Sanders Campaign staying in til DC

[Lyin' Steve]

Ironic how the same people whining about party unity are the ones who are calling Sanders a 'pathetic slime'. I doubt that'd do much for party unity, now, would it?

But "Hillary4Prison" and "F&ck the corrupt b*tch, BernieOrBust!" are just so beautifully unifying, right?

I will admit that most of the sane Sanders supporters have jumped ship. But judging from what I see on this forum, the hardcore Hillbots are just as bad. Constantly gloating over how Sanders is mathematically eliminated and insulting his supporters, then turning right around and criticizing Berniebots because they 'aren't helping party unity'. At this point, I'd argue that the hardcore Berniebots and the hardcore Hillbots are simply two sides of the same coin.

Sanders supporters have 100x as much vitriol as Clinton supporters, but as soon as they get insulted they clutch their pearls and go "oh how dare you insult me!  You might drive me away from the party!  Look at me I'm being driven away right now, watch me go, are you paying attention?  Hey over here!"

They are also not two sides of the same coin because the Sanders people make things up to get angry about like imaginary voter fraud, while the Clinton people mock Sanders and his band of children for the disgraceful things he actually says and does.  At this point he's far worse than even an Anthony Weiner or Rod Blagojevich and I'm sure you didn't complain when everyone piled on those two numbskulls.

Go back to 2014 and if I had told you Hillary had an opponent still in the race after she'd won the nomination, who was insisting on taking the fight to the convention, claiming the nomination was stolen from him and that every election he lost was rigged, saying his strategy was to get Hillary's 500 superdelegates to switch to him, attacking her relentlessly, and lying to his supporters to whip them up into a rage against her, you would probably have assumed that this opponent was just some kooky wingnut or future perennial candidate who got like 2% of the vote and wanted to cause trouble, like a Ron Paul or Alan Keyes or Mike Gravel or Keith Judd type character.

[Lyin' Steve]

Frankly, Steve, I think you're just refusing to see my point here. Clinton supporters on this forum, and oftentimes posters who are normally good, are, for some reason, getting all worked up and angry at somebody who has no chance at the nomination, instead of focusing all this energy against Trump, who's Clinton's real enemy at this point. Sanders supporters, of course, have the same problem, but they definitely don't have it 100 times worse. I believe that both Sanders and Clinton supporters on this forum have yet to find this neat feature called the ignore button, and they are suffering heavily from that.

As long as Bernie keeps damaging the party and making an ass of himself, it will continue to be rational to mock him for it.  Just because he has no chance at the nomination unfortunately does not mean that he can't damage Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.  It's like if Oklahoma City was down 45 points going into the fourth quarter of the last game of the NBA conference finals and just started fouling Steph Curry as much as possible and the coach challenged every ref call, and all the Thunder fans said "why are you complaining about a team that can't even win anymore, Warriors fans?  You should be focusing all your energy on Lebron."

As for 'party unity', if the Hillbots actually cared about that, they wouldn't be raging against the Sanders supporters like they are. They're just using it as a meaningless buzzword at this point, an excuse as to why they have this extreme hatred. As for Weiner and Blagojevich, I don't know how anybody who's actually serious can claim that literal corruption is worse than not suspending a campaign, and you're saying this due to an unsubstantiated rumor. At this point, I should really just dismiss your entire post as a bad attempt at trolling, but I won't just yet.

I care about overall unity in that I don't want Sanders riding around trying to convince people that Hillary is a criminal who cheated to steal the nomination from him.  That could change people's perceptions of her in a wide-reaching way (in fact it already has).  I don't particularly care about trying to get the far-out 10-20% of Sanders people who are just completely delusional and hate Hillary, people like jfern... I don't think hurting their delicate little feelings by saying mean things about Bernie is going to make the difference.

And I meant Weiner/Blagojevich in terms of how much he's damaging the party and how much contempt he's earned for his actions.  The Nevada debacle was really the tipping point in that regard.

As for your third paragraph, this is simply ridiculous. First off, anybody who hadn't deluded themselves into the 'Clinton is INEVITABLE' mindset knew that she'd at the very least have an opponent. Second off, there is, again, no proof that Sanders will stay in until the convention, as this is an unsubstantiated rumor. I've also never seen Sanders claim that every election that he's lost is rigged. Can you give me a link to him claiming that Mississippi's primary was rigged? What about Georgia? Just saying things doesn't make them true, Steve. I wouldn't say he's relentlessly attacking Clinton either, given that he recently actually entertained the possibility that Clinton would be choosing a running mate. Also, I don't think Sanders is lying to his supporters either; that's simply insanity on their part.

What do you mean there's no proof that Sanders will stay in until the convention?  He says it himself ten times a day.  And yeah he hasn't claimed literally every primary was rigged or involved some sort of cheating by the Clinton campaign.  He's claimed a bunch of them are, and then he generalizes it to discount the results of the entire thing.  Everybody knew Hillary would have an opponent, I was hoping she would get beaten by Joe Biden.  But having an opponent is very different from having one who behaves the way Bernie does.  Can you imagine Joe Biden doing what Bernie is doing?  It's unthinkable.  Biden has maturity, honesty and grace that Bernie is completely lacking.

Lastly, let me finish this off by giving you an example. Take a look at Jfern and Landslide Lyndon, the most obvious Berniebot and Hillbot on this board, respectively, if not the worst. They're both obsessed with trying to prove anything negative about their candidate wrong and proving anything negative about the other candidate right. They both use Independent avatars so that they can pretend not to be partisan, despite both likely being lifelong Democrats. Both are known to bring up the other candidate's shortcomings in completely irrelevant situations, and both have been known to create insane theories about other uses just because they don't support their candidate. I have no doubt that those two would be indistinguishable if they both supported the same candidate.

I'm not defending either of them.  I'm saying I have a right to target Bernie Sanders.

[Lyin' Steve]

He says that you can't lump superdelegates in with pledged deletates because pledged delegates are "real".

It's true, though. HRC won't have the requisite number of pledged delegates after the District of Columbia votes on the 14th. Superdelegates don't vote until the convention.

No delegates vote until the convention.

This is like refusing to concede a general election because "the electoral college doesn't vote until December!"

There is quite literally no valid room for comparison here given that you don't go into the general election with unpledged electoral votes who can be swing this way or that.

What? Literally every electoral vote is unpledged.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Faithless_elector_states.svg
List of states with laws against faithless electors (i.e. they are not only pledged but -legally bound- to vote for the winner of their respective state.

Remind me what happened to the faithless electors of past elections.
Were they incarcerated or did they send them a letter reprimanding them and asking not to do it again?

I don't have an answer because nobody from the shaded states has cast a faithless electoral vote. And there is plenty of precedent that 99.9% of the electors will vote for who they are supposed to. Meanwhile, the point you seem to be ignoring, the superdelegates are not decided by state votes. Again, there is -no electoral equivilent- to this. None.

And here's so much bad logic in this argument as well. It's wrong for him to stay in until the convention because it's already a done deal because we know who the delegates are going for. But then saying the electoral voters can vote for whoever they want, you're saying it's not a done deal by that point, and thus it's not a done deal by the convention, which contradicts the original argument.

I put some very-kind-to-Bernie numbers into that calculator website (i.e. him winning California by 15) and came out with 1900 delegates.  He needs 2383 to win.  Even if he was able to convince some superdelegates to flip to him, he's not going to convince 483 of them to do so.  It's simply so unlikely that it's basically a done deal.

[Lyin' Steve]

He says that you can't lump superdelegates in with pledged deletates because pledged delegates are "real".

It's true, though. HRC won't have the requisite number of pledged delegates after the District of Columbia votes on the 14th. Superdelegates don't vote until the convention.

No delegates vote until the convention.

This is like refusing to concede a general election because "the electoral college doesn't vote until December!"

There is quite literally no valid room for comparison here given that you don't go into the general election with unpledged electoral votes who can be swing this way or that.

What? Literally every electoral vote is unpledged.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Faithless_elector_states.svg
List of states with laws against faithless electors (i.e. they are not only pledged but -legally bound- to vote for the winner of their respective state.

Remind me what happened to the faithless electors of past elections.
Were they incarcerated or did they send them a letter reprimanding them and asking not to do it again?

I don't have an answer because nobody from the shaded states has cast a faithless electoral vote. And there is plenty of precedent that 99.9% of the electors will vote for who they are supposed to. Meanwhile, the point you seem to be ignoring, the superdelegates are not decided by state votes. Again, there is -no electoral equivilent- to this. None.

And here's so much bad logic in this argument as well. It's wrong for him to stay in until the convention because it's already a done deal because we know who the delegates are going for. But then saying the electoral voters can vote for whoever they want, you're saying it's not a done deal by that point, and thus it's not a done deal by the convention, which contradicts the original argument.

I put some very-kind-to-Bernie numbers into that calculator website (i.e. him winning California by 15) and came out with 1900 delegates.  He needs 2383 to win.  Even if he was able to convince some superdelegates to flip to him, he's not going to convince 483 of them to do so.  It's simply so unlikely that it's basically a done deal.

I'm by no means arguing that he should, or will, sway the superdelegates. But the comparison to staying in until the electoral vote is cast struck me as utterly absurd when the conventions are the time for debate and dealings of this nature, whereas the time for that is over once the general election occurs.

It's not a simile I would have chosen, since all my similes involve sports, but I think it does make sense.  You can have one or two faithless electors, so if the election was 268-272 or something and a candidate wanted to be an asshole and refuse to concede the election because faithless electors might deliver it, it would at least make a little bit of sense.  But this is like if McCain had refused to concede because he hoped 97 faithless electors would go to him.  It's just not happening.

[Lyin' Steve]

Sanders, on the other hand, decided that the last 48 hours of his campaign was a good time to validate Republican conspiracy theories about the Clinton foundation.  Maybe he should spend those last donations buying a copy of Clinton Cash for everyone on his mailing list?

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/282261-sanders-clinton-foundation-engaged-in-conflicts-of