It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep.  But there's a troll on the internet, and he's up to no good.  

Spamming your favorite blog with baseless smears, innuendo, and outrageous statements.  

You have a decision.

You can respond with an argument, but that only feeds the troll.  Or you can ignore him, and pray he just goes away.

But there is a better solution.  

Sixteen months.

Take a breath and think about that for a moment.  

This primary season has lasted sixteen months.

I want you to take everything you know about this primary season and forget it for just a moment, and visit with me into an alternate history of the last six months.  Turtledove a bit with me for a bit, over the fold.

Fans of the groundbreaking videogame Portal know that the game reaches its climax when you face and destroy GLaDOS--a patronizing, condescending, sarcastic and potentially deadly supercomputer with a female voice and a penchant for cake.

I know the game only for its exquisitely catchy ending credits song, "Still Alive," sung by a defeated but nevertheless defiant GLaDOS.  Songwriter Jonathan Coulton's tune is infectiously catchy and a wondrous display of passive-aggression by GLaDOS.  (Coulton's talents go far beyond videogame scoring, and his quirky tunes are a hit with the college scene).  

Listening to the song last night I was struck with the notion that Hillary Clinton is the GLaDOS of those closing credits.

Check it out.

This is a short diary.  It's both a warning and a benediction.  So listen up, my compatriots.    

Today Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, will win the West Virginia Primary by huge margins.  It will be a trouncing, it will be a drubbing, it will fill the sails of Clinton supporters with pride and a much-needed sense of victory and support and love and acceptance and fight, and that's good, because they are Democrats.  

What's all this, then?

I go away for a nice little weekend with my family, and I come back to the internets and it's like 28 Days Later or 28 Weeks Later, except it's only 4 days later, and instead of the "rage" virus, everyone has been infected with "chickenshit Democrat hand-wringing" virus.

Well, pardon my French, but fuck that noise.  

Follow me over the fold, because I am about to give you the woodshedding slash fight-them-on-the-beaches lecture you so clearly need.  You are Alan Arkin, and you desperately need an Alec Baldwin to tell you how it is.  You need a Jimmy Dugan, standing there, yelling at you about how there is no crying in baseball.  

So sit down and shut up.  Because you are acting, excuse me, like the Grade "A" archetypal Democrat: the spineless pussy.  

And you need to calm down.

Reader discretion is profoundly advised.    

Polls!  Polls!  More polls!  

To paraphrase Michael Berube, Professor of literature and cultural studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in a post last week or so at TalkingPointsMemo, regarding the ongoing navel-gazing at the Pennsylvania polls, which were inconsistent at the time:

We need to push off the primary past April 22 until more polls come out!

Will it be a 10-point win by Hillary? A squeaker by Obama?  Will Hillary keep it to 6?  Or 7?  Or--my God, man, imagine the possibilities--8?  

We may never know.

Oh, actually, sorry, I guess we will know.

Dither dather over the final tallies as you wish, for what brings you joy brings me joy, my wee compatriots.  

But if you want a real prediction, if you want the real deal, as they say, nay, if you want what will undoubtedly be heralded by future historians as a stroke of unprecedented prescience, then traipse with me with eager antici....pation across the fold!

Update [2008-4-20 20:48:56 by LarsThorwald]:  To respond to comments made in geekesque's diary regarding tamping expectations.  I truck with geekesque 100%.  I did not mean to suggest that Obama will win--I explicitly rejected that idea.  Nor do I think he will come within a point or two.  I limited my prediction to within 5 or 6 at best, but likely to within 10.  Predictions of a 10 to 12 point loss don't make me scarlet with rage, either.

I guess we'll all know in two days, so navel-gazing is silly now.  But I still stand by my gut, which, while a bit marshmallowy soft around the middle (don't grow old, kids!), has served me well as an engine of instinct.  Something is different here, certainly in relation to Ohio.  Maybe the point was that despite the comparisons, this really is far different than Ohio.  Maybe the point was that there is an electricity here that I would crap my pants if I ever saw anything rivaling it for McCain.  Maybe the point was that no matter what, every door knocked on, every phone call made, every sign planted makes a difference.  Just a wee bit of difference.  Or maybe I just like hearing myself gab.

kid oakland, in his most recent and excellent diary, related a tale of a disaffected reader of Daily Kos turned away, it is inferred, by the aggressiveness and tone of Obama's support here.  kid oakland posed this question:

I think we've all got to take a step back and think about that for a second. This was a woman who was cordial and welcoming and yet she felt estranged from DailyKos. The strike shut down the conversation.

That needs to change. Now.

I'm open to your suggestions how.

"It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth.  For that it will not stick where it is not just"

-- Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield (1752)

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

--Mahatma Gandhi (c. 1947)

"First they fight you, then you laugh at them, and then they lose.  Then you ignore them."

--Thorwald Corollary (2008)

It started, I think, long before the speech Obama gave last Tuesday, and it has been quietly growing among supporters like me who--with each passing day--feel a sense of increasing frustration and helplessness.    

I am addressing today a sense of outrage at the Obama campaign.  

I think it is a feeling felt by many Obama supporters.  

Probably thousands.

Why?

Follow me over the fold.  If you dare.

After having spent months touting her "35 years of experince"--a calendar of presidential-level experience that started the day she left law school--reporters had the audacity and gall to ask presidential candidate Hillary Clinton exactly what kind of experience that was.

When outrageously pressed that some of her duties as First Lady may not have consisted of the types of things one might ordinarily, you know, count as "experience" to be President, Hillary Clinton's advisors detailed her National Security and Foreign Policy credentials by noting that she had, among other things, risked her life in Bosnia dodging bullets.

From Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic comes the reporting that Obama wrote his speech on race and America himself.  Reports Ambinder:

This wasn't a speech by committee... Obama wrote the speech himself, working on it for two days and nights.... and showed it to only a few of his top advisers.

Last week the Obama campaign responded to a press release from the Clinton campaign by simply annotating it.  

It is in that same spirit that I annotate this diary entitled "On Why Obama Has Already Lost".  

And thus we reach the question of Obama's Church.

In an article posted on the ABC News website, ABC offers transcripts of sermons given by Reverend Jeremiah Wright denouncing the United States and raising America's blame for 9/11.  

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's south side, has a long history of what even Obama's campaign aides concede is "inflammatory rhetoric," including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own "terrorism."....

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright's sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

A little anecdote from Youngstown, Ohio, where I worked on the Obama campaign for a week:

It's election night, at about 7:30.  A group of volunteers are cleaning up the main campaign staging area, preparing to go to the rented banquet hall to watch the returns.

I turned to a staffer--a guy we'll call Chris--who was assigned to run a field office in Pennsylvania, and who had taken a couple of days to help in Ohio.  For the first time that week, I raised the courage to ask, "What do you think?  We gonna win this thing?"

Chris immediately said, "No, I think we lose Ohio by 12 to 14 points and reach a delegate draw in Texas."  Very simple, very matter-of-fact.  A prediction of defeat while putting away folding chairs.

To you Obama supporters, let me share with you a fun factoid that John King of CNN was kind enough to spook me with last night during my celebratory mood.  Here's a mathematical fact that will bring you right back down to Earth as it did me.  Perhaps you've already heard it.  

I hope you don't mind if I kick aside some of these champagne bottles from your little party last night and make myself comfortable while I tell you this.

Here goes:

If Barack Obama sweeps every remaining primary and caucus in every remaining state between now and the end of the primaries, and beats Hillary Clinton by a 55% to 45% margin in each one, he will still not have enough delegates to take the nomination.

I see you are awake now.  Good.  Have an Excedrin and a glass of water and follow me over the fold.

First-hand reporting of precinct activity on election day makes for fascinating reading, and so it was with some sense of excitement that I went to the polls today to catch primary fever and hopefully come away with a good story about massive voter turnout.  

I came away with a pretty good story, but not one that I expected.