Maybe Hillary Clinton shouldn’t sound like a character from a Maureen Dowd column

This is . . . not helpful:

In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” That assessment still hold?

Yes, it does.

If he gets the nomination, will you endorse and campaign for him?

I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions. [My emphasis]

I can understand Clinton’s bitterness, and her assessment of the worst of the Bernie Bros is of course correct, but saying you’re withholding judgment on whether you’ll support Sanders in the general against Trump is really bad, whether it’s a tactical gesture or not (I will assume it is but even so JFC).

It trivializes the threat that Trump’s potential re-election represents, and it’s a reminder that yeah in fact Clinton has been unnecessarily chummy with all sorts of scumbags throughout her career, very much including Trump himself. (The Clintons’ willingness to attend Donald Trump’s third wedding in 2005 was the kind of gesture that lent this demi-gangster fraud a sheen of social respectability he never deserved, as Trump himself was eminently aware at the time, which is precisely why he invited them).

And speaking of tactics, FWIW I think this is a bad one, both in terms of the help it will give Sanders’ primary opponents [Narrator’s voice: It won’t], and how it will energize his supporters. Also FWIW I have extremely lukewarm feelings about Sanders at best, and am not even sure I would prefer him to Biden, but this is ridiculous.