Sunday, May 22, 2016

Sanders supporters: Isn't that ridiculous?

Hearing some of the things Sanders supporters say, I often think, "Don't they realize how ridiculous what they seem to be suggesting is?" That's where I got the idea for this. Let's begin.

1) What I keep hearing from Sanders supporters is that superdelegates should give him the nomination simply because he does better in head-to-head polls with Trump, even though he is losing in both pledged delegates and the popular vote. Let's forget for a moment the simple fact that Bernie's "electability numbers" are inflated due to the fact that he has been spared the level of negative publicity that Clinton has been subjected to (Republicans have no reason to attack Bernie, and Hillary has mostly held back because she is afraid of pissing off his supporters), and also that this argument is VERY different than the one Sanders and his supporters were making a few months ago, when they were warning that superdelegates had better back the person who had more pledged delegates. But what you are essentially saying is that primary voters don't matter, and that the winner should be selected solely based on how well they do on General Election polls.

Isn't that ridiculous?


2) Another thing I keep hearing is that the fact that Clinton is "under investigation" by the FBI means that superdelegates must back Sanders. First, let's remember that the reason the FBI is looking through Hillary's emails is not because they had any suspicion that she had done anything wrong, but because Congressional Republicans, having failed with their witch hunt Benghazi Committee (which several Republicans admitted was an explicit anti-Hillary PR campaign), formally requested that the FBI look over Hillary's emails to be sure that she didn't break any laws. Unless and until the FBI says differently it remains nothing more than the FBI complying with a Congressional request. Basically, what you're saying here is that anytime Republicans want to take out an opponent, they can just hold some sham hearing, or request that a government agency look into whether or not that person did anything wrong, and then that person immediately becomes disqualified from running for President.

Isn't that ridiculous?


3) This one specifically applies to the "I'm gonna vote for Trump" contingent among Sanders supporters. While trying to assuage their conscience with such unfactual statements such as, "At least he's against war" (in reality he supported the Iraq War, and won't rule out the use of nukes in the Middle East), and, "At least he wants to raise the minimum wage" (in reality he wants to abolish the federal minimum wage), one thing they keep coming back to is, "At least he's self-funding his campaign, so he can't be bought". First, he's not self-funding in the General Election (and you should have known better that to believe he would), and every dollar he has given his campaign has been in the form of a loan for which he can pay himself back out of third-party contributions, and second he has only been able to (mostly) self-fund his primary campaign because he is a billionaire. So what you are implying with this point is that only billionaires should be able to run for President, as they are the only people who would be able to self-fund their campaigns.

Isn't that ridiculous?


4) Implying that the South somehow doesn't count. For weeks Sanders supporters kept repeating the cliché that Hillary can only win primary contests in the South. Then she started winning a lot of contests elsewhere, and the new argument was that she could only win closed contests. Whenever it's pointed out to them that she has actually won a majority of open contests (11 of 19 so far, according to ballotpedia), they invariably reply with, "Yeah, but those were all in the South!" One could easily deduce from this argument that Sanders supporters think the entire South should be excluded from the Democratic primaries.

Say it with me: isn't that ridiculous?

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