Authored by John Eskow via Counterpunch.org,

“If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two.” –James Carville “Well, you know, James Carville is well-known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about. And I intend to stay focused on fighting for the American people because what they don’t need is 20 more years of performance art on television. And that’s what James Carville and a lot of those folks are expert at … a lot of talk and not getting things done for the American people.” –Barack Obama

This is what they’ve got? James freaking Carville?

Yes, twelve years after he mismanaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign into a thoroughly delightful but stunningly unlikely defeat, James freaking Carville is the best footsoldier that MSNBC can muster up in the tireless (and tiresome) war they are fighting against Bernie Sanders, against the will of the voters, and against any chance of progressive change in our lifetimes.

I have no idea how—-or even if—-James Carville is still alive. He seems to be permanently coated in the death-spray of a female praying mantis, some corrosive fluid that’s permeated his brain and turns him more bitter by the millisecond; as you watch him writhe around in his seat among the standard MSBNC crew of failed Democratic Party apparatchiks, Chris Matthews-type mental cases, and ex-CIA bosses with weak-ass gravitas, he seems even more disturbed than the rest of the panel; it seems like he’s about to start consuming his own flesh, live, on national TV.

(Now, I think I speak for a sizable portion of the American public, of all political stripes, on this one: I wish James Carville hadn’t forced me to consider the issue of Hillary Clinton’s balls. It’s, um, distasteful. But when you delve into Carville’s quotes, you discover that they’re nearly ALL distasteful. While proudly fighting to break that glass ceiling and elect the first female president, for example, he said of Pamela Jones—-one of the women sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton—-“this is what you get when you drag a $100 bill through a trailer park.” The guy seems to have some deep psychosexual issues.)

The fact that MSBNC is already so desperate to kill the Sanders’ candidacy in its cradle that they’re willing to exhume poor James Carville, dress him up in his least filthy rugby shirt, stick a baseball cap over his skull to keep the children from shrieking, and prop him up to babble at Joy Reid is one more signal that the fix is in. As if we needed it: for months, MSNBC hacks have been saying that Sanders is a Russian plant, an idiot, someone only “racist liberal whites” and “misfit black girls” could like, and-—when all else fails, simply a guy (Jew?) who “makes my flesh crawl.”

Lets’ spare ourselves months of these subtle, rapier-like rhetorical thrusts and cut, as they say, to the chase: the Democratic Party, with James Carville serving as just one of their low-rent Paul Reveres, is screaming out a warning: it doesn’t matter if Bernie Sanders sweeps all, or most, of the remaining primaries, as he seems certain to do. It doesn’t matter what the plurality of Democrats actually wants: their hopes, their passions, their dreams mean nothing.

They’re simply not going to let him win.

Bloomberg, Biden, god help us Klobuchar, the reanimated corpse of Hubert Humphrey: God knows what human form the Party will assume, but it won’t be Bernie Sanders.

So I find myself wondering how those voters will respond to the brazen theft that we’re about to witness. “What happens to a dream deferred?” asked the poet Langston Hughes. How will the young people of America—-the idealistic anti-Carvilles among us-—react on that day, when they see the last pretense of American democracy stripped away to reveal the huge and reeking meat factory that’s owned and operated by the Mike Bloombergs of this world? What about the older ones among us, lying dormant in cynicism for decades, who’ve dared to awaken to at least a flicker of hope?

Will this blatant death-blow to democracy send us, at last, into the streets? Will we finally rain hell down on these monsters?

“Maybe it just sags, like a heavy load,” wrote Hughes, speaking of that dream deferred.

And that would be the most heartbreaking of outcomes…the outcome that James Carville, and Hillary Clinton, and Chris Matthews, and Joy Reid, and the CIA, and Wall Street, are all calmly expecting, as they lie back, smiling in the absolute certitude that they’re always right…