It sure seems as if Senator Bernie Sanders is spending a lot of his time apologizing lately. First, he had to “clarify” whether or not he’d told Elizabeth Warren that a woman couldn’t beat Trump. Then he sort of apologized for taking dark money from his own PAC. And now, just as the impeachment trial is getting underway, he’s been forced to apologize to Joe Biden. And this time it was for something he didn’t even say himself. (CBS News)

Senator Bernie Sanders apologized to former Vice President Joe Biden on Monday for an op-ed written by one of his campaign surrogates that claimed Biden has a “big corruption problem.”

“It is absolutely not my view that Joe is corrupt in any way. And I’m sorry that that op-ed appeared,” Sanders told CBS News.

The op-ed, published in The Guardian by law professor Zephyr Teachout, claims Biden “has perfected the art of taking big contributions, then representing his corporate donors at the cost of middle- and working-class Americans.”

I suppose an apology was in order, though perhaps not the one Uncle Joe wound up receiving. The surrogate in question who accused Biden of corruption was Zephyr Teachout, and if you agree to sign her on as one of your surrogates you should buckle up and get ready for a potentially bumpy ride.

For those who may have forgotten, Teachout is a law professor from Fordham Law School and a perennial progressive/socialist agitator. She’s also become something of a professional political candidate who can’t seem to figure out the whole political thing. She ran a primary against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2014, tried for a congressional seat in 2016 and tried to become New York’s Attorney General in 2018. She failed all three times.

But in all of those efforts, she’s specialized in taking on her fellow Democrats more so than any Republican opponents. She’s always ready to call out her colleagues for being insufficiently woke or insufficiently socialist. She did it to Cuomo and now she’s apparently doing it to Joe Biden. But since she’s speaking on behalf of Bernie Sanders, he’s the one who winds up having to apologize.

The sad part is that, as usual, Teachout was going after Biden for what could have been a very valid reason, but she highlighted the wrong aspect of the former Vice President’s history. The op-ed called out Biden for a history of taking large donations from generous corporate donors and then casting votes favorable to them later on in the Senate. It’s the old pay-for-play thing, but you’d have to look long and hard to find any members of Congress from either party who haven’t engage in that sort of activity from time to time.

If she really wanted to call out Biden for something, perhaps she should have looked into the apparently forbidden subject of how Joe’s family members manage to do so well financially through the most unlikely of methods. While most of the mainstream media doesn’t like to discuss this, we’ve already seen reports of how as many as five members of the Biden clan have gotten quite wealthy through his connections.

Not least of these is his son, Hunter, of course. Teachout could have brought up the curious way that Hunter landed a lucrative spot on the board of Ukranian energy firm Burisma despite having no experience in the energy industry, rarely if ever attending any meetings and supposedly being unable to even speak Ukranian. And that was happening at the same time that his dad was not only Vice President but the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine. He had a similar arrangement in China at one point.

But I’m sure that was all just a coincidence and too distasteful for Teachout to bring up. And now that Bernie has apologized for her rudeness it will all just be water under the bridge.