SCARY – AT 10:08 A.M. ET: Yesterday's Democratic primaries were kind of a wash. Hillary managed a small victory in Kentucky and Sanders won Oregon, but the delegates are given out proportionally, so Sanders gained maybe a tiny number of seats. Bottom line, Hillary is within 100 delegate votes of the nomination.
The scary side here is that Bernie Sanders is becoming increasingly strident and threatening, and some of his comrades, uh, I mean supporters, are out of control. From an editorial in the Sacramento Bee:
A lot of Democrats don’t want to admit it, but Donald Trump isn’t the only presidential candidate playing with fire and recklessly courting an angry mob.
For the latest round of curse-word hurling, chair throwing, social-media stalking and conspiracy-theory swapping, look no further than the supporters of Bernie Sanders.
Over the weekend, dozens of Sanders devotees lost their minds after the Nevada Democratic Party, meeting for its convention in Las Vegas, awarded a majority of delegates to front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Convinced that the establishment had rigged the rules and that Sanders delegates had been excluded for unfair reasons, they booed and traded barbs with people on stage, including Clinton surrogate and keynote speaker U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.
The convention ended abruptly, descending into chaos that was captured for the world to relive on Facebook and YouTube.
Death threats and vandalism followed, prompting Nevada Democratic Party offices to close on Monday and its chairwoman, Roberta Lange, to release some downright disgusting voicemails and text messages she had received from Sanders supporters. She also reported threats against her grandchildren.
The episode had the reek of Trump rallies, where threats, insults and sucker punches to defend the presumptive Republican nominee have been common. Yet looking back at the hundreds of Sanders supporters who descended on a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles earlier this month to intimidate her supporters, making one little girl cry, it now seems inevitable that the same kind of violent eruption would afflict those “feeling the Bern.”
That’s a scary prospect for a divided political party that is going to need to rediscover its united front in time for the November election. Like the Republicans whose unity was shredded by Trump’s rise, the Democrats now face the prospect of an internal revolt.
COMMENT: The disruptions in the Democratic Party are more serious. They are coming from the fringe left, which has a history of violence. Our eagle-eyed reporters have not yet figured out that Bernie Sanders appeals to the same kind of people who wanted the United States to lose in Vietnam, and even in the war on terror.
May 18, 2016 |