Clift's Big If.

Newsweek's Eleanor Clift drools over the prospect of post-Clinton-victory headrolling:

I'm beginning to think Hillary Clinton might pull this off and wrestle the nomination away from Barack Obama. If she does, a lot of folks—including a huge chunk of the media—will join Bill Richardson (a.k.a. Judas) in the Deep Freeze. If the Clintons get back into the White House, it will be retribution time, like the Corleone family consolidating power.

So there's her thesis, all predicated clinging bitterly to this opening 'if.' I submit that she's awful wrong-headed in thinking Sen. Clinton might pull this off. Her closer:

Now the burden is on Obama to win the next round of primaries on May 6. He has said publicly that Indiana could be the tiebreaker, a prediction he could come to regret. If Clinton can win Indiana, hold Obama to single digits in North Carolina, and then run up a big margin in Kentucky on May 20, where she's leading in the polls, she could overtake Obama in the popular vote.

Emphasis mine, because that's just a lunatic excuse/reason she's come up with to write the column. You really have to chain a bunch of if's together here for this to be anything but rank fantasy. If Obama underperforms, Clinton might overtake him in the popular vote. Except the nominee isn't selected by popular vote. Clinton would, presumably, still be behind in the pledged delegate count, and would have to use her popular vote lead (a lead that, I'm fairly sure, would disregard the uncountable and Obama-friendly caucus goers) as a tool to woo superdelegates. If that actually worked, and superdelegates piss off the black vote for a generation by overturning the pledged delegate lead Obama put together, Clinton would still have to, you know, win the election before this Corleone enforcement could commence. (I paraphrase an old Atrios post when I say that if either Democrat winds up losing this in the general, s/he'll instantly become the most hated person in the party, and that's hardly a position from which one can take down one's new enemies.) Since step three involved losing your black vote, step four here is no dunker, even despite the otherwise-all-important fundamentals.

All four conditionals fall into the 'unlikely' category. Chain them together and you're so disconnected from reality that those seven paragraphs are just about as serious as "Who would win, The Hulk or The Thing?"