Turkana has a great piece up right now refuting the Obama spin, and in particular the latest lies from Markos in Newsweek.

Obama blogger Markos Moulitsas uses his Newsweek gig to repeat what's become boilerplate at his Obamablog:

No matter how you define victory, Barack Obama holds an insurmountable lead in the race to earn the Democratic nomination. He leads in the one metric that matters most: the pledged delegates chosen directly by Democratic voters. But he also leads in the popular vote, the number of states won and money raised. Still, Obama's advantages aren't large enough to allow him an outright victory. He needs the 20 percent of party delegates who aren't bound to a candidate. It's with these superdelegates that Clinton has staked her ephemeral chances.

Clinton's near-lone chance of victory rests with a coup by superdelegate, persuading enough of them to overcome the primary voters' preference.

Of course, almost none of this is factually accurate. Here are some facts...

1) Obama does not hold an insurmountable lead to earn the Democratic nomination. Neither candidate can win enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination, so neither candidate can win without superdelegates. Neither candidate has enough pledged superdelegates to secure the nomination, so either candidate can still do that. That's the simple truth.

2) That the pledged delegates are "the one metric that matters most" is nothing but an opinion. The opinion of an Obama blogger......

snip

3) A victory by superdelegates is not a coup. Such a framing is both factually wrong and deliberately inflammatory............

Turkana then quotes Sean Wilentz ....

......It is this eccentric system that has given Obama his lead in the delegate count. If the Democrats heeded the "winner takes all" democracy that prevails in American politics, and that determines the president, Clinton would be comfortably in front. In a popular-vote winner-take-all system, Clinton would now have 1,743 pledged delegates to Obama's 1,257. If she splits the 10 remaining contests with Obama, as seems plausible, with Clinton taking Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Puerto Rico, and Obama winning North Carolina, South Dakota, Montana, Oregon and Guam, she'd pick up another 364 pledged delegates. She'd have 2,107 before a single superdelegate was wooed. You need 2,024 to be the Democratic nominee. Game over. No more blogospheric ranting about Clinton "stealing" the nomination by kidnapping superdelegates or cutting deals at a brokered convention.

Of course Markos knows all this, as does Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews. What they are doing is using their bully pulpits to try and game the system.

Turkana......

Obama bloggers want to scare Clinton supporters and Clinton donors. They want to create an aura of inevitability for Obama such that any Clinton victory will be seen as a theft. This makes Clinton look petty and dishonest, and her supporters, at best, delusional. But facts are stubborn things, and the facts are that such a framing is simply inaccurate. And these same Obama bloggers then claim that it is Clinton and her supporters who are dividing the Party! And they wonder why Clinton supporters are so angry. They wonder why people who do not support Clinton but simply care about honesty are so angry!

Any other candidate would have caved under this constant barrage long ago.

The fact that Hillary fights on, defiant in the face of such relentless pressure, shows just how much character and grit she has.....attributes which will come in mighty handy when she is fighting for health care in the WH.

When you come right down to it.....isn't this the kind of President we want?

Bloggers like Markos have written screeds on how mad they are that Pelosi and Reid acquiesce to Republicans rather than fight for our progressive issues. And yet they are backing a candidate who's mantra is "getting along" with Republicans......who says they had all the good ideas over the past 10-15 years, and who now says that his foreign policy will be like Kennedy, Reagan and GHW Bush!!

What is wrong with this picture?

I can only put it down to a severe....and pathetic....case of CDS.