Sorry, Bernie, Your Nevada Hijack Story Is False

Allegations of Fraud and Misconduct at Nevada Democratic Convention Unfounded PolitiFact

PolitiFact Nevada was present on the floor the entire time and gives an emotionless recap, step by step of what happened. It's even better than the one we posted yesterday.

{Quote}: "Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver said Nevada Democratic Party leaders "hijacked the process on the floor" of the state convention "ignoring the regular procedure and ramming through what they wanted to do."

Caucuses and delegate math can be incredibly confusing, and the arcane party structures don’t reflect how most people assume presidential selection works.

But the howls of unfairness and corruption by the Sanders campaign during Nevada’s state Democratic Convention can’t change the simple fact that Clinton’s supporters simply turned out in larger numbers and helped her solidify her delegate lead in Nevada.

There’s no clear evidence the state party "hijacked" the process or ignored "regular procedure."

We rate this claim False." {End Quote}

Bernie's Boys Club Gets Blistering Criticism

Bernie Sanders Is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim by Joan Walsh The Nation

{Quote}: " The defections of some supporters, the increased skepticism of even once-friendly cable hosts, and a rebuke by Politifact isn’t fatal to Sanders’s campaign, of course. What will be fatal to Sanders’s future as a mass-movement leader—as opposed to the messiah of an angry, heavily white, and male cult—is his continued insistence that his enemy now is not so much the corporate overlords, or income inequality, or the big banks, but a corrupt Democratic Party, epitomized by Wall Street flunkie Hillary Clinton, that has “rigged” the election to thwart him—as he raged in a tone-deaf speech Tuesday night, as cable news was showing the texted death threats to Roberta Lange in the background (which Sanders did not even mention).

{ . . . }

First of all, I don’t accept the presumption of moral and ideological superiority from a coalition that is dominated by white men, trying to overturn the will of black, brown, and female voters or somehow deem it fraudulent. There’s a growing element of male entitlement in the Sanders “movement” that supporter Sally Kohn articulates well:

{ . . . }

If you’d told me a year ago that we’d go into Philadelphia with 45 percent of the delegates committed to a socialist, as a firm flank on the left, backed by the many millions of Clinton supporters like myself who also identify with the left, I’d have said we were on the verge of transforming the party into a vehicle for racial and economic justice. Now I’m afraid of what’s coming. If Sanders wants to destroy the party instead of change it, if he wants to demonize progressives like Barney Frank and Connecticut Governor Daniel Malloy (Devine has suggested he wants them removed from leadership roles because they endorsed Clinton), if he wants to turn the first female presidential nominee into a corrupt caricature of herself, a cross between Carly Fiorina and Marie Antoinette, then Philadelphia will be a disaster. For the party, and for Sanders too. He thinks he’s the only one who can defeat Donald Trump. But in fact, he’s the only one who can elect him, by tearing the party apart. " {End Quote}

I Felt the Bern but the Bros Are Extinguishing the Flames by Sally Kohn TIME

This essay from Sally Kohn really speaks to all of us. Kohn is a Sanders supporter and spoke at his huge Brooklyn rally. We would have little difficulty communicating with each other.

{Quote}: "The Bernie Bros are real. I’ve been the target of Bernie Bros on social media, and when I endorsed Sen. Sanders at a Brooklyn rally in front of more than 30,000 people, a not insignificant portion of the audience booed me for praising Clinton in my remarks. Forget the plainly self-defeating results of that behavior in terms of trying to recruit would-be Hillary supporters to Bernie’s column. It was disturbing from a visceral, human level.

It’s also too easy to suggest that Sanders’ supporters are a different kind of angry than Trump’s. Are we entirely sure about that? The populist right may be more inclined toward misogyny and xenophobia, but the populist left is not immune from these afflictions. And as I’ve written before, when you see progressive white men—many of whom enthusiastically supported Barack Obama’s candidacy—hate Clinton with every fiber of their being despite the fact that she’s a carbon copy of Obama’s ideology (or in fact now running slightly to his left), it’s hard to find any other explanation than sexism. Either way, the brutish, boorish behavior of Bernie Bros (and their female compatriots, too) was a huge reason I was reluctant to seemingly side with them in endorsing Sanders—and has been the only reason I have ever questioned my decision to do so since.

But what’s perhaps most disconcerting to me about the events in Nevada is that if you remove the ideological valence, it’s easy to see an anti-establishment movement rising across the U.S. that is disturbingly proto-violent. Let me be clear: I am all for populist mass social movements and even anti-elite revolutions. The sooner the better. But what I am not for is hate and violence in the service of those ends, movements that seek to lift up their marginalized base by marginalizing others.

This is the philosophy behind Trump. I’m not saying that all or even most of Sanders’ white male supporters are violent xenophobes, but they are certainly angry, and in the past and present of America it is impossible to disentangle white male anger from gender and racial bias and resentment. This is, after all, all happening at a time when white male supremacy is finally, if only slightly, on the decline. . . . " {End Quote}

Come on, Bernie, Time to Level with Your Dreamers by Joy-Ann Reid The Daily Beast

{Quote}: If Sanders does hope to have a future in Democratic Party politics, he will eventually have to tell his supporters the truth: that he simply lost the primary contest, despite a hard-fought race. He’ll have to walk back some of his sharpest anti-Clinton rhetoric, and find some way to become a bridge to the voters who have become so fervently devoted to him.

{ . . . }

Of course, Sanders could refuse to do that, perhaps concluding that he would lose too much credibility with the rather angry movement he’s built, and go right on hitting Hillary Clinton instead. But he risks winding up an isolated figure in Philadelphia, surrounded by his diehards but scorned by Democrats who blame him for weakening the nominee, tolerated by Camp Clinton only because they have to, and unable to win meaningful platform concessions from a party that could well view him as an enemy invader, rather than a bluntly critical, but ultimately valuable friend.