Still bitter about her 2016 election loss, Hillary Clinton has shown what she means by 'she persists' in her continued rage at rival Bernie Sanders.

It wasn't enough that in her memoirs, titled 'What Happened,' Sanders had the temerity to oppose her in the primaries. He also copied her ideas, she whined. He wasn't a real Democrat, she added.

But now, one of her existing staffers, Adam Parkhomenko, tweeted just Friday that Sanders was colluding with the Russians.

PS...you seem to ignore the Russia support online for Bernie during the primaries. The guy is hiding something. Not sure I want to know what

— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) September 9, 2017

Now it's perfectly true that Sanders is a commie. He's a self-admitted socialist, and we all know he spent his honeymoon among the worker ants and Wendy's fashion show crowd in the romantic Soviet Union. He loved himself some communism there. But Russia isn't really communist anymore and its leader, President Vladimir Putin, whatever his faults, is no communist.

So for the Hillary crowd to persist in claiming Sanders was a Russian agent just yesterday is more than a little strange. After all, Bernie endorsed Hillary and energetically campaigned for her even after all her dirty tricks against him to steal the primaries. How's that for gratitude?

What's more up until now, Team Hillary's dirty tricks against Sanders have been of a more conventional sort. During the campaign, they rigged the primaries through the Democratic Party apparatus to favor Hillary, in the limited number of non-prime-time debates, or through insinuations that the man was an atheist, which he probably wouldn't deny, as a campaign smear, to name a couple examples.

Now they've gone back to the old Russian agent attacks. Apparently anyone who opposes Hillary must be one. Welcome to the club, Bernie.

Among Democrats, it has been a boiling theme of sorts for months.

Bernie did have a Soviet-born campaign advisor from Belarus, but the man was known for doing work on Russian opposition candidates who were against Putin. No cigar there. Bernie also had an talented campaign strategist named Tad Devine who did work with Paul Manafort on Vladimir Yanukovich of Ukraine's campaign. That latter leader, who won Ukraine's presidency, was indeed a Putin puppet who embarrassed Putin and eventually got thrown out. Kind of a maybe thing, but given the many other overseas candidates Devine's helped, many of them genuine democrats, it doesn't add up to a communist in the pay of Putin.

There was also the matter that Sanders is fairly popular abroad, including in Russia. Much of the world shares Sanders' view of socialism and that is not all that suprising. That does include Russia, so plenty of ordinary people in Russia do like Sanders and what he stands for. A reporter for RT News in Washington told me most of the reporters there were Sanders supporters, there were only about 3 in a staff of 75 who liked Trump. But even those factors don't add up to Sanders being a Russian agent, though one could see why maybe the Hillary team might imagine it from that picture.

Then there was Bernie Sanders' lonely vote against Russian sanctions, which he said he did because he wanted to preserve the Iran Deal. By themselves, Sanders was ok with sanctioning Russia. But since it was attached to the Iran Deal, he said he was against it. Now it could be argued that the Iran Deal itself is pro-Russia, given the way it weakens the United States, but it's a mighty tenuous thread to lean on, given that Bernie hasn't shown much evidence of being a Russian shill otherwise. The Nation actually debunked the claims of Russian collusion from that useless vote (accompanied only by one from Rand Paul) in this column here, and managed to trace the roots of the claims.

Sure enough, it came up with the name Peter Daou, a Media Matters-affiliated computer whiz who is now running Hillary Clinton's Verrit platform. Media Matters, according to Sharyl Attkisson in her new book, The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think and How You Vote, is the prime smear and slime operation in the Washington Swamp, and closely affiliated with Hillary Clinton. Bernie, it seems has been slimed by a new Brock operation. According to The Nation:

The jumping-off point seems to have been when Peter Daou, an avowed Hillary Clinton fan and major Twitter personality, quoted-tweeted my original post. Daou spends almost as much time energetically trashing Sanders as he does attacking Trump, and many of the respondents were followers of his. He certainly did not imply Sanders was a secret KGB asset, though, writing only: “Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul were the ONLY TWO VOTES **AGAINST** the Russia sanctions bill. Bernie was out of sync with every Dem senator.” (It was a Russia/Iran sanctions bill, and Sanders made it clear he objected only to the Iran part, but never mind.)

So how did people jump to this conclusion that Bernie Sanders, by opposing Democrats, must ipso facto be working at the behest of Russia? It wasn’t entirely organic. And it points to how fake news can infect some of our brethren on the left.

Which suggests Brock and his coevals are struggling to stay relevant after 2016's election loss, up to the same old tricks, sliming Bernie Sanders after Hillary Clinton got panned for blaming her election loss in her memoirs on Bernie Sanders. And traced by The Nation, no less.

It goes to show that Hillary will stop at nothing to pin her election loss on Bernie Sanders. Instead of backing off Sanders now that everyone is laughing at her for her sour grapes, she's doubling down. She Persisted, indeed.