2,118

That’s the new number required for either Clinton or Obama to take the nomination. The Rules and Bylaws Committee has decided to seat half of the delegates from Michigan and Florida. Conventional wisdom says Obama will have this wrapped up come Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, but Clinton adviser Harold Ickes has stated that the senator has asked that he reserve her right to take this fight to the Credentials Committee…in Denver. I can only assume that she’s holding off her decision until she knows whether or not she absolutely has to have all the delegates from Michigan and Florida to keep this going.

So, everyone is saying it’s over, except for Clinton who, instead of Rocky, is taking a line from Rambo this time, saying, “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn’t let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me? Who are they? Unless they’ve been me and been there and know what the hell they’re yelling about!”

Ok, maybe I went a little overboard on that one, but you get the idea. This puts Obama short of the nomination by about 66 delegates, depending on whose count you use.

The vote went down 19-8 to split the delegates from Florida based on the primary results (Clinton-105, Obama-67) and Michigan, a trickier matter as Obama was not on the ballot, split between the two candidates (Clinton-69, Obama-59). Each delegate will have half a vote at the convention. According to some news reports, the Obama camp had enough votes on the committee to split the votes 50-50. However, the candidate instructed his supporters to vote for a solution more favorable to Senator Clinton, an attempt to heal wounds in the party. Except that doesn’t seem to have worked.

According to multiple reports, the crowd at the meeting was raucous and combative, shouting back and forth at one another and heckling the speakers on both sides of the debate.

The longer this fight goes on, the harder it will be to bring the party together and with both sides acting like whiny children, my hopes are not high. So, to both sides I have the following advice: grow the fuck up!

Clintonites: Florida and Michigan broke the rules. If the party does not punish them in some way it will have no power over the primaries. States could hold their primaries at any time, and, of course, they all want to be first which means it will be chaos as each of the states makes their primary earlier and earlier. Sooner or later, the party needs to step in and impose some order and if they let Florida and Michigan skate, their threats will have no power behind them. Please remember here that the primaries are how the party chooses a candidate. And the parties are private organizations. If you don’t like how they do things you can start your own or go be a Republican. But since you chose to vote in the Democratic primary, you agreed to play by the party’s rules.

Obamaniacs: There is such thing as being a sore winner. So you don’t like the way Clinton has run her campaign. Well, I can’t say I disagree. That said, she would make a much better president than John McCain (McCain people, feel free to object in the most absurd terms below). Her positions on the issues, along with her voting record, are not all that different from Obama’s. So while she’s taken some bad advice from some very foolish people, and run with it like a Weight Watcher’s meeting after the Good Humor truck, she’s not that far off from your candidate. So stop acting like she’s the devil. While I think she’s lost her bearings almost as badly as Senator More Wars, Bomb Iran, Hundred Years of Iraq, Lobbyists Are Wrong Except When They Run My Campaign, Don’t Know Much About the Economy McCain, she would make a decent president. So when 23% of you say you would rather vote for McCain than Clinton, it only exposes your own ignorance. Try at least to act like you’re old enough to vote.

The best solution at this point is probably to lock both sets of fanatics in a room and refuse to let them out until one side is dead or, in the chaos of raging hormones and heightened emotions, they all start doing it. Wither way, wire the room for video and it will make for some interesting YouTube footage. So go on! Carpe Inimicus!