Those Contradictions Won’t Heighten Themselves!

This NYT article shows a variety of #BernieorBust rationalizations. One (which, it must be said, Sanders has helped to cultivate with his arrant nonsense about the system being fundamentally rigged against him) is to argue that if not supporting Clinton means Trump winning, it’s all Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s fault:

Ms. Peters, who makes a living selling goods online, said that she would not vote for Mrs. Clinton under any circumstance — and that she would blame the Democratic Party for a Trump victory in November.

“If the D.N.C. wants to go ahead and put out the candidate who can’t win and we lose in November, it’s not because I didn’t vote,” she said. “It’s because they were looking out for their interests and not for the better interests of the country.”

“If the DNC wanted to win, it should have overruled the will of the party’s voters by fiat.” Hard to see anything wrong about this except that it’s wrong on every possible level. (Even if you believe that Sanders would be a better candidate in the general, it’s rather obvious that a Bernie Sanders installed as the Democratic nominee against the preferences of a substantial majority of Democratic voters would not be.)

But at least Peters implicitly concedes that a Trump presidency might be even worse, even if she ignores these consequences. Some take the Brogan W. Bragman IV line that Trump won’t really be able to do anything:

“Everyone is like: ‘Trump has these terrible social issues. He hates Muslims and he hates the L.G.B.T. community,’ ” she said. “But our world is big enough that he’s not actually going to implement any of those changes in a realistic way. But what he will do is potentially audit the federal government, and he will try to break up some of the banks and try to at least influence government that way. However, with Hillary, it will just be a complacent, run-of-the-middle-of-the-road presidency.”

I dunno, replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg and/or Stephen Breyer and/or Anthony Kennedy with a fifth and/or sixth and/or seventh vote to overturn Obergefell seems like a pretty concrete harm to me! But yes, I concede the point; if you focus on bad stuff Trump can’t accomplish, ignore all of the horrible things he would have the power to do (including signing bills that a Republican Congress puts on his desk), and assume that he will do some good things there is absolutely no chance he will do, then his presidency seems better. As for Hillary Clinton doing boring stuff like “ensuring that the Supreme Court isn’t controlled by neoconfederate cranks for decades,” BORRRRR-ING.

Another special snowflake likes this idea. A Trump presidency might not be so bad because BUNGA BUNGA!

Victor Vizcarra, 48, of Los Angeles, said he would much prefer Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton. Though he said he disagreed with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, Mr. Vizcarra said he had watched “The Apprentice” and expected that a Trump presidency would be more exciting than a “boring” Clinton administration.

“A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in,” said Mr. Vizcarra, who works in information technology. “There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change. People are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.”

A Trump presidency would be a like a reality show! A reality show in which poor women in many states couldn’t get abortions, tens of millions of people would lose health insurance, carbon emissions would skyrocket, countless same-sex couples would have their marriage licenses invalidated, federal aid for the poor is slashed while the taxes if the upper class are slashed, etc. etc. etc. Hell, maybe even some fascism. That’s entertainment! And sometimes you have to focus on what matters.

[Meme by Noon.]