On Sunday’s “State of the Union” program, hosted by the recently-irascible CNN “journalist” Jake Tapper, multi-attempt, Democrat primary loser and Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders told a whopper of a lie about the way the party of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has addressed demands from radical BLM and Antifa rioters among their base in the aftermath of the police-involved shooting death of George Floyd.

Sen. Sanders said, among other things, that no Democrat “running for office” has called for police departments across the country to be defunded.

If you buy that, I have a bridge in Arizona to sell you.

Take a listen for yourself:

Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Nobody I know who's running for office talks about defunding the police — what we talk about is making police officers accountable." pic.twitter.com/b80r0Bys9n

— The Hill (@thehill) November 15, 2020

Sanders:

“Nobody I know, who’s running for office, talks about ‘defunding the police.’ What we talk about is making police officers accountable, making sure that police departments do what they can do best — figuring out how you deal with mental illness, how you deal with homelessness. But those are, in fact, police responsibilities, making sure the police officers are not killing innocent African Americans.

That is not ‘defund the police.'”

Now, reader, I bet you already have two politicians “running for office” in mind to rebut this obvious lie from Sanders. Why, it’s former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate for the White House, Senator Kamala Harris!

Remember when Biden couldn’t decide, from one week (or was it day?) to the next whether he wanted to defund the police or not? Yeah, that happened.

Then Kamala was clear: she told an interviewer she’s all about the rioting and chaos-causing tactics so beloved by her law enforcement-hating comrades continuing, even “after the election.” Then she cackled ominously.

The other problem with Sanders’ attempt at misdirection is that most of what he said makes no sense. Most pressing is the disgusting rhetoric implying that police officers are roving, racist, killing machines who want to kill as many Black people as possible. There’s no factual data to back that up, period. Secondly, police are well-trained to deal compassionately with mentally ill and homeless people (and it’s worth noting that those are sometimes the same people).

Are there instances of police shooting and killing Black people, mentally ill people, homeless people? Yes, of course. But taking money out of police budgets and siphoning it off to either social workers or leftist nonprofit organizations won’t solve one problem, as they’re already learning in Minneapolis, in a recent piece by our own Alex Parker.

As my colleague Michael Brown at RedState sister site Townhall.com, while citing a David Horowitz e-book on former President Barack Obama and leftist icon Saul Alinsky, reminds us,

….[Horowitz] quoted an SDS radical who wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

It’s also worth remembering what Alinsky wrote in the eighth rule of his Rules For Radicals:

“Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.

There’s no question that an old neo-Marxist like Sanders, and Marxist organizations with deep connections to the Democrat Party, like Black Lives Matter, know those concepts forwards and backwards.