Salon: Bernie must drop notion that everyone who disagrees with him is corrupt or a dupe

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54. Acually, Bernie and his campaign were out of their league and have only themselves to blame

"They committed a series of fatal strategic errors mostly attributable to incompetent staff work and an unforgivable lack of preparation against the Clinton Machine.

Among the bullet points in the campaign’s post-mortem, we can’t help but to note that Bernie & Company mistakenly went negative against Hillary, unnecessarily careening onto and embracing the low-road. Bernie, meanwhile, deeply excoriated the Democratic Party establishment and the superdelegate system, only to circle back, groveling now for establishment support after it’s too late. The Bernie get-out-the-vote effort failed to turn impressively massive rally crowds into actual votes, time and time again. Bernie himself stoked discontent and conspiracy-mongering within the party by misleading his supporters about delegate math while also failing to properly educate his ground-game activists about voter-registration and primary rules state-to-state.

Perhaps his deadliest error occurred when he pledged to run his campaign solely on individual donations famously averaging $27 when, in a general election matchup, he would’ve suddenly confronted a stratospheric pile of GOP cash that would’ve invariably crushed his chances unless he backpedaled. The list goes on and on. And now he’s willing to participate in a stunt — a debate between the GOP winner and the Democratic loser. A political exhibition bout.

These are all factors to take into consideration, and a farcical stunt-debate between Bernie and Trump wouldn’t have ameliorated Bernie’s self-inflicted damage, nor would it have sufficed as a last-minute Hail Mary. At the end of the day, it only would’ve managed to illustrate how a failed Democratic candidate was just as willing as Trump to debase himself within the idiocratic narrative."

— Bob Cesca is a regular contributor to Salon.com.