Let’s call your attention to a couple of items.

First, from John Hinderaker’s post Sunday at Power Line, there is this assessment of the Democrats’ presidential field heading into Tuesday’s Bernie Sanders love-fest in New Hampshire:

Pete Buttigieg. “Mayor Pete” is expected to finish second. He is now being attacked by his rivals for the first time, and is unlikely to do well in South Carolina. So he needs a good showing in New Hampshire to maintain momentum….

Joe Biden. Actually, there is nothing to watch for here. Biden, as I have said many times, is a dead candidate walking. He has no hope of getting the Democratic nomination — unfortunately, because he would also have no hope of beating President Trump. He is currently fourth in the RCP standings, and may slip lower. It just doesn’t matter.

Hinderaker is almost surely correct in his assessment. Sanders is quite likely to have a blowout victory in New Hampshire, seeing as though he was only denied one in Iowa due to (1) Amy Klobuchar’s proximity to the state, (2) an inability to campaign in Iowa as he would have liked owing to the impeachment trial, and (3) abject skullduggery on the part of the Iowa Democrat Party and, almost assuredly, the Democrat National Committee, which is bound and determined (and rightly so) to deny Sanders their nomination.

We’ll maybe talk about New Hampshire in this space later this week. But if Liz Warren, who hilariously was crushed in Pocahontas County, Iowa, last week, isn’t polling much better in New Hampshire than Andrew Jackson would in Jackson County, well, it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen on Tuesday.

Which means Bernie will have run away with one competition for delegates after having essentially tied for first in the other despite, as said above, abject skullduggery.

And then comes South Carolina. Which brings us to our other item of interest:

State Republican leaders in South Carolina are urging GOP voters to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the state’s Feb. 29 Democratic primary.

The plan — orchestrated by Greenville GOP chairman Nate Leupp and several other prominent Republican Party leaders — revolves around GOP leadership’s belief that Sanders poses the least amount of challenge to President Trump in November’s general election and its goal of getting the Palmetto State’s Democratic lawmakers to agree to close the state’s primaries.

“Bernie Sanders is the most socialistic, liberal candidate running in the Democratic presidential preference primary,” Leupp told The Post and Courier. “So we feel we can make a strong point that our Democratic state legislators need to help work to close our primaries so it protects them as well as the Republican brand.”

Currently, South Carolina has open primaries, meaning voters don’t have to be associated with a political party in order to cast a ballot.

South Carolina is the third primary in the Democrats’ contest. It’s probably the last chance Joe Biden has to stay viable in the race, though we all know it’s just a matter of time before Biden says something else stupid and the last few Democrats who haven’t given up on him decide to throw up their hands.

This is very shortly going to be a Bernie Sanders–Pete Buttigieg thing, with Mini Mike Bloomberg and his zillions of dollars of bought-up black mayors and laughably untrue TV ads trying to come up around the outside.

Not that anybody ought to be all that afraid of Booty-judge or Little Gulp, who aren’t what you’d call particularly electable, but if you’re a Republican you should probably cheer on the South Carolina GOP’s efforts to do to the Democrats what the mainstream media and their partisans have been trying to do to the Republicans, one way or another, for decades.

Let’s remember that Vichy Mitt Romney, who finalized everyone’s opinion of exactly who he is this past week, won the 2012 Republican nomination despite being precisely the wrong man to run against the promulgator of Obamacare on the strength of a legacy media campaign to destroy every other major GOP candidate, almost every one of whom ran a far superior race where it came to messaging. That was a repeat scenario of the 2008 John McCain campaign, in which no Republican you might talk to on the street could understand how a guy they couldn’t stand was suddenly the party’s nominee.

And in every red state like South Carolina where there aren’t closed primaries, Republicans find themselves with a case of the constant screaming reds over open (or in the case of poor, forlorn Louisiana, jungle) primaries, which turn Democrats into the swing vote in open Republican primary contests that all but assure election against a hapless and mostly-reviled “D” candidate.

Or, in the case of poor, forlorn Louisiana, it’s the general election, in which Democrats get to decide which Republican takes office — with predictably disappointing results for conservatives who are constantly assured we’re the political plurality, if not the majority.

So in South Carolina, the state GOP has decided to engage in dispensing a bit of sauce for the gander. And good for them. When the Democrats go batty over Sanders winning a primary thanks to Republicans engaging in an Operation Chaos campaign (and he might very well do just that; GOP voters regularly turn out twice as often as Democrats in party primary contests, and with the “sane” Democrats lacking a viable candidate the barbarians are already through the gates), they’ll be able to point to those results to the Dem legislators in their state and say, “See?”

Because if you’re the South Carolina GOP, you see, you don’t give a single fig about the problems of the Democrat Party. If you’re the South Carolina GOP, your opinion of the Democrats is every single misery that can be inflicted on Democrats in that state and everywhere else should and must be inflicted simply for possibility’s sake.

When Donald Trump’s campaign can’t set up a voter registration booth somewhere without some unhinged leftist mental defective trying to play Muslims-in-Nice, it’s surely time to engage in whatever nonviolent, completely legal skullduggery in order to help Bernie that might counter that which the Democrats are hard at work doing to stop him.

Look, it’s bad for America if Bernie Sanders gets the Democrats’ nomination. We get that. The man is a communist, for crying out loud, and he’s a worthless, demented old clown who has never managed a single accomplishment as an American not involving the political process in his entire existence on this planet. Moreover, Bernie Sanders might, and it seems like a stretch to say this even though factually speaking it isn’t at all, be even more anti-American than Barack Obama. The mere possibility someone so manifestly unfit for such a high office is being considered by a large segment of the people who are registered voters of one of our major political parties is damned frightening.

To Republicans it’s frightening. Think about how frightening it has to be for run-of-the-mill Democrats, who over the years have very much resembled the proverbial frog in the boiling pot, who sat stupidly still as the temperature has been gradually raised from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama and is now scalding them with the possibility of a Sandinista lickspittle as their candidate of choice.

James Carville has even fallen off the wagon. That’s how bad it is.

But the question — and this is why for the long game the Operation Chaos gambit is a laudably strong move — is how frightened the Democrats who aren’t quiet commies really are.

Look, Iowa proved something anybody who’s paying attention could easily see: the Democrats want desperately to screw Bernie over without alienating his people from voting with them in the general election. After all, their unionized, radicalized public-policy clients have done everything they could to indoctrinate an entire generation to become Bernie Bros and Sisses and Nonbinary Bernie Minions, and nobody in that party has offered so much as a peep. But now that a class of dysfunctional people without a clue about American civics or American capitalism, or even the faintest amity or appreciation for either, has become a third of the Democrat Party, they’re terrified not of Bernie but of his people.

Which, as James O’Keefe made perfectly clear if James Hodgkinson didn’t, is quite intelligent. If Sanders’ supporters don’t scare you out of your shorts, you are not paying attention.

The Democrats are trying to dupe these violent communist revolutionary clowns into casting a “D” vote in November for one of their Usual Suspect candidates, which frankly they’re running out of, without actually giving the Bernie Bros what they want. This is the Bernie Bolshevik revolution, a cross between Bane taking Gotham and Pol Pot’s Children’s Crusade.

In South Carolina, the effect of what the Republicans are doing is to stop them from making it so easy.

That’s the Lord’s work, frankly.

The result we want here is for the Democrats to have to bite the bullet and admit that because Bernie Sanders is a communist slimeball with an affinity for the Castros, Sandinistas, and Chavistas, not to mention virtually every other enemy of this country bent on the repression of ordinary people, he isn’t acceptable to bear their standard, and if the people who like him can’t process that, then they can kick rocks. That’s what an American political party worth considering a vote for would do, but right now the Democrats do not fit that description — despite the fact Sanders won’t stop dumping on them, like Lenin used to do to Kerensky.

To date, they know they need to do this, if for no other reason than that running Bernie means not only getting boat-raced by Trump but getting saddled with countless liabilities in local and state party organizations when the Sanders campaign installs them once he’s nominated. But they don’t have the stones to do it. They’re trying to have it both ways.

But they can’t. Not if Bernie keeps winning. To screw him over, at some point they’re going to have to stand up and say publicly that they’re doing it, and why, and bear the consequences. After all, there is no more appropriate canary in our national coal mine than the Democrat Party.

So let’s have Operation Chaos, in South Carolina and everywhere else we can make it happen.

This is gonna hurt, my Democrat friends. But you brought it on yourselves.