The stages of accepting personal loss is a subject you would be intimately familiar with, Billy.

The five stages of grief (Hillary supporter version):

* Denial ("maybe if I add the delegate totals up backward")

* Lying to yourself ("maybe if the super-dels are all really, really stupid ...")

* Lying to everyone ("she's really winning ... really!")

* Crapitude ("Ferraro is just saying what I've been thinking all along ...")

* Deeper crapitude ("Hillary isn't going to win, but at least she's going to take the Democratic party down with her ...")

Billy Glad has got to be one of the snarkiest, most self-righteous and supercilious posters on this board.

Having said that, he may be right about this one.

The ABC story is damning. This ain't gonna play with the swing voters.

Never mind Hagee's endorsement of McCain. Never mind that Hagee said that anti-Semitism was God's punishment on the Jews, or that Hitler was the "hunter" sent by God to drive the Jews back to the Holy Land, or his condemnation of the Catholic Church as an "alien cult" or whatever he said. Never mind the hypocrisy of AIPAC putting Hagee on their national stage. The press isn't gonna run with the Hagee story like they'll run with the Wright story.

If this story pans out, it can well kill the Obama campaign -- if not now, then in the general.

If the Obama campaign finds a way to minimize it, or brings out information that casts it in a different light, or distances itself successfully from it, then it will show rare political mastery. (Stages 1 and 3)

I'm not betting on it. (Stages 4 and 5)

If it doesn't do anything about it, then I have to ask how Obama could have thought that this wouldn't have come to light, and prepared for it. (Stage 2)

I do hope that I'll have to eat these words. (Stage 1)

So this damages, perhaps kills, Obama's chances in the general.

The problem is, Hillary's chances aren't much better. If any.

Before he dropped out from willful press neglect and thinly veiled ridicule, I was an Edwards supporter. Polls suggested that he would do better against various hypothetical Republicans than either Obama or Clinton. And he was (belatedly) tackling the serious issues of corporate dominance that neither Obama nor (certainly) Clinton had any stomach for.

Clinton is going to have one hell of a time spinning herself as anything like Republican lite. Good luck.

Oh well.

So: Welcome President McCain.

10,000 years in Iraq. (I doubt America will last 100 years if McCain becomes President.) Bomb, bomb Iran.

A hard-right coalition of 6 or 7 Supreme Court justices.

I could go on. You get the picture.

Enjoy your schadenfreude, Billy.