The knives were out for Sanders last night. Bloomberg skated.

Last night's debate in SC gave Michael Bloomberg his second chance to rebrand and deflect ("I said I was sorry!") as he led the rest of the pack on a wild, panic-driven, Russian-baiting attack on Bernie Sanders.

BLOOMBERG: I -- I think that Donald Trump thinks it would be better if he's president. I do not think so. Vladimir Putin thinks that Donald Trump should be president of the United States. And that's why Russia is helping you [Sanders] get elected, so you will lose to him.

And it was all downhill from there. The great irony is that Bloomberg is the only one among the seven with investments in Russia that dwarf Trump's. Bloomberg LP has long had corporate ties to Russia, including as a provider of business and financial news video to RBC TV.

Pete Buttigieg may have been the worst of the bunch with his clueless hit on the '60s Civil Rights Movement. Heading into the South Carolina primary, without a trace of African-American voter support, Buttigieg declared,

 I am not looking forward to a scenario where it comes down to Donald Trump, with his nostalgia for the social order of the 1950s, and Bernie Sanders with a nostalgia for the revolutionary politics of the 1960s.

Almost as if it were in response, Rev. Jesse Jackson writes in this morning's Sun-Times:

Sen. Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about making America into Cuba or Venezuela. He’s talking about extending social guarantees like those offered in other advanced countries, such as Denmark and Sweden.

The other candidates — particularly Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg — have scoffed at these ideas as too radical, too bold, too costly, too ambitious. They offer mostly a continuation of the politics that existed before Donald Trump disrupted the country. The problem with that, of course, is that it doesn’t offer much hope for most Americans.

When he was New York's mayor, Bloomberg led a ruthless expansion of privately-run charters schools that turned the nation's largest school system into a virtual war zone, forcing charter and public school educators to compete for space and survival. But in last night's debate, Bloomberg played the charter moderate and none of the others on stage challenged him, not even charter critics Sanders or Warren.

I can only imagine the looks on the faces of NYC teachers when he said:

"I'm not sure they're appropriate every place" and declared that charters provided an alternative for parents and that both charters and traditional public schools "helped each other" and were "mixed in with each other."

Not a single climate change question. Horrifying.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 26, 2020