I honestly don’t give a shit if Bernie debates Donald Trump- it’s his god damned reputation he’s ruining. This is over, and this Molly Ball piece nails it:
But in the world Sanders’s supporters inhabit, this is all so much media manipulation. “Do you trust the media?” asked one of his introducers, the television host Cenk Uygur. “No!” yelled the crowd. “Do you believe they’ve treated Bernie Sanders fairly?” “Fuck the media!” yelled someone standing near the press riser. (Sanders was also introduced by two actors, Dick Van Dyke and Rosario Dawson.)
Sanders and his people have their own sets of rules. All you have to do is unskew the delegate counts, they explain, take out the superdelegates, imagine they all vote for Sanders, imagine certain primaries had been conducted according to different rules. Angry memes about missing votes and stolen precincts ricochet around social media. Did you see what happened in Nevada, when the party, Sanders’s supporters claim, changed the rules to keep them from getting more delegates at the state convention? The game is rigged!
The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer” named Seth Abramson wrote in the Huffington Post a few days ago. “By the very nature of things—we might call it perceptual entropy—the impossible, once perceived, enters a chain of causation whose natural conclusion is realization.” By this logic, Abramson reasons, Sanders is actually winning. It’s, like, the Matrix, man, or something.
The Abramson piece is priceless and a must read for Sokol fans. This was my reaction the other day when I read it:
oh good lordhttps://t.co/xtkE7RJWth
— John Cole (@Johngcole) May 25, 2016
Ball continues:
The question is what it will take for Sanders to be satisfied with some sort of moral victory short of the nomination. This week, he was given five slots on the Democratic platform committee, which will allow him to influence what the party stands for—presumably an important goal. Sanders is also thought to be interested in reforms to the nominating process that he has derided as “rigged.”
But while his aides have occasionally alluded to these sorts of goals, Sanders continues to behave like a candidate who still believes he can win. On Monday, he criticized Clinton for turning down one last debate; on Tuesday, he sought to wring an additional delegate out of Kentucky by challenging the vote count in one district. His speeches give about as much critical time to both Clinton and Trump, and his crowds boo both with equal vehemence.
Is Sanders—the onetime liberal gadfly whose views few of his colleagues heeded—simply enjoying the spotlight’s validating glow for as long as it lasts? Or is he as delusional as some of his dead-ender fans? It’s impossible to tell.
Alternate working theory- he’s just a cranky old asshole and we’re finally seeing the Bernie Sanders that his colleagues have been putting up with for decades. That’s why all the Super Delegates went with Hitlery.