Bernie Sanders Can Squander His Movement and Savage His Legacy, or... His Choice.

If Bernie Sanders would rather, like some of his followers, burn down the house, his legacy and his movement die together.

Sanders is right to feel proud of his run. So should his followers. Now, he
falls in line gracefully, or he gets remembered as a whiny loser. His call.

It's clear by now there are deadenders in Bernie Sanders' camp. I've seen many Bernie fans claim that the nomination was "stolen" from him. Funny, but most rational observers pointed out months ago that the math didn't look good for him. This math reality was repeated with the basic changing "he'll have to get 67% of the remaining vote," or "71% of the remaining vote," depending on how well or poorly he did in primaries along the way. No one ever said, "Dude has a chance," except his politically inexperienced followers.

Then California was on the horizon. Over the weekend before California, Clinton picked up a bunch of delegates in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, leaving her 19 short of the nomination, which experienced political hands combined with her extremely likely win in New Jersey, which would report before California wrapped up, to declare her nomination a lock.

Then on Monday before California, the Associated Press, a news organization that is not and never has been, as far as we know, an organ of the Democratic establishment, realized Hillary Clinton was seriously on the brink of wrapping up the nomination. So AP decided to poll those superdelegates who were willing to weigh in. Taking the many superdelegates who said they were absolutely, positively voting for Clinton and combining that with the tallies already taken led AP to declare Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

You might wish, for some formal sake of the absolute purity of the electoral process, that AP had waited -- thus passing up the chance of going on the record as believing Clinton had it in the bag -- but that didn't happen because the AP is in the business of reporting what it has determined is THE NEWS.

Bernie supporters don't get the make that decision, AP does, and it did.

Just another reminder: Sanders wasn't ever going to win the nomination, and no amount of "The system was rigged!" or "They stole the election!" or "The DNC had its toe on the scales helping Hillary!" or "I'm voting for Trump because of those bastards!" was ever going to make a difference.

And it won't now, either. Hillary Clinton beat him quite soundly, in fact, by a larger margin that the then-insurgent candidate Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in 2008. The day after California voted in 2008, Clinton gracefully conceded and threw all of her support behind Barack Obama.

What part of "Bernie Sanders should do the same, as soon as possible" don't Sanders and his followers understand?

We'll see. In the meantime, read this smart piece by Bob Cesca on Salon.com. It lays it out Sanders' choices neatly.

As Spike Lee once said, "do the the right thing." In fact, it was the name of one of his movies. Any of you remember how that ended? Netflix it, and then think about burning down the house.

Good luck, and wise choices, to us all.