THOSE PEACE-LOVING BERNIE SANDERS SOCIALISTS – AT 9:53 A.M. ET:  One of the greatest journalistic mistakes of this campaign is to portray Bernie Sanders as your favorite, kindly old uncle, and his supporters as young, pure idealists.

Bernie Sanders is a tough, often mean-spirited political operative of the left.  And while many of his supporters are starry-eyed idealists, so were some of the supporters of Joe Stalin.  Some others are ugly.  From The Hill:   

The Associated Press is warning its reporters to stay vigilant after several received harassing messages from Bernie Sanders supporters.

Danny Spriggs, the AP's vice president for global security, said some reporters have received angry emails, social media messages and phone calls after the AP declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

"We have not received any specific security threats," Spriggs said in an email to employees, according to Poynter. "It is always good to practice situational awareness around AP bureaus and offices."

The AP on Monday declared Clinton the Democratic nominee, saying she had enough pledged delegates and superdelegate support to reach the party's threshold for the nomination.

Their call angered Sanders supporters, who — along with Sanders himself — argue that superdelegates shouldn't be included in the delegate count because they don't officially vote until the Democratic National Convention in July.

The AP defended its decision to call for race for Clinton, calling the process "painstaking but very straightforward."

"By Monday evening, 571 superdelegates had told us unequivocally that they intend to vote for Clinton at the convention. Adding that number to the delegates awarded to Clinton in primary and caucus voting to date gave her the number needed to be the presumptive nominee," Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll said in a statement.

"That is news, and reporting the news is what we do."

COMMENT:  Bernie is going to cause trouble at the Dem convention.  I'd like to see reporters do a deeper analysis of his candidacy, and his links to socialism, than we've seen so far.

June 8, 2016