Bernie or Bust

Somebody who gets mad at everything, gawd love him, got mad at me on Facebook for posting some of the wackier comments from the Bernie or Bust webpages. He thought I was making fun of Bernie supporters. But this was not about Bernie supporters, this was about the Bernie or Bust people, who were more often than not quite, uh, zany and confused. Their posts were really funny. After all, these are people who sat inside the convention hall staring into their iPhones completely oblivious to reality all around them. Posting that the evil Hillary forces had cancelled the roll call while that roll call was actually happening. That is funny. There is no way that isn’t really funny. And I saw that a dozen times. These raging space cases, out to save the world and completely oblivious to that very world. They are a funny bunch, a lot of them, passionate and clueless.

But my favorite Bernie or Bust moment, hands down, was the white guys chanting “Black Lives Matter!” as Cory Booker spoke. I swear he did a double take.

Booing Bernie

I am not surprised that Bernie was booed by his own true believers. If you have been looking at any of the Bernie or Bust pages you would have already seen comments from people who think he’s a traitor or a sell out, and lots more comments that were convinced he was still running and would win the nomination. People have been trying to contact superdelegates all week long, thinking they could be convinced to turn this around.

A lot of these delegates have had to spend everything they had just to get to Philadelphia, and a lot of the posts on FB are for crowdfunding Bernie delegates to get to the convention. No effort was made by Bernie’s campaign to help at all, even though he is sitting on millions. So the connection between Bernie Sanders and many of his delegates has gotten tenuous…they came there to support Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, and not Bernie Sanders the Democratic Senator. His speech to the DNC will be his biggest challenge. He might well be booed by his own people as he is cheered by Hillary’s. Embarrassing….

I’ve been figuring there would be a lot of excitement on the floor for a week now, even before Julian Assange dumped all those DNC emails. Since then, though, the Bernie or Bust pages have gone ballistic, with loud demands that Bernie withdraw his endorsement. I suspect that a lot of people in that crowd of delegates today were expecting to hear just that, Bernie withdrawing his endorsement and announcing he was still in it to win. The boos were by people hearing what they had refused to believe all along, that Bernie Sanders had no attention of contesting Hillary Clinton for the nomination on the floor. The chants of Lock Her Up are no surprise either, as the Bernie of Bust pages are rife with crazy conservative propaganda lately. Breitbart was everywhere. Not every Berniecrat is a democratic socialist. Don’t forget he got all those Rand Paul people, H.A. Goodman being the most famous. Libertarian one week, socialist the next, and then back again. Far more Sanders people have switched to Johnson than to Stein so far. More have switched to Trump than to Stein so far. Maybe this will change now, but some of those booing Bernie today will be voting for Trump, guaranteed. And while the vast majority of Bernie Sanders supporters in the country switched their support to Hillary weeks ago, they are not the ones in Philadelphia booing and chanting in front of television cameras.

It will also be interesting watching how angry Bernie delegates, nearly all of them white, interact with Hillary delegates, a great many of them African American and Hispanic. Progressives might discover a racial divide they did not was even there, one they exacerbated every time they claimed that Hillary’s victory margins–propelled as they were by black and Hispanic voters–were fraudulent. White people angry that their votes did not mean more than black and brown votes. It wasn’t meant that way, but it was often heard that way.

Fun times ahead, maybe. Like I said before, the Democrat in me wants a smooth running convention, but the political junkie in me is thrilled at the prospect for so much excitement….