Bernie Sanders wistful about a missed matchup against Trump: 'I wish to God I'd had the opportunity'

[frazzled]

61. Stop it

He didn't get the chance because 3 million fewer people voted for him in the primaries. He LOST. Get over it. He would have been decimated in the general, based on that paltry support alone. The Democrats and the Clinton campaign treated him with kid gloves. They could have hit him hard with a ton of stuff (which they never did, because they didn't have to: they were far ahead all the time). But the Republicans would have. Here's just a part of what Kurt Eichenwald describes from their oppo research, which consisted of a book "2-feet thick":

I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”

http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democrats-presidential-election-521044

Let me at 'em, let me at 'em! I'da beat him bloody. What ego, for someone who lost the primary by 12 points.