The latest chapter came at this weekend's Democratic state convention in Nevada, where the Sanders faction went completely bananas because the rules by which you had to be a Democrat to participate in a Democratic convention were simply too much for them to bear. Senator Barbara Boxer got booed. Punches and chairs were thrown.

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First of all, who elects anybody with a system that apparently was designed at a marmoset technical college? This sounds like something Kim Jong-Il would have thought up on the golf course between his 11th and 12th holes-in-one.

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That being said, this whole mess was over four freaking delegates, and the Sanders people should know better than to conclude what has been a brilliant and important campaign by turning it into an extended temper tantrum.

I voted for Bernie Sanders. I even wrote about why I did here at this very shebeen. But if anybody thinks that, somehow, he is having the nomination "stolen" from him, they are idiots.

And, no, I don't want to talk about it.

There was palpable tension between the two camps throughout the day at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, with Clinton supporters barely outnumbering those supporting Sanders among the more than 3,400 conventiongoers. Still, a 33-person delegate lead was enough to sway the division of a dozen delegates who were up for grabs Saturday in her favor.

Who would win the majority of those delegates remained uncertain going into Saturday because Sanders was allotted more delegates to the state convention. In April, Sanders had turned out more of his supporters to the county conventions — even though Clinton had won the popular vote in the February caucuses — thus allowing him to send more delegates to the state convention.

Based on the presidential preference of conventiongoers, Clinton won seven delegates Saturday, while Sanders won five between two categories of delegates. Each category — at-large delegates and Pledged Leader and Party Official delegates — had an odd number of delegates, which means a narrow Clinton win gave her the delegate advantage in each category.

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Several Sanders supporters, however, put together what they called a “minority report” of 64 Sanders supporters they believe were wrongly denied delegate status. According to state party representatives, six of those were eventually allowed as delegates, and the rest were denied delegate or alternate status because either they or their records could not be located or they were not registered Democrats by the May 1 deadline.

Eight Clinton supporters were denied delegate or alternate status for similar reasons, according to the state party.

New York, N.Y. — May 13, 2016 — A Washington Post story ignited a firestorm Thursday by alleging that presumptive GOP nominee Donald J. Trump impersonated Trump Enterprises public relations officials under false names to paint glowing portraits of himself for reporters. The Post story says that Trump himself called writers from various publications, including People magazine, to extol his own virtues while posing as at least two fictitious Trump Enterprises employees: John Barron and John Miller.

However, emails received by media outlets Friday from Barron and Miller establish that they are in fact actual persons and suggest that the Post story constitutes libel against Trump.

“Donald Trump is a tremendous guy who built a terrific company that employs thousands and thousands of people,” wrote John Barron, who said he is the PR specialist who spoke to the People reporter. “He’s a smart guy who is very rich and went to the very best schools, okay? He will win bigly in November, and then America will win so much you’ll get tired of winning.”

The email from John Barron was sent from a newly created Gmail account registered under the username “bighands1946,” which checks out as legitimate. Seconds after the Barron email was received, media outlets received an email from John Miller, the other publicity specialist mentioned in the Post story.

“Only a low-energy loser would say Donald Trump pretended to be someone else,” Miller said. “Trump is a tremendous person, a self-made man who took a small $1 million loan from his father and built it into a yooodge company. All three of his wives are beauty-full, so forget about it. And his daughter is so hot maybe he’d be banging her if he wasn’t her father, okay?”

The email from Miller emanated from a new Yahoo account registered to user “1946longfingers,” which appears to be a legitimate account.

The communications from Barron and Miller obviously put an end to the controversy The Washington Post article provoked, so responsible news organizations are advised to focus instead on Hillary Clinton’s impending indictment by the FBI and the Obama administration’s ongoing persecution of white people.

Anthony Senecal, who worked as Donald Trump's butler for 17 years before being named the in-house historian at the tycoon's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, has repeatedly published posts on his Facebook page that express profound hatred for President Barack Obama and declare he should be killed.

On Wednesday, Senecal put up a post that read:

"To all my friends on FB, just a short note to you on our pus headed "president" !!!! This character who I refer to as zero (0) should have been taken out by our military and shot as an enemy agent in his first term !!!!! Instead he still remains in office doing every thing he can to gut the America we all know and love !!!!! Now comes Donald J Trump to put an end to the corruption in government !!!! The so called elite, who are nothing but common dog turds from your front lawn are shaking in their boots because there is a new Sheriff coming to town, and the end to their corruption of the American people (YOU) is at hand !!!! I cannot believe that a common murder is even allowed to run (killery clinton) OR that a commie like bernie is a also allowed to also run !!!! Come on America put your big boy pants on---this election you have a choice---GET YOUR ASS OUT AND VOTE !!!! Thank you !!!!"

Touting his Tuesday night victories, Donald Trump unveiled a new moniker for yet another political adversary: “Crazy Bernie.”

“Big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee tweeted Wednesday morning. “Get ready for November - Crooked Hillary, who is looking very bad against Crazy Bernie, will lose!”

Minutes later, Trump gave the Vermont senator, who won West Virginia on Tuesday, a backhanded compliment.

“I don't want to hit Crazy Bernie Sanders too hard yet because I love watching what he is doing to Crooked Hillary,” Trump wrote. “His time will come!”

“I think a lot of the young people that are with Bernie Sanders are going to come to my side because they want jobs. Bernie Sanders and I agree on one thing, trade, that we don’t know what we’re doing on trade,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “The difference is, I’ll make great deals out of it. He doesn’t know what to do. The people that are with Bernie Sanders, the young people, I really believe they’re going to come over and vote for me. I think we’re going to have a lot of crossover.”

Bernie Sanders has a problem.

Remember those superdelegates, the Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who can vote for the candidate of their choice? The ones Sanders' supporters have been complaining about for months? It turns out, to have a shot at beating out Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, he needs them.

A lot of them.

He needs the ones who remain uncommitted, as well as more than 200 of those who have already publicly endorsed Clinton. Mathematically, Sanders cannot win the nomination without that support.

On Saturday, Sanders netted more than two dozen delegates over Clinton in Washington state after the party released vote data broken down by congressional district.

But his math remains dire.

Clinton won the Guam caucus on Saturday and now needs just 17 percent of the delegates at stake in upcoming contests to clinch the nomination. That means she could lose every single contest by a landslide and still be the nominee if all of her superdelegates continue to support her.

The point is, you need allies in a democracy. That’s just the way it is. It can be frustrating and it can be slow. But history teaches us that the alternative to democracy is always worse. That’s not just true in this country. It’s not a black or white thing. Go to any country where the give and take of democracy has been repealed by one-party rule, and I will show you a country that does not work.

And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.

We remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory, the power of his letter from a Birmingham jail, the marches he led. But he also sat down with President Johnson in the Oval Office to try and get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act passed. And those two seminal bills were not perfect — just like the Emancipation Proclamation was a war document as much as it was some clarion call for freedom. Those mileposts of our progress were not perfect. They did not make up for centuries of slavery or Jim Crow or eliminate racism or provide for 40 acres and a mule. But they made things better. And you know what, I will take better every time. I always tell my staff — better is good, because you consolidate your gains and then you move on to the next fight from a stronger position.