#BernieOrBust Turmoil Paving The Way for #PresidentTrump

There’s no proof that chairs were thrown in Nevada, as expertly analyzed by NPR’s ombudsman, but the violent atmosphere during the Nevada delegate selection is turning progressive media outlets against the see-no-evil, hard-line stance emerging from the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Take a look at this excerpt from The Hill round-up of progressives outlets, including a Talking Points Memo column by Josh Marshall, “It Comes from the Very Top,” signalling a harder turn against Bernie — although some of those critics backed Hillary — because of his response to events in Nevada:

Though many facts are still in dispute, complaints from Sanders supporters that the proceedings were biased against them led to scuffles at the venue and the event being shut down early because security personnel could no longer guarantee order. The state party chairwoman later had her cellphone number posted to social media and had threats made against her.

My view: The death threats are proven via audiotape (I believe) and definitely by social media postings — and haven’t been forcefully disavowed by anyone in the leadership of the campaign, except for some general comments about opposing violence, all the while still denying that Bernie’s supporters did anything remotely violent or threatening. And videotaped and reported scuffling, shoving, shouted obscenities and at least a raised chair in anger already shown online haven’t been disavowed or disputed by @Berniesanders or #feelthebern supporters.

I think Bernie should stay in through the convention to help tilt the platform leftward, but avoid promoting violent-appearing mass protests at the convention over Hillary’s nomination as based on fraud. Doing that will only fuel greater turnout for Donald Trump, who can be expected to crow about the protests via @realdonaldtrump and gain billions more in free media exposure.

Harold Meyerson of American Prospect explained this well, drawing on the experience of the 1968 activists protests in Chicago in which they became the story, not the war they were protesting:
http://prospect.org/article/how-bros-are-undermining-bernie. As he wrote:

The Bernie Sanders campaign has all but eclipsed its own message. Like the antiwar movement of the 1960s — whence I came — a small group of its activists have themselves become the story, supplanting Sanders’s powerful critique of economic elites and the sway they hold over our politics. The issues that Bernie has so forcefully highlighted have been shunted to the background; the Bros have taken center stage.

We’ve seen this all before. By the late 1960s, most Americans had turned against the Vietnam War, but the extremism of a small share of the antiwar activists, and their proclivity for violent confrontations, turned millions of Americans even more decidedly against the protestors — a backlash that gave the Nixon administration the political space to continue the war for four more years.

Was the convention rigged and therefore the tumultuous, ugly protests by Sanders supporters was somehow justified? Here’s the state Democratic party’s version about the dispute over caucus/convention-selected delegates, which can be taken with a grain of salt because the NV party leadership is Pro-Hillary but I haven’t seen any even-handed independent reporting disputing these basic facts, excerpted below:

• In plain terms, the Clinton campaign organized and got nearly all of their delegates to the State Convention. The Sanders campaign did not.

On the false and wildly inaccurate accusations that there were 64 potential Sanders delegates in question who were “denied” by the State Convention’s Credentials Committee on Saturday:

• Six of the 64 potential delegates were seated as delegates after investigation.
• The remaining potential delegates were ineligible for two main reasons: 1) They were not registered Democratic voters in Nevada by May 1, 2016, and 2) Their information — such as address, date of birth and name — could not be found or identified, and they did not respond to requests from the party and campaigns to correct it.
• Only eight of the ineligible delegates even attempted to register at the State Convention.

Joan Walsh, a Hillary supporter who is also critical of the Democratic Party’s roadblocks to the Sanders campaign, points out in a balanced piece in The Nation the real dangers Sanders poses to Democrats with his scorched-earth approach to the final leg of the primaries and tolerance of supporter violence:

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 Dannel 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.

MOVING FORWARD TO THE CONVENTION

I believe in all states where Bernie won popular votes the same proportion of super-delegates should back him.

Ultimately, Bernie’s important progressive voice shouldn’t turn into an end-game of stoking bitter, rage-fueled protests and violent threats by some of his supporters that will discredit Hillary and propel Trump into the White House.

The argument that only Bernie can beat Donald Trump may not hold up in the real world because there hasn’t been $500 million-plus in GOP/Koch negative ads hurled at him as a 73-year-old Jewish socialist who dabbled in pornography as a young man and wrote expressing approval for greater sexual expression for children. How will that be used by the masterminds of smear campaigns who Swift Boated war hero John Kerry? Here’s Slate’s look at the angles of negative advertising and stump speech attacks we haven’t seen yet, but could see if somehow, improbably, Bernie became the nominee:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/bernie_sanders_electability_argument_is_still_a_myth.html

Some excerpts:

The Clinton campaign has also ignored Sanders’ youthful sex writings. Republicans are unlikely to be so decorous. Imagine an ad drawing from the old Sanders essay “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” First it might quote the candidate mocking taboos on child nudity: “Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others [sic] sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing!” Then it would quote him celebrating girls who defy their mothers and have sex with their boyfriends: “The revolution comes … when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has ‘taught’ her and accepts her boyfriends [sic] love.” Finally, it would remind viewers that Sanders was one of 14 congressmen to vote against the law establishing the Amber Alert system and one of 15 to vote against an amendment criminalizing computer-generated child pornography. The fact that these votes were cast for entirely principled civil libertarian reasons is, in the context of a general-election attack, beside the point. (It’s also beside the point that lots of people, myselfincluded, have no problem with either child nudity or teenage sex.) It takes no special political insight to see that Republicans will try to make Sanders seem like a sexual weirdo. Will it work? I have no idea, but there’s no shorter route to the frightened lizard brain of the American electorate than dark talk about children and sex.

I will vote for Bernie in the June Washington DC primary, but if the campaign continues to harp on Hillary as stealing the nomination from him and tacitly encouraging quasi-violent protests over a rigged election, I and other progressives will likely reconsider our support of him. That’s already started in publications such as Mother Jones, The American Prospect, Daily Kos and others that have supported his campaign.