In the days since Hillary won the Pennsylvania Primary, she has been crawling all over Indiana talking about the Popular vote, and how important it is. Now that she has been mathematically eliminated from winning the race based on pledged delegates, the election of whom the entire race is designed to determine, it’s not surprising that she would want to cling to the only real-world-type numbers she could actually wrangle into her favor. If fact, she’s running around claiming to have already won the popular vote, if you include Florida and Michigan, and don’t give Obama any of the votes from Michigan. Aside from how absurd and comically footnoted that math is, there is another problem. The popular doesn’t mean anything. I’ll let Newsweek explain. There’s a lot here, but it explains it really well.

For starters, the Democratic rules clearly state that delegates, not votes, are decisive. But even if you grant that Team Clinton is only asking tiebreaking superdelegates to consider the popular vote when choosing a candidate–and not claiming that votes should replace delegates altogether–there’s still a pesky little problem to deal with: the popular vote is completely and utterly uncountable.

First, there’s Florida. Despite warnings from the Democratic National Committee, the Sunshine State scheduled its primary before Feb. 5–and true to its word, the party stripped the state of its delegates. That said, we’re not talking about delegates; we’re talking about votes. In Florida, where both Obama and Clinton were on the ballot, Clinton won by 294,772 (870,986 to 576,214). It’s an open question, of course, whether a primary in which both candidates refrained from campaigning should even count. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it should–which reduces Obama’s popular-vote advantage to 206,366. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help us much.

Next up is Florida’s fellow gun-jumper, Michigan, where Clinton racked up 328,309 votes. Obama’s total? Zero. That’s because his name wasn’t even listed on the ballot. On Jan. 19, Michiganders had two choices: Clinton or “uncommitted.” And while “uncommitted” earned about 45 percent of the vote, it’s impossible to determine what portion of that bloc backed Obama and what portion backed John Edwards, whose name was also absent. Ignoring the fact that Clinton herself said Michigan wouldn’t “count for anything,” this murkiness alone makes an overall popular-vote tally impractical: either you award all of the “uncommitted” votes to Obama, which would be grossly inaccurate; count Clinton’s votes and leave Obama at zero, which would undoubtedly disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Obama supporters; or don’t include Michigan at all, which would disenfranchise even more, both pro-Clinton and pro-Obama.

That said, the worst is yet to come. The final four states–Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington–all held caucuses. But unlike Florida and Michigan, none of them even kept track of how many people voted for each candidate. (This is standard operating procedure in some caucuses, where delegates are awarded proportionally in thousands of precincts.) Wonks can devise equations to estimate the popular vote all they want, but mixing precise vote totals from other states with caucus approximations–which are, by definition, inaccurate–is mixing apples and oranges. Besides, thousands of voters in Iowa entered the caucuses intending to support Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich, but were forced to jump to Obama, Edwards or Clinton once their preferred candidate didn’t reach the 15-percent viability threshold; in Nevada, the same thing happened to Edwards supporters. How can you possibly pretend to count people required to resort to their second choices?

The fact is, the Democratic Party has only one mechanism in place for deciding the nomination: delegates. The system is simply not equipped to produce an accurate tally of popular votes.

So, to sum up, Florida is shady, but countable, Michigan is wildly unfair, and the popular vote doesn’t even include three entire states won by Obama. Iowa, Washington, and Maine. And anyway, the popular vote has nothing to do with anything. If it did, those three states would have counted them.

What I find interesting is that in the same breath that Hilary uses to wax indignant about disenfranchising the poor Florida and Michigan voters, she actively campaigns to make irrelevant the votes in Iowa, Washington, and Maine. And what about the other caucus states where the popular vote is merely estimated? Should estimations be some kind of legitimate measure? I don’t think so. And on top of all of that, if she doesn’t make her preposterous popular vote argument effectively, she will simply say that the election was a wash, and that she should simply be coronated winner by the Super Delegates, basically disenfranchising ALL the votes, everywhere.

And I want to make one other observation. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. A powerful cabal in trouble, constantly redefining the definition of victory to suit the political reality of the day, repeatedly lowering the bar, over and over again, as the simple fact of failure becomes more and more apparent. Blindly stating the opposite of reality as if the truth were no more important than the content of an attack add. Changing or ignoring information that doesn’t suit them, while distorting and misinterpreting the information that does. This is Bush stuff. Plain and simple. I am tired of that, and I’m tired of this, and I don’t think I’m the only one, as the success of Barack Obama will clearly show.

So the bottom line argument for Hillary is this: Flordia and Michagan should count, caucus states don’t matter, and nothing is important unless Hillary says so. Nice. Just the president I want.