You'd think that by now the #FeelTheMath meme – the notion that independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his supporters should come to terms with the fact that cold hard math has basically put the Democratic nomination out of his reach – had been done to death by now. But you'd be wrong. So let's do this again.

Rolling Stone on Monday published an interview with Sanders about his quixotic battle to wrest the Democratic nomination from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The magazine's Tim Dickinson asked Sanders the most basic question at this point: What does the septuagenarian socialist's admittedly "narrow" path to victory look like? Sanders' three-part answer is instructive not only for illustrating exactly how vanishingly small his odds are but how deceptive his approach is and, ultimately, how intellectually dishonest he's being.

Let's take Sanders' answer piece by piece. The first part of his plan, he says, is:

For us to win the majority of pledged delegates, we're going to have to do very, very well in the remaining states. I think we have a shot – a real shot in California. We're putting a lot of our resources into that. New Jersey, we have a longer shot, but we can do it. So the path to victory is to do extremely well. You can do the arithmetic as well as I could. That's one path.

He is correct that he's going to have to do "very, very well" in the remaining states in order to win the majority of pledged delegates. Here's some context: There are 4,051 pledged delegates – the delegates earned with primary and caucus victories and bound to their candidate (as opposed to the free agent superdelegates, on which more in a moment). That means in order to win a simple majority of pledged delegates a candidate must garner 2,026 of them. Because of the existence of superdelegates that would not be sufficient to capture the nomination (the magic number is 2,383 total delegates), but it would imbue a candidate with a level of legitimacy from having earned the voters' imprimatur.

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Where does the race stand? According to the delegate tracker on the authoritative website The Green Papers, Clinton currently has 1,770 pledged delegates and Sanders has 1,500. That leaves 781 up for grabs in the nine remaining contests, with California (475) and New Jersey (126) the biggest remaining prizes.

OK, so how big of a hill does Sanders have to climb to vault past Clinton and capture a majority of pledged delegates? He would need to win 526 of the remaining 781 remaining delegates. I'll save you the math: That's a hair more than 67 percent.

That's pretty much an insurmountable deficit. It's true that Sanders has surpassed two-thirds of the vote on seven occasions this cycle – Vermont, Kansas, Idaho, Utah, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington – but with the exception of Sanders' home state those were all caucus states, which tend to favor candidates like Sanders who have committed supporters willing to spend the extra time and energy necessary to participate in the process. The best he's done in a primary state he doesn't live in is his 60 percent in New Hampshire (which is right next to the state he lives in).

But that's all retrospective. How do things look in the upcoming states? Well the last time Sanders led in a California poll was, well, never according to the RealClearPolitics compilation of polls. That site's average of surveys gives Clinton a 8.7 percent lead in the Golden State; the HuffPost Pollster average is 12 percentage points. And the numbers are worse in New Jersey where RealClear gives Clinton a 17-point margin while HuffPost has it at a hair over 15 points. Polls can be wrong (see Michigan), but Sanders needs to not simply win but win smashing, 2-to-1 landslides. Is that possible? Sure. It's also possible that Donald Trump will convert to Islam and emigrate to Mexico but I wouldn't bet on any of these scenarios.

OK so the first part of Sanders' grand strategy is the longest of long shots. What of the other two legs of his stool?

Here's part two:

The second path is to tell the superdelegates ... that they have to respect the wishes of the voters of those states and vote for the candidate who won overwhelming – I'm not talking about one or two points, I'm talking landslide – victories.

He notes that while he won West Virginia's primary by 15 percentage points, six of the state's eight superdelegates are supporting Clinton; and that while he won New Hampshire with 60 percent of the vote, 6 of the 8 Granite State supers are Clinton-ites (the other two remain unpledged thus far). This is of course the specific job of superdelegates: To exercise their own judgment rather than be bound by their state's voting results. If they were bound they'd be just regular old delegates. And while there may be a case for getting rid of supers, it's not one Sanders is in any position to make at the moment because – given that Hillary Clinton has a basically insurmountable pledged delegate lead – the unbound party elites are Sanders' last hope.

Oh, I almost forgot this gem: "We won in Washington state with 70 percent of the vote." Funny thing about that: It's true that Sanders won nearly 73 percent of the more than 26,000 votes cast in March in that state's caucuses (which is how the pledged delegates are distributed); but it's also true that she won more than 52 percent of the more than 789,000 votes cast in the state's primary last month – so it's a bit rich that he's complaining about getting ripped off in the state.

But just for the sake of argument let's wave the magical blogging wand and reallocate superdelegates according to state results (in other words take the percentage of the vote each candidate got in each contest and multiply times the number of superdelegates available in those states and territories). We'll even give Sanders his 73 percent Washington victory. This is of course somewhat inexact because you end up with candidates getting fractions of superdelegates but it's close enough to make the point: Instead of 543 supers, Clinton would have roughly 293 while Sanders' total would vault from 44 to 257.

Would it be a closer race? Yes. Would it give Sanders any sort of claim to the nomination? No because ... he'd still be losing among pledged delegates, superdelegates and, math being math, total delegates.

So his idea that popular pressure bringing the superdelegates into line with popular will would give him a leg up in the race is, ahem, specious.

But the depths of Sanders' intellectual dishonesty come to bear in the third component of his supposed path to victory:

The third path to victory: making it clear to the superdelegates that their primary goal is to make sure we defeat Donald Trump. And that I am, in fact, the stronger candidate.

Actual voting results be damned, in other words: The superdelegates should anoint him the nominee. To quote that famed canine detective of my cartoon-watching youth, Scooby Doo: "Awroo?!?"

Honestly I can't put it any better than Bloomberg's Jonathan Bernstein:

Bernie path to winning

Step 2: Get supers to vote with their state

Step 3: Get supers to not vote with their statehttps://t.co/nI5CuZZxfa — Jonathan Bernstein (@jbview) May 31, 2016

Look, you can either say that the supers should accord with the will of the voters or you can say that they should (as intended) vote in the best interests of the party as they see them. But you cannot say both.

No wait, I'm sorry you can – if you're Hillary Clinton, who's winning among both kinds of delegates. But if you're Bernie Sanders, part two of your grand victory plan is in direct contradiction to point three.

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This is the worst of Sanders, as I've written before: The tea-party-of-the-left agitator who is either deluding himself or willfully misleading his supporters. Sanders suffers from rectitudinal hubris, a self-righteousness so total, a belief in his own virtue (and his not-happening revolution) so all-encompassing that he fancies himself as operating under different rules. He can favor gun manufacturers because he's from a rural state and it's good politics; if anyone else does it it's because they're in the National Rifle Association's pocket. He can demand that superdelegates array themselves according to the will of the people and then in the next breath that they do so according to the will of Bernie Sanders.