Weekend Open Thread: Sanders Releases Devastating Final Photo Bomb Attack on Clinton! (UPDATE: Denied!)

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Hillary Clinton visited Santa Ana and was spotted posing at Crave with OC “Dems” Melahat Rafiei, Jordan Brandman, and Jose Solorio.  Her advance person has presumably already been fired.

[Editors note: See correction at the end, although this story remains in its original published form.]

The Bernie Sanders campaign in Orange County has so far been notoriously well-behaved, but it appears to have saved its most devastating attack for the last few hours of the primary campaign.  A photograph has been published of Sanders’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, among a group of what were described at local Latinos at the Santa Ana eatery “Crave.”  The three full faces featured most prominently next to Clinton at the “Crave Power Lunch” were prominent “business Democrat” campaign strategist Melahat Rafiei, doomed Anaheim City Councilman Jordan Brandman, and disgraced former Assemblyman and current diffident Community College Trustee Jose Solorio — none of whom are the slightest bit Latino (except to some extent Solorio.)

Orange Juice Blog continues to endorse Bernie Sanders in Tuesday’s primary despite his campaign’s apparently engaging in just about the worst dirty trick of the election year — one that associates Clinton with the absolutely most obnoxious Democratic political figures in the county outside of Tom Daly, Lou Correa, and the Irvine PR profession.  [NOTE: SEE CORRECTION BELOW!]  Despite our recommendation for Bernie, we really have to come to Hillary Clinton’s defense here.

Hillary is not from here; she presumably doesn’t know the local political actors.  She has to rely on campaign staff to protect her against extremely unfortunate associations in photos.  That staff let her down  They obviously seem to have been insufficiently on the lookout for Sanders campaign operatives, but worse — they those allowed those likely operatives to somehow maneuver these local figures into the most visible spots within the photo, where they join Clinton in gazing off delightedly to the middle right.  (How they managed to do it is anyone’s guess, but it would seem likely to involve at least use of spiked elbow pads to shove untainted others away from the candidate.)

As a result, Hillary has to go into Tuesday’s primary intimately associated in voters’ minds with Brandman, recently humiliated by the local Democratic Party in response to his efforts to undercut Latino political power in Anaheim and implicated in a seemingly unending serious of votes shunting public money to big donors while hiding behind the very same “You can’t prove an actual quid pro quo!” that Clinton herself has used regarding with respect to the financial industry.  Brandman and his associates have been recruiting candidates to split the Latino vote in Anaheim’s most Latino district for his race against Dr. Jose Moreno — the lead Plaintiff in the court case that led to the establishment of “by-districts” in Anaheim.  And there is his anti-Latino self, looming behind Hillary.  It’s a big problem.

As if that weren’t enough, she will now be associated with Solorio, who in the last cycle was trounced by what was thought to be an unimaginable margin in his “State Senate race” against Janet Nguyen, despite sucking up such a large share of party money in his ignominious quest that he almost took State Senator Tony Mendoza down with him.  Solorio, best known in the State Assembly for being a two-faced, backstabbing snake in the grass, was previously notorious for recruiting Assemblyman Daly into the race to represent the overwhelmingly Latino 69th Assembly District against Julio Perez in 2012, but also for recruiting — based on empty promises — Santa Ana Council member Michele Martinez to successfully split the Latino vote against the relentlessly and remorselessly Caucasian Daly.

Between Brandman and Solorio, the photo falls not far short of sending out a glossy mailer to Orange County Latinos saying “¡Jód*te cul*s perezosos estúpidos!” to arrive the day before Election Day.  (Note: translation by Google, but it certainly sounds like what OJ editors have occasionally been told.)  No even halfway-competent Southern California campaign would have done this — fueling suspicion that this must be the result of some exquisitely dirty trick of a kind that the Sanders campaign has generally eschewed.

Inclusion of the normally camera-shy behind-the-scenes puppet-master Melahat in the photo initially seemed surprising, until OJB remembered that she is running for a spot on the Democratic National Committee next week — meaning that Hillary’s photo simply reminds voters of the perversion of that organization under its current Hillary-approved leadership.  Melahat — who has managed or advised many successful campaigns for candidates supported by development and other business interests and generally unsuccessful campaigns for leftist sacrificial lambs who can scrape together enough to afford her fees — is, like Hillary, famously unbothered by soliciting campaign contributions from wealthy interests averse to the public interest, which may or may not be an association that Hillary would like to de-emphasize until Wednesday.  The worse association may be that Melahat, who is of Iranian descent, may simply remind Persian-Americans and others that Hillary is considered to be even more likely than Donald Trump to pursue policies that may yield the wholesale slaughter of their relatives and compatriots — and to the transition of Iran into something looking a whole lot more like Iraq.

OJB encourages OC voters to simply ignore this photo until and unless it becomes clear that Hillary actually knew what sort of company she was keeping.  Positions on the issues,  and practical concerns about electability, both strongly favor Bernie — so let them, and not this astounding and outrageous photo, determine your vote!

[First Editor’s Note: the Sanders campaign denies any involvement in placing the Traumatizing Trio anywhere near Clinton, or even helping them gain admittance to the event.  “No, we had nothing to do with this.  She’s REALLY LIKE THAT!  I know — we can’t believe it either!”]

[Second Editor’s Note: Orange Juice Blog has learned that everything in this article involving alleged actions of the Sanders campaign, or any communications with and from them, including the note immediately above is wholly satirical.]

[Third Editor’s Note: This is your Weekend Open Thread.  Talk about that, or anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decency and discretion.  And on Tuesday if not before: Feel the Bern, Get ‘er Dunn, Say Hello to the Newman, and Do the Cha-Cha with Chuchua!]