Clinton: The Denial Continues

“I’ll be making no decisions tonight,” said Senator Hillary Clinton as she asked her supporters to go to her website and send her messages of support.

I don’t understand what she has left to do that can’t be done post-concession. She lost fair and square, but she’s making statements about the popular vote and the electoral votes. She’s asking for her supporters to stand with her and send in their messages of support. She’s still asking for their contributions on her website. She’s still trying to make the case that she’s the best and most electable candidate even though the votes are all in and she has clearly lost.

Meanwhile, her supporters are chanting “DENVER! DENVER!” — threatening a brokered convention because that’s exactly what she wants.

Her arrogance tonight does nothing but draw out the inevitable conclusion to this primary season. She’s holding her party and her country hostage to her failures. She is the worst kind of poor sport.

The entire Democratic Party has been coddling Hillary Clinton while she pitches every kind of temper tantrum she can think of. When a child pitches a fit because she doesn’t win a board game, you don’t coddle her. You send her to her room and tell her to learn how to lose graciously. This has gone on long enough.

Update: As usual Andrew Sullivan couldn’t have said it better:

The speech tonight was a remarkable one for a candidate who has lost the nomination, though not remarkable for a Clinton. It was an assertion that she had won the nomination and a refusal to concede anything to her opponent. Classless, graceless, shameless, relentless. Pure Clinton.

Her narcissism requires that she deprive her opponent of a night, or a second, of gratification or attention. And she has now won, in her Bush-like version of reality, 18 million votes. Her invitation for her supporters to email their suggestions to her website is pure theater, a way of keeping herself in the spotlight and maneuvering her delegates to demand a second spot on the ticket. The way she is now doing this - by an implicit threat, backed by McCain, to claim that Obama is an illegitimate nominee if she does not get her way - is designed to humiliate the nominee sufficiently to wound him enough to lose the election.

Either way, she is clearly intent on getting Obama defeated this fall if she is not offered the vice-presidency. And if she gets the veep nod, the way she has gotten it will allow her to argue that a November loss was not her loss. It was his. And she will run again in 2012.

She will not go away. The Clintons will never go away. And they will do all they can to cripple any Democrat who tries to replace them. In the tent or out of it, it is always about them. And they are no longer rivals to Obama; they are threats.