Running from packs of ravenous reporters, leftist New York mayor Bill de Blasio has a big corruption problem – a problem so big, in fact, that even the media aren't sleeping through it.  According to the New York Post, de Blasio and his police department were bought off by a campaign donor for a mere $160,000 in a brazen pay-to-play cash scheme.

According to the Post:

"We're going to become significant contributors, but we want access," Jona Rechnitz, 34, testified telling de Blasio fundraiser Ross Offinger after Hizzoner clinched the Democratic nod for mayor in 2013.

De Blasio soon paid Rechnitz a visit in his office, the disgraced businessman told jurors in Manhattan federal court.

...and...

Explosive new court documents accuse Jona Rechnitz – a Bill de Blasio donor and the fed's key witness against two NYPD cops and ex-union official Norman Seabrook – of threatening "to go to the feds" over a scheme he was wrapped up in unless one of his wealthy friends got paid.

The Post also has videos of the de Blasio moneybags man cozying up to the city bigs as the cash flowed.

So it's pretty obvious that de Blasio is neck-deep in corruption and may just exit office in a paddy wagon.

You'd think someone that filthy would be a political pariah, all washed up.

Not so, in the loopy socialist world of Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has leapt to de Blasio's side, promising to rally with de Blasio at a campaign re-election event in New York next week.  Apparently, he's not too worried about getting political mud on himself through association with New York's top political pig.  And that's about par for the course, given that he dismissed Hillary Clinton's "damn emails" to his own detriment during a 2016 presidential primary debate, and now this.  For a socialist like Sanders, corruption is always to be dismissed so long as a Democrat does it.  Hillary's didn't bother him, and neither does de Blasio's.

As mud-spattered and indifferent to it as he is on this one, it stands in stark contrast to the image he presents of himself as Mister Clean, the un-Hillary of politics, the man uninfected by Clinton's pay-to-play instincts, the man who ran the clean, honest campaign with smalltime donors.  Even his wife's role in the bankruptcy of a small Vermont college seems to have left him unscathed.  During the primaries, Bernie was the candidate of Occupy Wall Street.  Hillary was the candidate of Goldman Sachs.

Not anymore with this de Blasio mud bath.  Based on Google Images pictures, it appears that the pair have been friends and cronies for a long time.  And that's not surprising.  Both have hardcore revolutionary socialist pasts, and both have sought to repackage themselves (without apparently changing their views) as reasonable Democrats.  Both took their honeymoons in socialist hellholes – Sanders in Soviet Moscow, de Blasio in Castro's military dictatorship of Cuba.

They're both hardcore.  And now Sanders seems to think he's mud-proof.  Knowing socialists, it's pretty much how they behave, excusing wrongdoing on any fellow socialist while always pointing the finger at political opponents.  Bernie has no shame in this regard.

He ought to know that times are changing, even if he can't change.