Jeralyn, 'small tent democrat' (aka Armando), the self-described "shrill" Corrente, and last and least eripostal and Turkana at the Left Coaster, all spew the same nonsense while pretending to be neutral.

Obama supporters who have the guts to post online are derided as "idiots", "Obamabots", naive, "followers of the Dear Leader" (or "Precious"), misogynists, ad nauseum. I have never seen this level of vitriol in a Democratic primary. Certainly their is pro-Obama bias in dKos and elsewhere; but objectively, is it this negative?

All I can hope is that the "delusional" Clintonistas are small in number and not representative of Democrat voters, especially women.

We have enough to worry about in the GE, e.g. Bush's comments about Obama as an "appeasor of terrorists", McCain's "concerns" about Obama's former pastor, and Huckabee's insinuation today that Obama was shot at.  

Turning this topic on its head somewhat, what's most apparent is the proliferation of bizarre theories employed by Clinton supporters to 'explain' the unthinkable idea that people could actually choose Obama over Clinton.

Despite the fertile ground that exists for the various social psychological effects to take root in the thought processes of Clinton supporters, I can't help but wonder if someone is aiding the cause. I'm not merely  stating the obvious, since we know about the agitprop techniques in use by some in the political sphere, but the prevalence of pop psychological explanations for Obama's support strike me as odd.

It could be said that we're doing the same thing now, by using psycho-pathological explanations for Clinton support, but some of these theories are so over-the-top and strange as to be unrecognizable.

I recall reading about Sydney Blumenthal's "liberal guilt" explanation for Obama's support. Apparently, I'm so neurotic about the legacy of slavery that I need a compensatory mechanism to assuage my guilt. Of course, Blumenthal's position with the Clinton campaign explains his fondness for psycho-babble explaining Obama's support, but his tendency to use right-wing sources to spread his malicious propaganda is no less heinous.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.html

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.

These attacks sent out by Blumenthal, long known for his fierce and combative loyalty to the Clintons, draw on a wide variety of sources to spread his Obama-bashing. Some of the pieces are culled from the mainstream media and include some reasoned swipes at Obama's policy and political positions.

But, rather remarkably for such a self-professed liberal operative like Blumenthal, a staggering number of the anti-Obama attacks he circulates derive from highly-ideological and militant right-wing sources such as the misnamed Accuracy in Media (AIM), The Weekly Standard, City Journal, The American Conservative, and The National Review.

I could go on but I think I'll save my thoughts for a more extensive posting in my diary. However, there is one more article that illustrates the method of the smear as well as the utter lack of integrity by a Clinton supporter.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/obamas-believer.html

Never mind the flap over his "Muslim-sounding" middle name, or the controversy generated by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Over the past several weeks, a far more interesting question about Barack Obama's "true" religion has emerged in the news media's fascination with the "Obamessiah."

Even though, as Newsweek's Eleanor Clift recently observed, his media halo has "tarnished" a bit, pundits and political operatives remain at a loss to explain what Hillary Clinton herself referred to, in a Feb. 26 interview on Pat Robertson's The 700 Club, as the Obama "phenomenon." They are particularly befuddled by the intense involvement of so many young people, many of them university students and first-time voters. They dub them Obamaniacs and Obamabots: "glassy-eyed, brainwashed cult worshippers," who chant "mantra-like" slogans and "swoon with euphoria."

New York Times columnist David Brooks has likened them to Hare-Krishna people and to Moonies -- "Soon they'll be selling flowers at airports and arranging mass weddings." Joe Klein of Time has dubbed their "mass messianism" to be "just a wee bit creepy." And William Lowther, Washington correspondent for the Telegraph (United Kingdom), reported something "unnervingly akin to the hysteria of a cult, or the fervour of a religious revival" at Obama events.

Picking up on the hysteria theme, syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker has dismissed their "New Age glossolalia" as spiritual hunger gone terribly wrong, seduced by Obama's rhetoric, which "drips with hints of resurrection, redemption, second comings." MSNBC's Chris Matthews, going Parker one better, was quoted in Australia's The Age as saying, "I've never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. Obama comes along and he seems to have the answers. This is New Testament."

If it feels like religion ...

Actually, Parker and Matthews may, however unwittingly, be onto something here. It has to do with two concepts that are deeply embedded in the Protestant theology that derives from the New Testament. And these concepts go a long way toward accounting for what is going on at Obama rallies. ...

The author of the above OpEd, Mary Zeiss Stange, is an assistant professor of Feminist and Religous studies at Skidmore college in the state of New York, and we can quite safely assume that she's a Clinton supporter, which is why she's so willing to sacrifice any professional standing she may have to provide an academic gloss to the cult explanation for Obama's support.

ad bellum purificandum - Kenneth Burke

Me thinks Jeralyn made notes backwards. Hasn't HRC been saying the map is more important than the math? As in, the states she's won are more important?

And where did she come up with 313 electoral votes? Does that count all the delegates from MI and FL like Obama doesn't get any of them?

I am fed up with delusional Hillary maniacs. Can't they read the news and compare it to what their great leader tells them?

Hillary and Bill think they need to remain relevant as they lose control of the Party. To do so they need to create uncertainty - change the rules and move the goal post. They'll arrive at the Convention seeking a salute.

Well, "You can't vote for war and disown the results"

Al Giordano's got a great post up today to help the recovering Hillaryites back to the real world. Worth a read.

And how to square it with things like this and this that suggest she's throwing in the towel? I think clearly  she isn't giving up even if her rhetoric has changed. She's going to keep pursuing it to the very last with everything she can use, right up to the last minute and to the last dollar she can drum up. No one should be deceived by all these dissections of what went wrong or by the milder tone, which is purely tactical, to keep from forcing the SDs to declare for Obama to halt the damage she was doing.

The assumption in the media and the blogs that the race is over is premature, and dangerous. All these calls for unity and reaching out to Clinton supporters lately are meant well, and important in the long term, but the fight is still on. I have great respect for Sen. Clinton's will to win and I'm not as sanguine as some are like you that this is completely delusional. It may be harmful to the party for her to keep pressing on, harmful to our chances in November, but the fact is, she may yet still be successful if she pursues this to the convention, particularly as the GOP ramps up its attacks on Obama between now and then. Calling it delusional and impossible even at this point is simply a narrative to help make Obama the inevitable choice. One should never make the mistake that the Clinton campaign did about inevitability and fall for one's own spin.

At this point I think we should just ignore them. We all know Obama will be the nominee. Bush knows, McCain knows it, the press knows it.
They have their little alternate universe, it has no relation to the real world and their bleating will not affect the outcome. Let them waste their time.

One thing a lot of people are missing is that the delusions are actively encouraged by the Clinton campaign. One of its strengths (and Obama's weaknesses) is in its blogger outreach. Every day HillaryHub links to SusanUnPC, Jeralyn, Alegre, and other pro-Clinton blogs. There are conference calls where the bloggers pick up their talking points.

It's true that Hillary Hub has a disclaimer saying that external sites don't represent the opinion of Clinton's campaign, but that's not a persuasive argument for me. The fact of the matter is that Clinton's Internet team, led by Peter Daou, is encouraging Clinton supporters to feed at the trough of the smear merchants at No Quarter & Talk Left.

I'm still confident that Clinton will eventually concede before the convention, but as someone upthread pointed out, she's got her work cut out to reign in this beast she's created.

than money and when a certain campaign is 20 mil in debt and over half is owed to that campaigner personally, one sticks around for a deal that will include some if not all of that debt to be paid off. Sickening but true.

Has anyone even stopped to think for two seconds about the millions being spent on this campaign, on both sides? Think of all the people that could have given health care to.