his fans are quick to believe anyone pointing out obvious holes are corrupt. It's a go to boogeyman that his campaign and its supporters cling to like a security blanket. The effect is to give him carte blanche to throw out ridiculous proposals - from tens of trillions in new taxes, social programs that don't even fit into that new revenue, freeing 600,000 prisoners, ect - and toss out "something something revolution" as how it actually works.

Oh man, this is what made me go from liking Sanders as a protest candidate to hating him as the leader of the left's Tea Party.

Sanders cannot deal with criticism, period. He deflects any criticism of his policies by writing his critics off as part of a vaguely-defined "establishment." When Sanders' critics happen to share his ideals, he responds by questioning their devotion to those ideals; he doesn't differentiate between criticism of his ideals and criticism of the means by which he hopes to achieve those ideals. The most egregious case would be when Sanders responded to criticism on the part of four (outspokenly liberal) former heads of the Council of Economic Advisers by writing them off as members of the "establishment" who were peddling "establishment economics."

I disagree that Sanders does not make character attacks--he probably makes more of them than Clinton. Character attacks are the only way he knows how to respond to criticism. He's so convinced that he has the moral high ground on every issue that he just shrugs off criticism instead of actually listening to it and using the experience to design better policies in the future. I suspect that he's overused this tactic to such an extent that it's all he has at this point, because his reliance on character attacks has let him get by with underdeveloped policymaking capabilities. Sanders' character attacks aren't seen as such, because he's so self-righteous that he can package his mud-slinging as speaking truth to power.