SANDERSVATICANPOPEGATE!!11!!
[SIZE=5][CENTER]SANDERSVATICANPOPEGATE!!11!!*
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Oft-berated Bernie Bros and e'er-negated Sandersnistas, I have your back. Imma blow the lid off SandersVaticanPopeGateGhazi "right fscking now:" Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the the Vatican Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, invited U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders to speak at an Academy conference and, probably, also to have "face time" with Pope Francis II. (All emphasis in this post is mine.)This was an honor to both the United States and Sanders. Despite needing the time for his New York primary campaign, Sanders accepted, spoke and had papal face time. So, of course, instead of congratulations and praise, these events led to filling Vol. 32,753 of Campaign Falsehoods About Sanders: Media/Clinton supporters went full court "press" batnuts, rabidly deflecting from the positive news, while flailing desperately to try smear Sanders. That's it. That's what happened. Need more deets about the sitch? Don't stew, boo: I still got you. First, though, a smidge of factual context.
As we all know, only two candidates now contend for the Democratic Presidential nomination, U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who leads in pledged delegates, and Sanders. A number of sharp contrasts delineate them. Both candidates have ties to the "Empire" State, Bernie having been born and raised in a poor area of NYC and Hillary having been the state's wealthy and powerful former FLOTUS "carpetbagging" Senator for eight years, including during and after 911. Sanders campaigns partly on Hillary's being the candidate of big business and big wealth, while he fights for the rights of the 99%. Hillary funds her campaign mostly with "dark" money and larger donations from Big Business and the very wealthy; Bernie funds his campaign exclusively with donations from individuals, averaging $27 per donation, to a maximum of $2,700 per individual, one of several "Sanders sea changes" to modern U.S. politics. Hillary polls significantly below Sanders on issues of honesty and trustworthiness.
Some claimed that Sanders won the debate on April 14, while Hillary appeared both evasive and dishonest. When Bernie announced his April 15 speech at the Vatican, already on Hillary's schedule were an April 15 dinner with George and Amal Clooney, costing $353,000 a couple, and an April 16 Clooney home fundraiser at $30,000 a head. The New York primary is very important for both candidates, because of both the number of delegates involved and the symbolism, but Hillary especially needs to win New York, much as Bernie especially needed to win Vermont. Many Catholics vote in NY. Mainstream media, which is very big business, owned by even bigger business, undermines Sanders when it isn't busy ignoring him. The rest of this post writes itself.
Per the Constitution of the Academy, Pope John Paul II established the Academy on January 1, 1994, to promote study and progress of the social sciences, primarily economics, sociology, law and political science. The Academy offers the elements that the Church can use in developing social doctrine, and reflects on application of that doctrine in contemporary society. The Academy is "in effect the Vatican’s in-house think tank on social, economic and environmental issues." [URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/us/politics/bernie-sanders-vatican.html?_r=0[/URL] In other words, the mission of the Academy and the life work of Sanders seem to match. The conference to which the Bishop invited Sanders marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Centesimus Annus, an encyclical that Pope John Paul II issued May 1, 1991, the centennial anniversary year of Rerum novarum, an important 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII . Centesimus Annus also marked the (presumed) end of the Cold War, as symbolized by the fall of the Berlin wall. While the piqué chorus downplayed the importance of this conference, it certainly seems significant to the Vatican (and to me). "But wait! There's more." (Sadly.)
On April 8, the day Sanders announced he would speak at the conference, the New York Times headlined and leded its report of the prestigious invitation thus: "Bernie Sanders Announces Plan for Speech at Vatican, and Clarifications Follow
Updated, 5 p.m. Senator Bernie Sanders was excited on Friday (April 8) to announce that he would travel to Rome this month to give a high-profile speech at the Vatican,but the trip quickly spurred an international dust-up amid confusion about how he got invited and whether he would meet Pope Francis.[[URL]http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/08/bernie-sanders-announces-plan-for-speech-at-vatican/[/URL] (Note: The facts were known by the time the NYT "updated" its story.) No, NYT, a trip simply takes someone or something from one place to another. You and other media, in your avaricious zeal to try to defeat Sanders, were responsible for the needless confusion and consequent embarrassment of both the Vatican and Sanders.
Also on April 8, on Morning Joe, Sanders said that he did not know if would get to speak with the Pope. However, at The View later that same morning, host Joy Behar exclaimed in the midst of her set up spiel, "You're meeting with the Pope?" Bernie said "Yup." Dear reader, I cannot say whether Bernie misheard the question or anticipated a different question or inexplicably contradicted the statement that he himself had made earlier the same day on national television. I can say only that, for whatever reason, Bernie said "Yup" while Behar was talking. However, I note that Bernie did in fact end up, at a minimum, having "face time" with the Pope on the morning of April 16 (something I will take up in Parte Duo of this post). Without having paused, Behar claimed that the Pope had invited Bernie, asking Bernie "What do you two have in common exactly"? Only at that point did Behar stop talking long enough for Bernie to give an answer that did not need auditory enhancement to be heard over Behar's spiel. Bernie immediately answered her question, without backtracking to correct anything said by him or by her during her introduction.
Bloomberg News, the eponymous media outlet of a billionaire to whom a very few, very rich people Americans had briefly turned their Presidentially-longing eyes, soon reported that Ms. Margaret Archer, President of the Academy, had claimed that Sanders had not only invited himself to the conference, but had violated protocol by going around her office to invite himself. Said Ms. Archer, "Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons. He may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly -- not that he will." [URL]http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-08/sanders-accused-of-discourtesy-in-seeking-vatican-invitation[/URL]
Ouch! While the Vatican is not supposed to get involved in secular politics, the President of a Vatican Academy (falsely) accused a U.S. politician of behaving badly in order to pander for the Catholic vote! We were really off to the debases once the Clinton campaign re-published the falsehoods. "Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, gleefully re-posted a report on Twitter indicating that the Vatican was angered by its dealings with Mr. Sanders." [URL]http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/08/bernie-sanders-announces-plan-for-speech-at-vatican/[/URL] So began a near-lunatic tempest in a See pot.
Both the Sanders campaign and the Bishop vigorously disputed Ms. Archer's version of events. Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who is a member of the Academy and had worked with the Pope last year on an encyclical, stated that the Academy had reached out to him, asking how to reach Sanders and Sachs provided the information. [URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/us/politics/bernie-sanders-vatican.html?ref=topics&_r=0[/URL] This datum strongly suggests that Ms. Archer was either delusional or dishonest. The totally unlikely alternative is that Sanders had "invited himself" to speak at a Vatican conference, but refused to give the Vatican his contact information--or that a member of the Academy who had worked closely with the Pope lied about having been contacted. "Michael Briggs, a spokesman for Sanders....said the characterization of the invitation is 'categorically untrue. The invitation came to the senator from the Vatican.' His campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said the trip wasn’t calculated to help the candidate’s appeal to Catholic voters in the New York primary." [URL]http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-08/sanders-accused-of-discourtesy-in-seeking-vatican-invitation[/URL]
Bishop and Academy Chancellor Sánchez Sorondo was reached in New York on April 8, not long after Ms. Archer had spoken to Bloomberg. When Reuters conveyed to him the comments of Ms. Archer, the Bishop, who is senior to Archer, immediately responded, "I deny that. It was not that way. This is not true and she knows it. I invited him with her consensus." [URL]http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-vatican-idUSKCN0X5257[/URL] He explained, “We are interested in having him (Sanders) because we have two presidents coming from Latin America. I thought it would be good to have an authoritative voice from North America.” [URL]http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-08/sanders-accused-of-discourtesy-in-seeking-vatican-invitation[/URL]
Someone may have asked the Bishop why Sanders and not Clinton. In any event, the New York Times offered this quote from Sánchez Sorondo, an Argentine who is close to the Pope: "We invited the candidate who cites the pope the most in his campaign, and that is Senator Bernie Sanders.” The Bishop also said that Mr. Sanders’ focus on climate change and his attention to poor people on the margins of society were “very analogous to that of the pope.” He said that made the Vermont Senator an obvious person to invite..... .[URL]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/us/politics/bernie-sanders-vatican.html?_r=0[/URL] Archer did not respond to Bloomberg's phoned and emailed requests for her response to the Bshop's remarks, so the remarks stand unchallenged. [URL]http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-04-08/sanders-accused-of-discourtesy-in-seeking-vatican-invitation[/URL]
Via email, Reuters received a copy of the invitation to Sanders. Dated March 30, the invitation bore the name of Ms. Archer and the signature of Sánchez Sorondo. [URL]http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-vatican-idUSKCN0X5257[/URL] Recall that, on April 8, Archer had told Bloomberg that Sanders had gone around her to invite himself two or three days earlier--meaning April 5 or 6, yet the invitation was dated March 30. One wonders what or who, or how much, happened to Ms. Archer between the time the Bishop got Ms. Archer's "consensus" to the March 30 invitation and April 8, when she made her false, "politically-tinged" accusations about Sanders. Of course, media has not been hammering those who lied about this. Also on April 8, the same day as Archer spoke to Bloomberg, the Academy issued a press release that listed Sanders first among the speakers at the conference, before even heads of state and the President of the Academy. Make no mistake, the Vatican understands the significance of such things as well as any protocol consultant to Queen Elizabeth II:
We're delighted to host this conference to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Centesimus Annus, bringing together world leaders, including US Senator Sanders, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, Bolivian President Evo Morales, Academicians of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences such as its President Margaret Archer, and leading scholars such as Professor Daniel Finn, Professor Jeffrey Sachs etc., to examine and discuss changes in politics, economics, and culture in the world these last 25 years in the light of Pope Francis' new encyclical Laudato si'.
So there ended the disgraceful, fabricated shaming of Sanders by Democrats for the "sin" of having received an invitation from the Vatican to speak about wealth inequality and peace, right? No, no, my dear naifs et naïves, nooooo. That would have been far too semi-sane. Looping the loop all week were lies that Sanders had invited himself, that the Vatican had disinvited Sanders, that Sanders was not one of the speakers, that the Pope and/or the Vatican had distanced themselves from Sanders, that Sanders had cancelled the trip and on and on. And then, of course, came FaceTimegate and NoPhotogate. Parte Duo will attempt to cover more of the freakish feeding frenzy.
*The original title of this post was SANDERSVATICANPOPEGATEGHAZI. However, I realized that, although Hillary supporters indiscriminately fling around the name "Benghazi" and the "ghazi" suffix in a feverish attempt to discredit any and all criticisms of Hillary, people died. It's not casual or funny or a punch line.
= new reply since forum marked as read
piece. I think you dissected and addressed each facet of the absurdity of the SVPG (no ghazi) with grace and eloquence.
Here's a cherry on top.....
v
LOL Bernie just did not see her 
Evo Morales and then seems to place himself between Archer and Bernie. Body Language speaks volumes.
And good work on clarifying some of the issues.
Seriously, seeing so many people become unhinged over this has been beyond disturbing.
Great post Merrily 
