manifestly innocent claim is, if not merely stupid, then really quite nefarious. It's dishonest and unfair to Mr. Sanders, but, then, after the way he was treated by the Democratic party in 2016 he's probably used to being unfairly treated by his Democratic colleagues.