BY MEGAN ESTES

Megan Estes was fired from her job as a star reporter for one of the nation’s top newspapers after it was discovered that she completely fabricated 134 stories. This is her first column for TPM Cafe, courtesy of MrSensible.com.

Nothing is going right for Hillary Clinton lately. Michigan and Florida aren’t revoting, there were no bullets over Bosnia, and there was no Waterloo for Barack Obama, who after some recent trouble is now getting new endorsements almost daily. Even the little angel in Hillary’s infamous 3 a.m. television ad recently revealed she was an Obama Girl.

The Clinton campaign has been a nexus of angst for weeks, but there still remains a nucleus of denial at its center that is hell-bent on developing and executing new strategies for victory. With the situation becoming increasingly desperate, the strategies are following suit.

The newest, inspired by Obama’s recent pastor problem, involves digging up dirt on the pastors of Obama’s superdelegate supporters. Sources inside the campaign say that this plan marks a fundamental shift in strategy that will continue until the Democratic National Convention in August.

“People in the media have been saying that this campaign has been win-at-all-cost, but that really hasn’t been true to this point,” says one Clinton staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I mean, Hillary didn’t say a word about Rev. Wright until just a few days ago. But Obama’s like the Teflon Superman or something. Nothing sticks. So now we have to break down everything around him.”

The staffer divulged a few of the most problematic scenarios for Obama’s superdelegates. “One of my favorites involves a Southern superdelegate who’s a member of a Church of Christ whose pastor has a unique solution for dealing with homosexuals. In one sermon he said that God sent AIDS down to Earth to kill homosexuals. We’ve all heard that one before, but he also believes that men with AIDS should be locked in pink prisons and placed in solitary confinement. He believes that Jesus will reveal Himself to the men once they’re inside the pink prison, and once He has, they will be cured of AIDS and homosexuality and can be safely freed to preach the gospel to the masses.”

There’s a congressman and Obama supporter from north of the Mason-Dixon Line who attends a Unitarian church. The Clinton campaign has video of a sermon where the pastor says that anyone who still believes in the divinity of Jesus is an intellectual inhabitant of the Dark Ages.

The campaign is hoping to use this information as blackmail to lure the superdelegates over to Clinton’s side. If that doesn’t work, they plan to go public with the information, which could put the careers of some prominent Democrats in jeopardy. Some of the information goes beyond mere statements from the pulpit into even more dangerous territory.

The most titillating potential scandal involves a philandering congressman who attends a mega-church. According to the Clinton campaign, the pastor of the church is using church funds to finance his porn film production company. The congressman, wearing a wrestling mask and performing under the name Phil A. Buster, is one of the company’s biggest stars.

“And we’ve also got a superdelegate who is a closet Scientologist,” the staffer said. “That’s really all we need for that one.”

Moral qualms aside, could this plan actually put Clinton in a position to win the nomination? “We have information on nearly 100 current and possible Obama superdelegates that I consider potentially damaging,” said a Clinton advisor. “A less deft politician than Obama would have been derailed by the affiliation with Jeremiah Wright. Virtually all of these superdelegates are less deft than Obama, and I would say that about 20 to 30 percent of the information we have at our disposal is at least as damaging as what Obama faced with the Wright problem.

“No public figure wants to risk a scandal. We believe that if we present this information to them that they will come over to our side.”

Never mind the Democratic Party, the political process, or Americans’ ever-increasing cynicism about their leaders. In the mad dash for the most powerful position in the world, Hillary Clinton has lost all perspective. These days, when it comes to Hillary, it’s all about Hillary.