Hubris and chutzpah - updated

The Democratic Party has developed a cancer, and it's berning. This putz's arrogance and delusion are running amok.

Update: Keep these obits coming.

More data

Those Democrats who still live in the fact-based world -- i.e., not Berners -- have the benefit of understanding what is actually happening, as opposed to what they want to happen. Nate Silver & co. are among those reality types -- with the latest being this useful analysis.

The money line: “If all states held primaries open to independents — instead of closed primaries, or caucuses of any kind — Clinton might have a larger lead in elected delegates than she does now. The model indicates that Clinton would have a lead of 294 elected delegates, compared with the 272 she holds now. That’s not a huge difference, but it means that Clinton has been hurt at least as much by caucuses as Sanders has been hurt by closed primaries.”

Already a third-party candidate

Good punchline -- and good profile of delusion -- from Lupica.

A sickness, not a movement - updated

This is dynamite in understanding the reality of the Bernie phenomenon. And the Perfesser adds his usual invaluable gloss. These Bern-feelers don't even support single-payer as much as Hillary's supporters do. CDS all the way.

Update: And what does he do if she absolutely crushes him in California (and, of course, New Jersey), as she did in New York? Is there the faintest glimmer of a hope for actual grace?

The right thing

As I've said -- in the post titled "Wow" -- it is incumbent upon Elizabeth Warren to validate Hillary and invalidate the "Bernie or bust" crowd. Apparently, she will.

The grist just keeps on comin'

The previous post had gotten updatey enough. So here's another county of the left heard from who's no longer feeling the Bern.

Wow

These people are certainly principled.

Update: Here are the details. Seriously bad shit.

Update 2: Hypocrisy all the way down.

Update 3: The perfesser's right: not ending well.

Update 4: This is the demon whose life -- and whose grandchild's life -- is being threatened by Sanders supporters. And thank goodness some are calling a spade a spade.

Update 5: And this is the cancer that is invading the Democratic Party. The new Ralph Nader. A narcissistic whiner who is drunk on the adulation at his rallies. He's said it: He doesn't care about consequences.

There is no longer a cost-free way to manage this. Hillary has to be firm and whip this superannuated infant's ass. And if he pouts, takes his marbles and goes home without endorsing her, she has to go out and beat Trump anyway. It's a damn shame this had to happen, but it's not fatal.

Update 6: This is a moment of truth for Elizabeth Warren. She needs to denounce Bernie. Indeed, all real progressives need to do so. This guy is now a real and present danger to a progressive political agenda. He's the Donald Trump of the left, and serious leftists need to say as much.

Update 7: Well, the Nevada convention is starting to look like a tipping point. Jeff Weaver is not the only bad actor here -- it's the whole campaign that is deliberately spreading lies -- and the world now knows that. Even many Bernie supporters know it and are appalled.

Again, it's sad that it has come to this -- Bernie was never a serious candidate for president, but his campaign was, for awhile, salutary in pulling the Overton Window to the left. Alas, it wasn't just that. It was also a cult-like vehicle driven by ego that could become infected with misogyny.

And, by the way, when Bernie can be devastatingly made into a joke, you know it's over.

Update 8: One more thought: This makes the choice of Warren as veep more likely.

For the record...

... no, Hillary has NOT argued against single-payer because it was "a wrenching legislative battle that had already been lost." Rather, she argued that we shouldn't start from scratch. She was never opposed to the public option -- which Obama's team duplicitously dangled in front of the left during 2009-10, while never intending actually to include it in the ACA. In fact, the public option is precisely the kind of add-on improvement to Obamacare that she has been advocating throughout this campaign.

Two reactions:

First, does the Times have no editors, at least, who have watched the debates and who know enough about what Hillary actually said to alter the language of this lede accordingly?

Second, it's actually fine, and very Hillary-like. She's allowing Bernie to get credit for something she was already planning to do, in order to have his followers feel a win, feel more welcomed, and vote for her. She's all about the outcome, and if Bernie Sanders goes to his grave thinking he brought the creator of Hillarycare around, it's an acceptable price to pay.

Things fall apart, the right cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the GOP. And the Agent Orange carcinogen wouldn't have it any other way. God is clearly calling down payback on these anarcho-fascists. One hopes a blood-dimmed tide won't be loosed, too.

This isn't the point

It's not whether Bernie should "drop out." It's whether he should stop attacking Hillary -- and encourage his supporters to do the same. His continued presence doesn't hurt her chances. His attacks do.

No duh

I'm sure Michelle Goldberg will be furiously trolled for this -- but it's all true, and needed to be said, because this kind of crap. And this.

Attention must be paid - updated

I do not share Andrew Sullivan't intense fear -- but his piece on the threat of Trump is essential reading. We are fortunate to have in Hillary Clinton the genuinely strongest candidate -- as a candidate, as a preternaturally evolved human -- in our lifetime. We'll need that, after the election, as well as before it.

Update: Even after a year's preparation -- indeed, a lifetime's, for those of us who grew up on the mother's gall (h/t Lady Macbeth) of the Republican Party -- it's still a brain-fuck.

Blah blah

If this kind of self-righteous chest-puffery is what's required to get the votes, then so be it, but in the privacy of this anonymous and almost entirely unread blog, I will say that it's pathetic to hear these self-declared revolutionaries preen around the yard with their self-aggrandizing purity, all on behalf of a silly narcissist who found a pleasant sinecure at an early age and held onto it like a lazy professor with tenure, reading the same lecture notes for 40 years with no serious interest in listening to his students and no serious interest in how the world was changing around him.