Hillary Clinton herself doubled down on her daughter’s comments on ABC News Thursday morning, and campaign aides have done the same. Of course, this is not true. Under a single-payer system, everybody gets health care. That’s the entire point, as Hillary Clinton well knows. Chelsea Clinton knows it too. As Alex Pareene points out: “Chelsea Clinton has a masters degree in public health from Columbia. She knows exactly how what she’s saying obfuscates the issue.”

This is well beyond the level of vitriol that is needed in the primary. More importantly, it’s stupid. The Democratic Party has been advocating for a single-payer health care system since the Truman era. Hillary Clinton herself said in 1994 that a single-payer system was all-but politically inevitable, and advocated making Medicare available to all Americans in 2008. Politicians don’t win races by trying to pull the wool over their potential supporters’ eyes about core policy beliefs they have held for decades.

But Clinton’s cynical, dishonest assault on single-payer is consistent with the weird, sinister turn her campaign made at the outset of 2016. Earlier this month, Clinton attempted to smear Sanders as being soft on Wall Street, suggesting that he doesn’t have a plan to take on “shadow banking.” This is daffy any way you look at it. As we’ve noted before, Sanders favors aggressively breaking up the large financial institutions that engage in shadow banking. He would buttress those efforts by reinstating Glass-Steagall and hit those shadow banks that remain unaffected with a tax on their transactions.