To continue our discussion of different kinds of power, I am thrilled Obama has brought Samantha Power, who was forced to resign from Team Obama during the campaign for calling Hillary Clinton "a monster," back on board as part of the transition team--for the office of the Secretary of State.

If you don't know about Samantha Power, here is an excerpt from Esquire:

Power, a journalist and now a professor at Harvard, who won a Pulitzer prize for her 2003 book on America's response to genocide, A Problem from Hell, and who helped kick-start the Save Darfur movement, has a vision that will help shape 21st-century American foreign policy. What Norman Podhoretz is to the neocon movement Power is to this as-yet-unnamed force. (Neo-internationalism? Moral interventionism? Machiavellian idealism?) She espouses talks--firm talks--with rogue states, a respect for international law, and a moral and pragmatic duty to intervene--with troops if necessary--in cases of genocide.

I'm happy she's back for a number of reasons: she's passionate about human dignity and has a complex and pragmatic view of how to secure it. In other words, she's tough and smart. Heart and head. Has a plan. A view. And her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is endlessly relevant, and gives her unique insight into seemingly intractable hostilities, like the one between Israel and Palestine.

Though she's been lambasted by Zionist groups who say she wants to do everything from fund Islamic terrorists to invade Israel, her official position is that the US should engage in an immediate and intensified involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In her view, the situation "has to be resolved first of all for the benefit of the parties involved, but also to prevent 'cynical Arab leaders' from exploiting the conflict as a tool for justifying their policies."

This seems to be a rational approach.

But mostly I feel good about Power's return because Obama's ability to bring her back in a leadership role in HRC's realm says he feels free as POTUS to make controversial decisions and continue to mix up ideological perspectives in the hopes of reaching different conclusions. He appears to be using the power vested in him to follow his agenda of change, rather than kowtow to personal gripes, party lines, or general consensus.

Obama appears to believe the two women, though different in their approach, are stronger together than apart.

Do you agree?

The news that's not about dead Indians:

• President-Elect Obama is expected today to announce the appointments of Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates as the Secretaries of State and Defense, respectively.
• 20,000 U.S. troops are expected to be stationed within U.S. borders by 2011, courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security.
• CNN is taking on the AP with their very own newswire.
• American students are flocking to universities abroad in record numbers.
• Jorn Utzon, the architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, has died in Denmark.
• The BBC has made contact with the pirates who are famously dominating the Somalian coast, via a 12-year-old child.
• Taking a cue from Caesar Bloomberg in New York, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez wants to amend his country's constitution to allow him to run for office in spite of previously established term limits.
• The goverment of the Indonesian province of Papua wants to implant HIV sufferers with microchips.

Torture fetishist Michael Goldfarb recently transferred duties from shilling for John McCain on the Weekly Standard website to shilling for John McCain on the John McCain website. Part of Goldfarb's new job is trying to win over Hillary Clinton supporters who have misgivings about voting for an inadequate black male. Hence he serves up this sort of treacle:

Senator Clinton has really grown on us over here in Crystal City over the past few months. She ran an impressive campaign, and proved herself to be an impressive candidate and as John McCain has said, inspired a generation of women...[I]t's clear that John McCain and Hillary Clinton respect each other -- and there is a genuine affection for her here at McCain HQ.

Moving, no? Of course, for most of the period in which Senator Clinton is alleged to have grown on McCain staffers, Michael Goldfarb was a safe distance from Crystal City writing, of Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster, "tell us something that we don't know." Still, he at least has been consistent in preferring Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama:

I'm surprised that anyone can be surprised by the Clinton's [sic] lies anymore. Frankly, I find them rather comforting in comparison to Obama's new kind of politics, which best I can tell seems to be the same old politics in a new self-righteous package. All politicians lie, and the Clintons more than most.

All together now: That's not change we can believe in!

(h/t: Frank Rich)

On Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton gathered her supporters in a literal concrete bunker several stories beneath the surface of the earth, with walls thick enough to block out all cellular reception and no TV monitors or any other medium of communication with the outside world. There, amid cheers of "Denver! Denver!" she congratulated her friend Senator Obama for having run a sporting race, proclaimed herself the rightful victor, and appealed to Americans young and old to pawn their video games and withdraw from their pension accounts (respectively) in order to keep her historic campaign squarely on track to the White House. Yet by the following evening, her aides announced the suspension of her campaign and her endorsement of Barack Obama.

!Hillary Siempre! ¡Venceremos! What transpired in those fewer-than-24 hours? Only the most audacious squeeze play of Bill and Hillary Clinton's political careers, and --- because of its spectacular failure --- the last.

Clinton's Tuesday night pseudo-victory speech was an attempt to extort concessions from the Obama campaign and the Democratic party, including a right of first refusal to the vice-presidential nomination, a pledge not to put any other woman on the ticket, and an indefinite grace period in which Clinton would keep her campaign formally intact and concede nothing.

The threat, in case her demands were not met, was clear: Clinton might not be able to win, but she could undermine the legitimacy of Obama's nomination, whip her supporters into a frenzy, and ensure John McCain's election. To make clear her assessment of the balance of power in the party and put the screws to Obama and the DNC, she recruited, of all people, Bob Johnson (yes, that Bob Johnson) and Lanny Davis (yes, that Lanny Davis) to attempt to seize control of Obama's vice-presidential selection, and tried to mobilize support on Capitol Hill to bolster that coup.

The Clintons' power play failed because --- like Gorbachev, Honecker, and Ceauşescu before them --- they grossly miscalculated both the breadth and depth of their power. On Wednesday, Ed Rendell, whose machine delivered Pennsylvania to Clinton, told NY1 that "[t]here’s no bargaining...You don't bargain with the Presidential nominee. Even if you're Hillary Clinton and you have 18 million votes, you don't bargain." Maxine Waters flipped her support to Obama, while Charlie Rangel announced that "[u]nless she has some good reasons-- which I can’t think of-- I really think we ought to get on with endorsements [of Obama]." Hilary Rosen, one of Clinton's chief backers among Democratic insiders, switched to Obama and rebuked Clinton in sharp and unequivocal terms: "I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat." That's what happened publicly. Just imagine what her remaining supporters told her in private as they scurried from a sinking ship.

On its own terms, the Clintons' last, failed power play is a fascinating story of cloak-and-dagger politics, but its real importance is what it portends for the campaign going forward. Clinton herself has not yet come to terms with the significance of the dissolution of her core of support; the AP reports that she is "exploring options to retain her delegates." MoDo reports that she "has told some Democrats recently that she wanted Obama to agree to allow a roll call vote...so that the delegates of states she won would cast the first ballot for her at the convention," apparently unaware, as the Economist puts it, that "[t]he convention is supposed to be a coronation, in this case of Mr Obama. It loses some of its impact if nearly half the states stand up and say they proudly support the next president of the United States...Hillary Clinton." In other words, she still thinks she can dictate terms.

If Obama takes the bait --- fortunately, the indications are that he will not --- and centers his strategy on placating the Harriet Christians of the world rather than expanding his appeal to independents and Republicans, he'll hand John McCain his best shot of winning.

How bad was John McCain's speech in New Orleans Tuesday night? Here are some reviews:

(1) [T]his speech is a mash and tough to digest. You have to get through the self-congratulatory praise of independence and commander-in-chief pose....

(2) McCain’s speeches don’t have to sound this bad, and don’t always sound this bad.

(3) McCain's speech was creaky, ungracious, and unnecessary.

(4) [H]is refrain punctuated with a forced smile just isn't working.

(5) McCain's delivery deadens [the speech] somehow.

(6) As a performance, it's a little painful.

(7) Question: Would you rather: a) watch last night's McCain speech? Or b) be waterboarded?

The New McCain Aesthetic: Seasickness Okay, but those are all lefty partisans, right? Actually, it's all from National Review. Rolling Stone's take is pitch-perfect: "It's like watching the out-takes from an Andy Rooney kvetch."

McCain's stilted delivery, unfortunately nasal timbre, and creepy grin are problems beyond his campaign's control, but other problems are entirely unforced. His handlers seem unwilling to restrain their candidates' obvious loathing of his opponent and unable to distinguish between a clear, incisive point and incessant, petty sneering -- the kind that's incomprehensible to anybody who doesn't closely follow political inside baseball. Both these campaign flaws make McCain deeply and viscerally unappealing. (The toxic influence of Michael Goldfarb already taking hold?)

And their choice of visual presentation is simply inexplicable. Matthew Yglesias notes "he's shifted his aesthetic from his old black and white 'fascist' aesthetic [see here] to a new green and white Islamofascist aesthetic [see right]." Okay, that's unfair, but a campaign in 2008 that would deliberately choose anything other than a red, white, and (especially) blue color palette clearly has screws loose.

But the McCain campaign's worst decision of all was to try to have their guy deliver their awful speech awfully in front of a tiny audience, minutes before this happened:

The review of Obama's speech from National Review went like this: "Aesthetically, politically, rhetorically etc, it boiled down to Godzilla versus Bambi. And, amazingly enough, McCain was Bambi." And here's their criticism: "U2's 'Beautiful Day'... is playing at the Barack Obama rally. No Americans write music Obama likes?" In other words, it's not going to be a close election.

No, Jamie Kennedy didn't become a Catholic priest. This is Fr. Michael Pfleger, doing some guest-pastoring/MCing at Obama's church. Noted without comment with two comments: (1) Everything he says about Hillary Clinton is true; (2) it occurs to me that I could get back into Judaism if I could find an Ethiopian reform synagogue --- any ideas?

Next up, meet a young Hillary Rodham, aged 10.

And last, to paraphrase scripture, my ears had heard of Joe Lieberman slobbering all over John Hagee, but now my eyes have seen it. There is no bargain too corrupt for Holy Joe:

Here's a prediction/hope for the next viral video: a mashup of Hillary Clinton threatening to torpedo the Democratic convention and comparing herself to Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King rolled into one, with scientologists threatening to sue everyone on earth for "enturbulation."

Here are two Friday Afternoon Specials for Memorial Day Weekend. First, Hillary Clinton has news for the naysayers who think she should drop out of the race. What if Barack Obama is assassinated, ever think of that? "Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," she reminded any members of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader's editorial board who might have forgotten. (Video here.) Note the seamless blending of derangements: dynastic megalomania triggering fantasies about her opponent being snuffed.

Watch me free associate, Clinton-style: R.F.K. was slain by a militant Palestinian, which my esteemed rival for the nomination may or may not be, but Bill and I have friends in Boca who have questions that can only be answered by recognizing the Florida primary. Ready on day one. Ovaries of steel. Sis-boom-bah.

We'll be halfway through President Obama's goodwill hoops game with Ayatollah "No Mahdi, no foul" Khamenei before a glassy-eyed Hillary, her lipstick applied like Diane Ladd's in Wild at Heart, stands before her ten remaining supporters in a fortified compound in Michigan and simply mouthes the word, "nigger."

Second, John McCain's medical records were released today under a cloud of secrecy nearly thick enough to suggest there was something remotely eyebrow-raising about them. Mac is just fine, as it turns out. No signs of recurrence of his melanoma, and the worst of his problems are tantamount to yours and mine: "Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has kidney stones and takes medication to reduce his cholesterol but otherwise has a strong heart and is good shape, the doctors said." Fit as a fiddle, able to leap tall expectations in a single bound, and hungry for love and it's feedin' time.

Better still -- no, not really better still, but you know what I mean -- is the photograph The Drudge Report has been hosting of McCain (see inset), which shows him to be the scrappin'est sparkplug of a septuagenarian, who drinks not coffee but espresso and is very much that twanging advertisement for Viagra Bob Dole so hoped to be.

Can we be left in any doubt whatsoever that we have here, ladies and gentlemen, a man who sprinkles iron filings on his Corn Flakes, who shoots a falcon dead square in the eye at a hundred miles through a series of smoke rings he's exhaled from pure and legal Dominican cigars, who would ask only for a can of spinach and your humble support to make the world safe for democracy? Just keep your daughters at a safe distance; women who unwittingly step in the path of that wink have wound up pregnant.

The surprising, spectacular, and deeply encouraging failure of populism to move Democratic primary voters is only part of the story of the long overdue demise of the Clinton dynasty in North Carolina and Indiana Tuesday night. Just as decisive, if not moreso, was the near-total collapse of Hillary Clinton's support among African-Americans.

I'm not talking about the familiar collapse of Clinton's black support after Barack Obama proved himself to be a viable mainstream presidential candidate by winning the lily-white Iowa caucuses. A second mass exodus of black voters away from Hillary Clinton made Indiana a statistical push, fattened Obama's margins enough to completely wipe-out Clinton's pyrrhic, pointless victory in Pennsylvania, and broke down the wall of bullshit sustaining the idea that the Democratic primary didn't end in February.

After Obama's win in Iowa, her surrogates' public musings about Obama's possible history of crack dealing, and Bill Clinton's now infamous trashing of the Palmetto State as a consolation prize for the you-know-whats, Hillary Clinton still managed to pull in about one fifth of the black vote in South Carolina. Yet from one Carolina primary to the other, roughly two thirds of Clinton's remaining black support dissolved, only slightly less steep a drop, proportionally, than her fall from this October poll in which she actually led Obama in black support, to the South Carolina exit poll. If she had maintained her South Carolina performance among blacks on Super Tuesday, Potomac Tuesday, Super Tuesday II, and this past tuesday, the net shift would have been more than 500,000 popular votes --- enough to shrink Obama's popular vote lead to near parity, and perhaps take the lead on not terribly extravagant assumptions about non-black liberals who were turned off by the Clinton tactics.

The African-American Vote: Between the CarolinasThe handy chart to the right tells the story graphically. (I've explained my methodology below.) Clinton's share of the black vote declined by about one sixth between South Carolina and Super Tuesday --- a period when national polling showed Obama's support rising across all demographics, and Clinton's falling --- and declined a bit more than another fifth between Super Tuesday and the Potomac primaries at the peak of Obamamania, when (again) all his numbers were improving and hers were going in the other direction. When either economic and demographic factors or Plagiarismgate, Goolsbeegate, and various other pseudo-scandals broke Obama's winning streak in Ohio and Texas, Clinton's black support rose slightly (by about one sixth) --- just like her white and brown support.

Then the Wrightmare struck, a thousand innumerate pundits were launched on a quest to prove that Obama's candidacy was undone before the slightest credible evidence emerged to support their case (they were stunningly wrong, as we now know), and Clinton was only too happy to embrace a wild long-shot electoral strategy of trying to stoke white resentment against a strange, dark, foreign, religiously suspect crypto-Communist who hangs out with sundry terrorists when not spewing elitist contempt for good, decent, ordinary folk. And what happened to Clinton's black support? It plummeted by a catastrophic 44.6 percent between the bookends of the Wrightmare (and nearly a full fifth just between Pennsylvania and Indy/NC), to the point where Hillary Clinton can barely attract half the level of black support of George Allen in his 2006 senate campaign (8.2 percent versus 15). Repeat: barely half the black support of George "Let's welcome 'Macaca' here to the real world of Virginia" Allen. All the while Obama's black support rose.

It's sort of incredible that this needs to be said, but future aspiring presidents, observe the ruins of the House of Clinton and take note: If you want to be the Democratic party's nominee, you will need some black votes, and 0 percent is worse than 5, which is worse than 10, which is worse than 20. So avoid basing your campaign on the argument that your party's most loyal constituents are worthless. They will (eventually) notice.

* * *

How I crunched the numbers: South Carolina is taken as a theoretical starting point, representing the performance among black voters Clinton could have managed even after the emergence of an electable black presidential candidate and her campaign's tactical decision to royally piss off a lot of black people. I track Clinton and Obama's subsequent performance on the four multiple-primary nights since South Carolina --- Super Tuesday, the Potomac Primary, Texas and Ohio, and Indiana and North Carolina --- by calculating the total number of votes cast by African-Americans on each election day and the share of the aggregate African-American vote each candidate received (that way, e.g., Obama's 86 percent in Delaware, 66 percent in Massachusetts, and 61 percent in New York, are weighted to reflected the tiny, medium, and huge populations of each state; for similar reasons as well as the distorting effects of political machines in individual states, I treat single-state primary days as statistical noise and ignore them). Figures are generated from the Real Clear Politics state voting totals and CNN's exit poll estimates of black turnout and vote shares. No caucuses were included since primary and caucus voting pools are incommensurate and too few caucuses had data on black voting to allow for a separate graph of black voting trends in caucus states. Likewise, the New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. primaries had no available data on black voters.

You can download the spreadsheet here and double-check me, or if you're curious and industrious, plug in new values in the C, D, and E columns and track the voting trends of any demographic group.

Our long national Wrightmare is finally over.

With his unexpectedly impressive win in North Carolina and equally unexpected draw in Indiana last night, Barack Obama has successfully withstood a substance-less campaign of defamation from the Clintonites and their allies in the GOP to put to rest any lingering unreasonable doubt over the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign. The Clintonites are still making a show of staying in the race, but they've clearly been sapped of the defiant élan of the last few months, have tellingly retired their character assassinations against Senator Obama, and are effectively resigned to watching their superdelegate and high-level surrogate support leak like a sieve.

Salt Of The Earth: Didn't Woody Guthrie Sing An Ode To Slack-Jawed Idiocy? So what did the zombie campaign do to finally get its brain killed? Somehow, it managed to disprove one of Barnum's laws, and went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (That is, literally went broke; last month Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million, on top of the at least $5 million she's already lent herself.) Needless to say, this is encouraging news not only for Obama supporters, but all Americans. Here's how it happened.

The Clintonites, whose respect for middle America consists entirely in buying every single crude stereotype about it, simply assumed that the white working class is a) the only part of the electorate that matters and b) monolithically slack-jawed, liver-damaged, unemployed, resentful, paranoid, and gullible. Consequently, they premised their Indiana and North Carolina primary campaigns on the Nigerian 419 gas tax scam, blowing up either OPEC or the moon, the immolation of 72 million innocent Iranians in a nuclear holocaust, leveling the playing field in the housing market by preventing anyone from buying a house for years to come, and generally making sure never to listen to experts just in case they might once in a blue moon be right about their field of expertise. (Under a Hillary Clinton administration, Megan McArdle writes, "no one has to worry about oil or houses, because there won't be any to worry about. That's just the kind of thoughtful, caring politician she is.")

And sure, the Clinton platform may in reality have been what quote-unquote experts describe as "fucking retarded." But as salt of the earth pundits like Joe Scarborough explained, working-class whites just want a bit of help with their bills and aren't interested in lectures from eggheads. And as spokesmen for the last redoubts of Clinton backers further noted, Obama's skepticism about the appreciation working-class people would show to a rich woman offering them a piddling bribe bespeaks a profound elitism and arrogance sure to turn off blue collar voters.

But then a funny thing happened. In Ohio, Obama won 34 percent of the white vote and 42 percent of voters making under $50,000 annually. In Pennsylvania, those numbers were 37 percent and 46 percent, respectively. And in Indiana, 40 percent and 50 percent. In other words, through two months of relentless and increasingly absurd populist pandering and racebaiting, over three primaries in three bordering, demographically similar rust-belt states which one would intuitively expect to be susceptible to the Clinton tactics, Obama consistently if slowly improved his performance among white voters and working-class voters. The Clinton campaign's descent into surrealist performance art bought them less than nothing.

Meanwhile, Obama's share of the college-educated vote, which dipped slightly in Pennsylvania thanks in part to the strength of the Ed Rendell machine, bounced back with a vengeance last night. It seems people who've studied a bit of economics don't take well to being told that up is down; nor, in all likelihood, are they wild about being being called "Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle" while a presidential candidate looks on smilingly.

So apparently, in 2008, having the audacity to hope that Americans --- even white working-class Americans --- aren't drooling simians can pay off in the end.

Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her supporters are right: It is not a certainty that Barack Obama will be the Democratic presidential nominee. On the other hand, they're wrong to think that means her candidacy is still viable. It's effectively certain that she will not be the nominee, in the same way, though not to quite the same degree, that it's effectively certain that buying lottery tickets isn't a wise retirement plan.

That 70's Candidate: From Nixon in a pantsuit to Jim Jones After Obama's win in the Guam caucuses (by a margin of seven, meaning your single vote still wouldn't have made a difference), Obama leads Hillary Clinton by some 154 elected delegates, with eight primaries and caucuses left to go. If Hillary Clinton can win 60 percent of the vote in every remaining contest, she will reduce Obama's lead to about 73, according to Slate's delegate calculator --- a margin large enough that it's still exceedingly unlikely for Clinton to make up the difference among superdelegates. Still, let's give Clinton supporters the benefit of the doubt, and assume for the sake of argument that if Clinton does achieve 20 percent or more margins in all the remaining states, that sufficiently many superdelegates will be swayed by her campaign's electability arguments and give her the nomination. Let's further assume that Clinton has a 50:50 shot of getting to 60 percent in each state --- an absurdly generous assumption for Clinton considering that she has broken 60 percent once, in Arkansas, on Feb. 5.

In other words, let's offer Clinton supporters assumptions so generous that they beggar plausibility. What are the odds, given those assumptions, that Clinton can close the elected delegate margin to one close enough to win the nomination? With eight contests, and a 50 percent chance of winning 60 percent or more in each one, the probability is (1/2)⁸, or 1 in 256, or less than one quarter of one percent, or worse than the odds of being on a plane with a drunk pilot, of dating a millionaire, or of writing a New York Times bestseller.

And of course, in reality, Clinton's odds of reducing Obama's elected delegate lead even to single digits are far longer, likely by orders of magnitude, since the largest remaining state by far, North Carolina, is favorable to Obama, as are Oregon, Montana, and South Dakota. Meanwhile, Indiana, which votes along with North Carolina tomorrow, is set to be a mid-to-high single digit win for Clinton with a negligible impact on the delegate count --- like Pennsylvania, even though the latter was reported as a double digit win, because, unfortunately, simple arithmetic is too much for most reporters to handle.

I mention reporters' losing fight with math because if a critical mass within the press were at all capable of understanding probability, the Democrats would already have their undisputed candidate. The band-wagon phenomenon in elections is well-established: People like to associate with winners, and don't like to associate with losers. So if the state of the race were reported accurately -- if the "journalism" available to the low-information, low-education voters Clinton is depending on were to correspond to reality -- then anyone looking for information about the Democratic election would encounter the fact that Hillary Clinton's continuing campaign is vastly more likely to make John McCain the president than to make her the nominee. And that would surely improve Obama's margins enough to euthanize the Clinton campaign before the convention.

Instead, we are subjected to an hourly fusillade of obfuscatory bullshit†† out of the Clinton campaign. And since the direct target of that bullshit is a press corps incapable of discriminating between an event that's improbable because it has a 49 percent chance of occurring and an event that's improbable because its odds are less than 1 in 256, and since that press corps is the filter through which voters pick up information about the election, the fantasy that Hillary Clinton can be the Democrats' presidential nominee continues apace.

That fantasy, by the by, is what's sustaining the small but non-negligible chance that Barack Obama won't be the Democratic nominee. Of the plausible scenarios that don't lead to an Obama nomination, many involve the Clintonites behaving so despicably that they not only ensure her defeat in the general election --- an outcome that makes nonsense of their appeal to superdelegates to think of "electability" --- but also quite possibly endanger her senate seat. Of which Timothy Noah writes, "Clinton is determined, but she isn't insane." That's conciliatory, but maybe not true. What else would you call someone who bets the house --- not her house, but the houses of 30 million Democratic primary voters --- on a (worse than) 256 to 1 shot?

†Assuming also (for the sake of simplicity) that each primary or caucus is an independent event --- which, in this primary campaign, doesn't seem like much of a stretch. Consider the mirror-image outcomes in Vermont and Rhode Island, the disparity between Wisconsin and Ohio, etc.

†† That is, bullshit in Harry Frankfurt's technical sense of language deployed to achieve some (usually political goal) without the slightest regard for what the truth is. Lying, by contrast, is concerned with truth --- the point is to convince the hearer of the opposite of the truth.

As the race for the Democratic presidential nomination goes on longer and longer,"C" Is For Clinton, That's Good Enough For Me Hillary Clinton's candidacy becomes an insult to the intelligence of people further and further down the IQ scale. Earlier this week, the beer-swillin'est gun-shootin'est valedictorian of Wellesley ever! decided to base her Indiana primary campaign on a gas tax holiday proposal so imbecilic even Paul Krugman, who's been running agitprops for her ever since John Edwards dropped out of the race, had to concede the point. Last night, HRC appeared on the O'Reilly Factor, presumably to commiserate over the plight of what O'Reilly calls "the folks" with an even phonier populist than she is.

Naturally, when O'Reilly claimed that "both parties, both parties have sold the folks out on energy, and now the folks are gettin' hammered, and they should be angry at both parties," Clinton couldn't resist upping the ante for extra-chromosomal energy policy. She intends to pay for her gas tax holiday with a tax on "windfall profits" to the oil industry, which, as Krugman points out, simply means taking back the windfall profits that a gas tax holiday would giftwrap to the oil industry, and justified said tax on oil companies by claiming that there "is no basis for them to have these huge profits." No basis, that is, except for the oil companies selling a product and consumers buying --- you know, the legal transactions loophole.

But the stupid burns the worst when Clinton draws the proverbial line in the sand and announces her intention to "take on OPEC...I would file complaints [in the WTO] and change the law so citizens and businesses could file anti-trust actions. We're going to begin to hold them accountable." It goes on like that.

Megan McArdle links to trade law expert Marc Benitah's list of reasons the scheme couldn't possibly work --- but fuck that asshole, what does he know, he probably eats arugula from Whole Foods, am I right? --- and she adds:

OPEC isn't restricting production right now; pretty much everyone is working their capacity flat out. Hillary Clinton wants to sue OPEC for not producing oil from wells they haven't drilled yet. Next: a lawsuit against Ford for not building us the cool flying cars we were promised in The Jetsons. I WANT MY FLYING CAR!!!!

Yes, and I'd like to sue the human genome project for not making me super-fast, super-strong, and immortal, but let's not get carried away.

So Hillary Clinton is betting that people gullible enough to believe her candidacy is still relevant are also gullible enough to buy into an economic platform that appears to have been co-drafted by Huey Long and Rube Goldberg. At some point though, reality will intercede, and Clinton's supporters probably ought to be closely monitored to avoid some kind of Jonestown scene.

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Hillary Clinton has come out in favor of a summertime gas tax holiday, because, she claims, she wants to lend a hand to consumers hard hit by rising fuel costs. What's more, she's using the proposal to bash her Democratic primary opponent as an out of touch elitist. One could criticize the plan by pointing out that it will save consumers maybe $30 --- or, if the supply of gas is inelastic (it is), the cut won't save consumers anything. Or one could point out that a candidate ostensibly in favor of curbing greenhouse gas emissions has no business promoting a government-backed splurge in fossil fuel consumption. Or one could point out that Clinton's proposed 18.4 cent/gallon cut in gas prices is more than offset by the 35 cent hike in gas prices her cap-and-trade plan will entail.

But really, that's missing the big picture. What other monomaniacal politician propelled himself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate? What other politician railed against plutocrats and fed voters' suspicions that they were victims of an elaborate conspiracy of financiers? What other politician attacked his political opponents as out of touch elitists who were vaguely but suspiciously alien to his country and its culture, and was friends with Leni Riefenstahl?

I think you know the answer:

Didn't like international corporations, either

On my way to work yesterday, I had the chance to hear a radio interview withMcAuliffe Sez: "We're way ahead in the states we won." Hillary Clinton's reptilian water carrier, Terry McAuliffe, who in addition to exulting over his candidate's primary victory, put forward the startling argument that the Pennsylvania result had catapulted Clinton into the popular vote lead by about 120,000.

How did McAuliffe get his number? First, by adding all votes for Hillary Clinton in the illegitimate Michigan and Florida straw polls to her total, second, by adding zero of the uncommitted votes in the illegitimate Michigan straw poll to Obama's total, and third, by throwing out estimates of popular support in the Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington caucuses.

Assuming that non-Hillary Clinton supporters can see without difficulty that the McAuliffe math is preposterous, the rest of this goes out to Hillary's ardent supporters, who are latching onto McAuliffe arithmetic, and are already firmly latched onto the type of argument of which the McAuliffe math is a token.

Dear Clinton Supporters,

The reason that the McAuliffe math is preposterous is that the (non-question-begging) motivation for the first step is (clearly and flagrantly) inconsistent with the (non-question-begging) motivation for the second and third. Say that "letting the voices of the people be heard, man" trumps everything, including the procedural rules Michigan and Florida violated, the necessary conditions of electoral legitimacy, and manifest unfairness to the Michiganders and Floridians who didn't vote because the elections didn't count. Then the democracy-and-rainbows principle trumps everything, also including the difficulty of assigning a precise number of Michigan uncommitted votes to Obama (it'll be more than the 120,000 vote Clinton lead under McAuliffe arithmetic) and the difficulty of measuring popular support in caucus states.

Alternatively, say that this is not 'Nam, this is voting, there are rules, and you can't just give Obama the likely number of votes cast by his supporters in Michigan, or count estimates of popular support in non-reporting caucus states even if the estimates are fairly precise, because procedural fairness prohibits it. Then there are rules, such as the rules that govern electoral legitimacy, and elections that don't meet minimal standards of legitimacy aren't legitimate, and can't become legitimate because lots of people show up to vote. Do you know why nobody argues that elections in Russia or Cuba are legitimate just in case they have record turnout? Because that would be fucking retarded.

According to the principle that motivates step one of the McAuliffe math, don't do steps two or three. According to the principle that motivates steps two and three, don't do step one.

So if each of the steps of the McAuliffe math is motivated, the result is a (clear and flagrant) contradiction. No contradiction is true. Therefore at least one of the steps is unmotivated. So, Clinton supporters, you've got a tri-lemma: (1) You can argue for a contradiction. Or, (2) you can argue for an unmotivated manipulation of the primary and caucus results. Or, (3) you can junk at least one of the steps of the McAuliffe math and accept that Obama is in the lead, that he won't lose the lead, and that all donating money to Hillary Clinton accomplishes at this point is helping a woman much richer than you pay off her loan. If you opt for (1), good luck with that, you're a ridiculous person, and you probably shouldn't be voting. If you opt for (2) you're scarcely better off than you would be if you argued for (1)†, you're likewise ridiculous, and you likewise shouldn't vote.

If you opt for (3), congratulations, unlike your candidate and her staff, you can put two and two together. Well done. Do you see how crazy the people still inside the cocoon look from the outside?

Love,

Dan

† There are literally uncountably infinitely many possible manipulations of the primary and caucus results, of which uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Hillary Clinton, uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Barack Obama, uncountably infinitely many produce a lead for Mike Gravel, and uncountably many produce no determinate leader. (That's not an exhaustive profile.) For example, if you only count states Barack Obama won, Obama's lead in both delegates and popular votes is massive; mutatis mutandis for Clinton. If you only count Gravel voters, Gravelmania is sweeping the Democratic party. Also, if you only count states that are yellow on Wikipedia's US map, or only the total number of commonwealths won, or only count the average elevation of states won by each candidate, or only the total number of years voters for each candidate have lived, or total X chromosomes possessed by each candidate's supporters, Hillary Clinton is killing it. But if you only count states named for French and English monarchs, only count the total student loan debt of each candidate's supporters, or only count membership totals in facebook support groups, Obama's coasting.

Sign seen in Philadelphia I had a meeting this morning and I was running late. I realized I had missed the bus and there were no cabs to be found. I started walking towards Center City all while hoping I’d miraculously run into a lost cabbie. Didn’t happen. I stopped at a busy intersection, pulled out a five dollar bill and started approaching cars.

“Five bucks if you drop me at Market Street.”

After suffering glares from a couple of old people and making a couple of frightened girls zoom off – I shouldn’t have had my hood up – I found an African-American guy in an Explorer, listening to Ne-Yo, pulled up and let me in.

“I’m in a good mood today,” he said.

I got in. After a brief lull in conversation I reminded him that later in the day ObamaRemember, It's The City Of *Brother*ly Love: Apparently Hillary Clinton's ovaries, as well as her tactics, are costing her votes in Philadelphia would be holding a major rally near the Liberty Bell.

“You gonna vote?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he said.

“Who for?”

“Obama!”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t trust a woman to be President,” he said.

I was shocked. Here was a black guy not voting for Obama because the junior senator references Jay-Z in his speeches.

That was sarcasm, by the way.

I egged him in a little bit and found that he didn’t particularly have a reason for supporting Obama aside from the fact that Hillary was a woman.

“Well, also because that’s what my Church wants me to vote,” he said.

I probably should have stopped and inquired whether it was his Church that was feeding him the line about Hillary’s gender. But I had reached my stop. I paid him and scampered off.

(Yes, I did make my meeting on time).

***

I found my morning encounter interesting because of another experience involving Obama and Hillary.

One night, three of us – me, one Princeton graduated white guy in Big Pharma, and a middle class Indian lawyer – got in a cab being driven by an African immigrant. He heard us talking about politics and asked us who we were voting for.

“I’m leaning towards Obama,” I said.

My Indian friend – a former Republican – said he was totally for Obama, while the white guy said that he would support anyone who didn’t raise his taxes.

“So two Obama and one McCain?” the cabbie confirmed. “Why not Hillary?”

Before I could answer, he answered his own question.

“I tell you why, man! She lies about every policy. Voted for war, says she’s against it. Says she’s for little guy, is in bed with corporations.”

“So you’ll vote for Obama, then?” I asked.

“No man, I can’t vote,” he replied. He wasn’t yet a citizen. However, he assured the three of us that every passenger he picked up he would try to convert them away from Hillary.

“Even McCain is better than her,” said the cabbie who can’tvote.

***

A few days earlier, I was taking a trip out to the sub-urbs to see one of my friends. I went to 30^th Street train station and waited for my train to arrive. In the meantime, I saw a couple of Obama activists approaching the travelers. To pass the time, my friend and I went up to them.

“Pretend to be a Hillary supporter,” I told him.

He went up (naturally) to the cute girl and started peppering her with questions about Obama as well as dropping positive commentary about Hillary.

She argued with him fervently. Ultimately, though, her argument could be summed up in one line: “How can you trust Hillary? She’s just not trust-worthy.”

Not wanting to be left out of talking to the cute girl I chimed in: “That’s an interesting accent you got there. Where are you from?”

“Oxford University,” she said. “I’m a visiting student at Penn.”

When the train arrived, we walked away. As we left, the girl who couldn’t vote in the elections reminded us again that Hillary was untrustworthy.

***
Hillary hate is pretty high in Philadelphia. It’s not just the Churches, and the cabbies, and the rich Penn kids. It also infects the right-wing anti-abortion activists.

When I was returning from the aforementioned meeting earlier I got on a bus that went past the historic City Hall.

At a distance, hanging between two light-poles, right next to the Masonic Temple, were two tremendous signs.

The letters were in black, except for the word ‘Jezebel’, in parentheses.

“HILLARY (Jezebel) KILLS BABIES” read the first sign. The second one featured a gruesome picture of a dismembered fetus.

After I pushed down the bile in my throat, I asked myself why the sign didn’t say anything about Obama. After all, he, like Hillary, is also pro-Choice.

***

It was at that point that the germs for this article began coming to my head. It appeared that no one had particular reasons for their Obamamania other than the fact that they hated Hillary.

I also begin asking myself. If Obama’s support in Philadelphia – a relatively well-educated and progressive city – is premised on such irrationality, then can’t it be the case that in other parts of the country, support for Hillary or McCain or even Bush, is also premised on irrationality and closed-mindedness? If so, what does it really say about politics in America? Is it really the case that our leaders are bankrupt or is it that our leaders are a reflection of ourselves; even, dare I say, Obama? 

People enduring severe economic stress “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” Barack Obama privately told a group of fundraisers in San Francisco. For those who have been on the moon for the past few days, you should know that Hilary Clinton responded that Obama was “elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing.”

That word, frankly, is what poker players call her tell. When she says it, you know she is about to bluff: advance a charge that would be just plausible if we didn’t know her, a charge she is counting on 24-hour-cable-coiffed-heads to play dumb about for excitement’s sake. Oh, by the way, John McCain just agreed with her: Obama is elitist. And now Maureen Dowd.

I can’t really imagine a time attacks like this wouldn’t annoy me. If you are worldly, erudite, discriminating, articulate, etc., then you presumably have rare gifts. But since these are rare, and worthy, then you must be part of an elite. So, na, na, how can you be elite without being elitist?

As it happens, though, I just finished reading Dreams From My Father, the younger Obama’s extraordinary memoir, and these particular attacks strike me as foolish and brazen in way that borders on dangerous. Do we really --- proudly --- credit politicians this much for their ability to manipulate us? Do we really want --- as Richard Gere twinkled at Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” --- a “professional”?

Obama and Orwell

I picked the book up in an airport out of curiosity; I was a strong supporter anyway and thought I might learn a thing or two about his past. I did not expect to be utterly absorbed by the third page, by his story and, even more important, his style. Imagine Orwell combining his autobiographical essay about his public school, “Such, Such, Were The Days,” and his reflections on British imperialism “Shooting an Elephant,” with The Road To Wigan Pier. Imagine Orwell having the religious humility to look back without rancor.

So now imagine that Orwell ran for Parliament in a working-class district after the war, and gave an interview in which he said that poor people sometimes cling to religious dogmas or xenophobia to try to make sense of their world. Imagine his Tory opponent --- knowing full well that few people in the working-class actually read essays or books --- suggested that Orwell, that author, was elitist. Imagine that a columnist for (of all places) the Times of London picked up the story and accused Orwell of being --- how did Dowd put it? --- less a candidate than an anthropologist.

I guess the idea is that if you are brilliant enough to write, and write movingly, about your years in poverty, your gratitude for the transcendent life of the mind, your decision to organize against despair with compassion and mentoring, your years defending people downtrodden by forces they cannot control, your loved ones in far-flung parts of the world, pitting their magic against alcohol --- indeed, if you can write anything without a ghostwriter --- then you must think you are smarter than ordinary people, and must therefore be “out of touch.” (On the other hand, if you are accustomed to privilege, and educated to triangulation, so that you know how to buy a ghost writer who'll make you appear a populist, then, by definition, you don’t think you’re so smart, and must therefore be close to ordinary people.)

So here is an anthropological question for you. What do you say about the future of a democracy that buys this stuff?

The corner of Church and State: Neither are one-way streetsSunday night, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed up at Messiah College’s Compassion Forum to talk about faith in political life. Good for them. Just wish it had been Hebrew College.

As a persecuted, outnumbered, and very intelligent people of faith, we Jews have been staunch supporters of the separation of church and state. After all, when you make up just over 2% of the population of a country, you don’t want presidential politics to turn into a “most popular faith” contest. We’d be sitting on the sidelines with the Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and wild Wicca folks, watching the Christian evangelicals, mainline Protestants and Catholics duke it out for religion numero uno.

As a result, Jews have lived split lives, following a kind of self-made kashrut in which politics and faith may never mix. Jews have become well-known for our left-wing political activism, from the labor movement of the 1920 and 30s to the hippie/peace movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the pro-peace and anti-globalization movements today. Yet, with just a few exceptions, the political Jews have been secular Jews, using tikkun olam as a substitute for religion instead of as an expression of it.

The result has been a damaging split within the Jewish community. On the one side, the progressive, pink, secular Jews; on the other side, the insular, black-hatted, religious Jews. Religion and politics grew so far apart that many of us felt we had to be closeted to cross the divide—Orthodox Jews had to pretend to being apolitical; progressive Jews had to pretend to be secular.

Both had to disregard a difficult little fact—namely, that Jewish law is all about mixing politics and faith. Torah teaches us to feed the poor and house the homeless, care for the sick and instruct our children, steward the earth and, in all cases and everywhere, protest wrongs. We even have cool terms for these obligations: tzedakah, give charity; bikkur cholim, care for the sick; pikuakh nefesh, save human life; ba’al tashchit, do not waste the earth’s resources; tikkun ha’olam, repair the world.

These obligations come to us as essential elements of our faith tradition. They are not simply examples of good ethical practices, nor are they limited to caring for our immediate family, community or faith group. As Ruth Messinger and Aaron Dorfman remind us in Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, the Talmud tells us that we have a broader universe of obligation than just caring for our own:

Our Rabbis taught: We sustain the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor, visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead, for the sake of peace. [Gittin 61a; and see Rambam’s gloss, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, 10:12] In the modern world, political action is the most effective way to fulfill these ethical obligations. Social Security and Medicare, a national health care plan (may it be so) and public schooling, global aid and a military that can intervene to right wrongs—these are all part of our political system. In short, Torah itself tells us that politics and religion cannot be separated.

How do we reconcile a faith tradition that tells us to mix politics and religion with a democratic and pragmatic belief that politics and religion must be kept separate? Barack Obama framed the problem, and offered a solution, when he suggested that asking whether we can have politics and religion together is a false question. The real question is to ask, how do they belong together. And for that, Obama had an intriguing answer:

All of us come to the public square with our values and ideals and our ethics—what we believe. And people of religious faith have the same right to come to that public square with the values and ideals that are rooted in their faith, and they have the right to describe them in religious terms….

There is a fundamental difference between talking about values, about the why behind our ideas and actions, and talking about programs and positions, the what of political life. For example, a Catholic should rightly be able to talk about why even the potentiality of life is sacred—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should be against abortion. As Jews, we should be able to talk about the holiness inherent in our choices about what we eat—but that is very different from saying that all Americans should take up kashrut.

Indeed, when we understand that faith gives us political values, we will find ourselves back in that comfort zone for Jews—flourishing debate. Torah tells us that we must intervene to right wrongs—but what does that mean, precisely? For example, does the value of pikuakh nefesh, protecting a life, mean we must protest the Iraq war and withdraw our forces (the good left answer) or (as John McCain insists) bring it to the best possible conclusion, however long that takes? Does caring for the sick mean a national health care plan or health care tax credits? Values don’t necessarily lead to particular positions.

It’s time for Jews to stop worrying so much about dividing faith from politics. We should be spending our energy getting into the debate, offering up our own ideas about how Jewish values would lead to a better politics.

In an old stand-up routine, Woody Allen told the story of his ill-fated trip to a costume party in the deep south. He decided to dress up as a ghost and, through a series of mishaps the reader can probably fill in, Woody found himself in the clutches of four burly Klansmen determined to lynch him:

Suddenly my whole life passed before my eyes. I saw myself as a kid again in Kansas, going to school, and swimmin' at the old swimmin' hole and fishin' and fryin' up a mess o' catfish and going down to the general store and gettin' a piece of gingham for Emmy Lou and suddenly I realized, hey that's not my life! They’re going to hang me in two minutes and somebody else’s life is flashing before my eyes.

After Barack Obama committed the Kinsley-gaffe of saying what he really thinksThe heroine of Tuzla can fire bullets as well as dodge them about the pro-God, pro-gun, anti-gay, anti-trade culture of the rustbelt, Hillary Clinton might as well have asked Woody Allen to script her response. He couldn't have done a worse job than Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson, who greenlighted Clinton's recent serial recounting of the time the life of a Bosnian soldier flashed before her eyes. With her opponent reeling from his offense against the sportsman's ethos, what else could Clinton have done but hallucinate another identity that isn't hers:

You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl...You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are.

And of course, as a child of that culture and that way of life, Hillary Clinton is eminently qualified to testify to the centrality of huntin' and swimmin' and fishin' and fryin' to the core identity of real Americans. She is, after all, a simple girl from rural Illinois whose granpappy taught her to shoot and trap, skills that paved the way for her to graduate as the valedictorian of her class at Wellesley and go on to Yale Law School and work as counsel for an assortment of multi-billion dollar corporations. When opportunism civic pride called her to run for elective office, what could a blue-collar midwestern patriot do but take a piss on Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, and any other state she could plausibly call home? By accepting a gift-wrapped senate seat from Chuck Shumer, Clinton also managed to crush the ambitions of elitist latte-sipping New Yorkers like Nita Lowey, thereby striking a double-blow for feminism and the unpretentious Methodist values of the Rodham clan.

So, Bob Casey, the pro-life, pro-gun, Catholic working class white senator from Pennsylvania, has endorsed Barack Obama after previously pledging to stay neutral. Chris Dodd believes Obama's nomination is a "forgone conclusion" and strongly implies that Hillary Clinton should drop out for the good of the party. Pat Leahy has come right out and said that Clinton should drop out. Even Joe Andrew, a former DNC chairman and staunch Clintonite superdelegate, is demurring on whether he'd support Clinton if she loses the national popular vote. Isn't the Clinton plan to win through superdelegate support somewhat imperiled by superdelegates not supporting her?

And sure, if you're counting by delegates won, votes won, or states won, Obama hasHillary Clinton takes Tennessee to block the nomination basically sewn up. But what's so special about delegates, votes, or states? Hillary Clinton is still very much the favorite. Take a look at the map to the right and see why.

The real way to capture the Democratic nomination is to form a connected chain of states from the west coast to the east coast. All Clinton has to do is pull off an upset in North Carolina and she wins! And even if she doesn't, her brilliant blocking moves in Arkansas and Tennessee (to think I ever doubted Mark Penn's strategic genius) left Obama needing a win in Kentucky, a state where Clinton is heavily favored, to have any hope of winning. How can Barack Obama be expected to beat John McCain if he can't beat Clinton at Electoral Map Connect Four? Alert the superdelegates.

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton went where her campaign previously refused to go: publicly attacking Barack Obama for his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ, first in a newspaper interview, then again in a press conference. The specific words of Clinton's Jeremiah Wright riposte --- "He would not have been my pastor," she said to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review --- convey less about her real motivations than does her decision on where those words would first appear. What the hell is Clinton doing cozying up to a fringe publication like the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review owned by a vitriolic plutocrat best known for his hatred of the Clintons?

The answer is that she could trust no other publication to understand, frame, and properly distribute the real message she's trying to express with her sudden revival of the Wright issue. That message: Dear white Pennsylvanian, isn't it clear that black men can't be trusted?

Understandably, Obama supporters reacted with outrage, many of them noticing her use of a racial appeal. Urging us to calm down, Jamie Kirchick writes at TNR that people of all political stripes have legitimate questions about the relationship between Wright and Obama, and Clinton was simply enunciating that sentiment. The statement that we don't choose a family but do choose a church is innocuous.

The thing is, at the risk of repeating myself, context matters. A lot. Take, as an example, a sentence that (I hope) won't hit any political nerves: "Daniel has good penmanship." Here are two cases: (1) You are my kindergarten teacher. Someone asks you about the quality of my handwriting. You answer, "Daniel has good penmanship." (2) You are my boss. Someone asks you to assess my talent and the quality of my work. You answer, "Daniel has good penmanship."

What you literally assert in (1) is identical to what you literally assert in (2). ButHillary Clinton to Richard Mellon Scaife: "No hard feelings about the murder accusations, BFF!" what you meant to communicate in (1) and (2) could scarcely be more disparate. Whether you succeed in communicating those disparate meanings depends on the competence of your audience not just with the definitions of the words you used and the syntactic rules linking them, but also with the conventions that dictate how to interpret a sentence in a given context. A Martian who had memorized the Oxford English Dictionary and the rules of English grammar and syntax wouldn't have a clue that in case (2), you are actually disparaging me.

Likewise, a Martian would have no idea that "San Francisco liberal" is a reference to homosexuality, that "law and order" spoken in a particular time and place is an incitement to crack down on blacks, or that "neoconservative" spoken in a particular time and place by a particular speaker means "Jew." A Martian would have no idea that a black comedian using "nigger" communicates one thing, and a white comedian using "nigger" communicates something entirely different.

We, however, are not Martians (most of us, anyway). Let's try, therefore, to piece together what Senator Clinton tried to communicate as people familiar with the conventions of political speech and the facts of this particular campaign.

Hillary Clinton could not, as she later claimed, have been merely responding to a question. Her interview was with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, an eccentric millionaire who spent much of the 1990s funding efforts to prove that Hillary Clinton and her husband murdered Vince Foster and committed countless other crimes. The Tribune-Review's journalistic and editorial values are a reflection of its owner's values. If her intent had simply been to get her message out to the people of Pittsburgh, I'm sure the editorial board of the Post-Gazette --- a better newspaper with a larger circulation that isn't owned and operated by a lunatic who until recently was trying to put Hillary Clinton in prison --- would have loved to hear from her. Given the news of the past week, knowing the outlook of the Tribune-Review, the most credible explanation for Hillary Clinton's decision to sit down for a heart to heart with Scaife himself (see the picture above) is that she was engineering an opportunity to say something about Jeremiah Wright and frame the resultant coverage to her benefit.

Fine. That's her right and prerogative. The question then is, why would she engineer such an opportunity? What was she hoping to communicate in attacking Obama for being a member of the Trinity Church? The interpretation that she was voicing the legitimate concerns Jamie alludes to doesn't pass the laugh test. Hillary Clinton has no problem whatsoever building, maintaining, and profiting from decades-long relationships with a rogues gallery of assorted crooks and demagogues --- including a frightening and frighteningly influential conservative religious clique. (On the other hand, Hillary Clinton's own long-term pastor turns out to be quite the fan of Jeremiah Wright; maybe it's time to choose a new church.)

Clearly, Clinton made the decision to explicitly criticize Obama over his association with Wright because she saw the issue fading from the news while she became a laughingstock for telling risible lies about surviving in a warzone. She did so because she feels the issue can win for her; and the way it can win for her, if it can, is by provoking a white backlash against a candidate who suddenly seems too black. And Hillary Clinton, not being a fool, knows that, too.

Repeat: Context matters. When Jamie, a scrupulous journalist with a legitimate reason for asking questions about Barack Obama and his pastor, says that Obama should have left the church, what he is communicating is that Barack Obama should have left the church. When Hillary Clinton, presidential candidate, says that Barack Obama should have left the church, what she is communicating is that Pennsylvania whites need to vote against the black guy. And if the platform for getting that message out is one gleefully provided to her by a Puccini villain who spent a decade persecuting her --- hey, that's politics, right?

When Hillary Clinton declared her support for the Iraq war authorization on the Senate floor in 2002, she cited her experience in foreign policy as a determining factor on her vote. That experience hadn't quite swelled to thirty-five years yet, but according to Clinton, it was substantial:

[P]erhaps my decision is influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.

Of course, since the Clintons have spent the last eight years stonewalling efforts toHillary Clinton: Thirty-five years of lying about experience find out just what Hillary Clinton's experience consisted in, the primary source for verifying her claims has been...Hillary Clinton.

Well, despite the Clinton campaign's best efforts, records of her comings and goings as first lady are now in the public domain. And --- pretend to be shocked --- reality doesn't match up to the Hillary Clinton approved biography of Hillary Clinton. Highlights:

Clinton has said she helped negotiate the April 1998 Good Friday agreement between warring factions in Northern Ireland. But while Catholic and Protestant figures hashed out last-minute details of a power-sharing agreement in Belfast, Clinton was at the National Press Club in Washington at a party honouring Bella Abzug, a congresswoman from New York City who had died recently. While President Clinton phoned major participants in the peace talks, she met with Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and joined a farewell party for Democratic operative Karen Finney. On the day the agreement was actually signed, she met with Philippine first lady Amelita Ramos.

When Nato launched air strikes against Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country's onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, Clinton toured ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut's tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. She dined at the Temple of Luxor, and stayed overnight at the Sofitel Winter Palace Hotel there.

On August 20, 1998, Bill Clinton ordered US missile strikes on suspected terrorist sites in Sudan and Afghanistan. The president and Hillary Clinton were on holiday on Martha's Vineyard, a posh island vacation spot off the coast of Massachusetts. After announcing the attack, Clinton cut short his break and returned to Washington to confer with his national security team; Hillary Clinton remained on the Vineyard until August 30, her records show.

There are other key foreign policy dates when the record is not so clear: on the day the presidents of three Balkan states signed a peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, ending years of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, Clinton's file lists no public schedule for that day, but indicates she was in Washington.

So there really is no remaining rationale for Clinton's candidacy. The pinnacle of her involvement in policy-making as first lady was a catastrophic failure on health care reform, a failure that she has breathtakingly claimed should count in her favor, presumably on grounds that would justify giving George W. Bush another go at foreign policy. She has further claimed that the Hindenburg-like outcome of her health care initiative spurred her to create the State Children's Health Insurance Program --- a magnificent achievement (if you're into government sponsored healthcare, anyway) undermined only by the fact that Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy created SCHIP while the Clinton administration opposed it.

Her vaunted foreign policy experience apparently consists in exotic vacations and, to be fair, occasionally delivering desperately-needed commodities to US troops in Bosnia, such as Sheryl Crow and Sinbad.

And then in 1999, she became a New Yorker ex nihilo, used her husband's political machine to brush aside actual self-made women like Nita Lowey and claim a Senate seat against minimal opposition. From that perch, she quickly set to work as an utterly unexceptional pothole senator, taking a break from constituent services to vote for the odd war resolution without reading it.

Now, it's true that Hillary Clinton literally has more experience than Barack Obama: She's older than he is. But she's also younger than John McCain. And has accomplished less than either of them (not that McCain's accomplishments are particularly heartening). Will the fact that her candidacy is ultimately grounded on nothing at all finally put a stop to it? Never mind, there are Jeremiah Wright sermons on Youtube.

Hillary Clinton is a thoroughly vetted candidate, about whom there is nothing left to learn. That's probably why the Clintons are shutting down the release of confidential papers from the Bill Clinton presidential library. As Hillary Clinton would be delighted to explain, there is nothing new under the sun about her record; therefore there is no reason anyone should get to look at, say, the chain of events that led from Denise Rich's $450,000 donation to the Clinton foundation to the pardon of Rich's ex-husband, the continent-galloping racketeer and fugitive Marc Rich. What sort of paranoid freak could possibly be interested in Hillary Clinton's records as first lady, who she met with, and what, if anything, she actually did?

Likewise, because the Clintons are so well vetted, they refuse to release their taxHillary Clinton: "What part of 'tested and ready' don't you understand?" returns. The skeptical might point out that Hillary Clinton publicly demanded that her 2000 senate challenger Rick Lazio release his tax returns. But that's missing the point: Lazio was unvetted, and so he had an obligation to release the returns; Hillary Clinton is vetted, thus she has no such obligation. And besides, everything that there is to know about the Clintons has been known for years. Her 2007 tax returns couldn't possibly yield any fresh information about, say, Bill Clinton's $700,000 windfall profit off of a transaction on a non-public security backed by the People's Republic of China, with an anonymous buyer who paid far more than market value. Why, that's just old hat from the witch-hunts of the 90s. Bo-ring! The source of the savings that allowed Hillary Clinton to loan her campaign $5 million of her own money? Obviously the product of a lifetime of coupon clipping during all the years the Clintons lived on a government salary.

Similarly, what traction do opponents of Hillary Clinton's campaign hope to achieve by prying into Bill Clinton's relationship with his BFF, the Canadian mining tycoon Frank Giustria? In 2005, Clinton lobbied for the brutal Kazakh dictatorship of Nursultan Nazarbayev to assume leadership of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, thereby paving the way for Giustra to gain a foothold in the lucrative Kazakh uranium trade. Clinton went so far as to inform Nazarbayev that "recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life." Shortly after the deal was completed, Giustra helped raise $21 million for the William J. Clinton Foundation. It's called a coincidence, people; and in any case, all of this was detailed in the Starr Report.

So the Clintons are perfectly justified in refusing to release the names of donors to the Clinton library since 2004. Prior to 2004, unreasonable, Kenneth Starr-like critics will observe, the list of donors included the royal family of Saudi Arabia, the State of Kuwait, Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation, professional war-with- Iran-monger Haim Saban, and many other similarly upstanding persons and institutions. Conspiracy-minded nutcases, of course, will suggest that Clinton library donors were hoping to curry favor with Senator Clinton or a potential future Clinton presidency. But that's preposterous; the far more parsimonious explanation is that every single donor was expressing his or her own gratitude for the 22 million jobs created in the 90s, particularly the Saudi royals.

Yes, it's high time that the press stopped giving a free pass to Senators Obama and McCain.

I have little love for Samantha Power's foreign policy prescriptions (which I findSamantha Power: Committed the gaffe of honesty eminently worthy of a Harvard academic) but I will say that her lickety-split resignation from the Obama camp after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" was probably the silliest episode yet in an overlong cartoon of an election season.

Power was giving an interview to The Scotsman newspaper:

"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.

"She is a monster, too – that is off the record – she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.

Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.

"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

There's nothing out of sorts here. Power's only moment of naivete came in announcing something was "off the record" in a transcribed audience with a member of the UK press.

Clinton, of course, rampaged through Tokyo before demanding Power's resignation, which the Obama camp served up with alacrity. Here's Power's goodbye:

"With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an adviser to the Obama campaign effective today,” Power said in a statement Friday. “Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months.”

Many pundits have credited Clinton's twin victories on Tuesday in part to her cheery appearance last weekend on Saturday Night Live. She clearly benefited from that show's trenchant mockery of the media's soft treatment Barack Obama, which resulted in a tougher line of questioning of the candidate just before the Texas and Ohio primaries. (He stalked offstage in San Antonio like a wounded gazelle after being pressed about his questionable relationship with the Chicago sleaze merchant Antoin Rezko, and his lying populism over NAFTA.)

The week before, you'll recall, Tina Fey proudly called Hillary a "bitch" on air and demanded the country wake up to the fact that a shrill, unbearable woman is exactly what it needed right now. One might have expected, then, a shrewder Clinton reply to the Power remark along the lines of "I'm the monster who's ready on day one;" but alas, this touchy Mothra roared and the Obama mouse gave all.

His supporters have cause for real alarm. It's not "dignified" of their man to resort to defensiveness or automatic capitulation as a means of countering the well-oiled (and oily) Clinton attack machine. I suspect he will face a nicer audience from John McCain -- if not from McCain's uncontrolled phalanx of conservative backers -- but that doesn't distract from Obama's core wimpiness.

Indeed, in her shrieking and sanctimonious efforts to regain the front-runner status, Clinton has actually made a worthwhile point about her opponent: If he can't effectively stand up to her, how the hell can we expect him to stand up to Al Qaeda?

James Fallows reports:

In a live CNN interview just now, Sen. Clinton repeated, twice, the "Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience, I have a lifetime of experience, Sen. Obama has one speech in 2002" line. By what logic, exactly, does a member of the Democratic party include the "Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience" part of that sentence?

By the same logic, one supposes, that leads a presidential candidate from one party to cut commercials for a candidate of the opposing party. I'm willing to be corrected on this point, but I doubt there is another instance in postwar American history of a candidate literally endorsing the nominee of the other party against his or her intra-party opponent. (John Anderson never supported Carter; George Wallace never supported Nixon.) Hillary Clinton's priorities are now unambiguous. She will do anything legally within her power to win the Democratic nomination, including destroying the most promising natural politician her party has seen in some 40 years. If she fails, she wants to make certain that Obama is too toxic ever to run again.

The irony is that the path she is paving to the nomination, even if it is the best way to optimize a still long shot, all but guarantees a McCain victory in the fall. She will lose to him deservedly.

UPDATE: Hillary Clinton repeated her endorsement of McCain in three separate appearances yesterday. John Aravosis has video. 

Tonight brings the final debate in the Democrats' nominating contest before the crucial primaries of Ohio and Texas, and possibly the final Democratic debate period. Jewcy is here to liveblog all the action. How will Hillary Clinton attempt to knock Barack Obama off his stride? By killing him with kindness? By insinuating that he's a substanceless phony (p.s. his middle name is 'Hussein')? By attacking the media? All three at once?

Palpable tension is in the air; the anticipation is feverish. Check back at 9pm EST, when the proceedings kick off, and don't forget to hit the refresh button.

8:45 (pre-show): Keith Olbermann is warming things up announcing the worrsssst perrssson in the worrrllllld. Here are the crucial questions going in: Will Obama simply try to coast, or will he take the offensive? How far out on a limb will Hillary go trying to bring Obama down? Presumably, if we're going to see the vaunted "kitchen-sink strategy" in action, it'll be in a free media venue like tonight's, since the Clinton campaign can scarcely afford to waste their remaining paid-media funds on aimless scattershot attacks.

Substantively, how much time will be given over to yet more soporific bickering on health care mandates? Hillary Clinton evidently believes this is the big issue where she can put daylight between herself and Obama, but there are a couple of problems with this line of attack. For one thing, David Cutler and Ted Marmor, the two best health care economists of the center-left in this country agree that mandates just don't matter that much for achieving universality (and also, ceteris paribus, more economic freedom is better than less --- not that that's a catchy argument among Democratic primary voters). For another thing, Obama has proven perfectly capable of holding his ground and defending his non-mandate position. Maybe Clinton believes there's a massive constituency that's clamoring not only for universal health care, but also a specific health care mechanism, but she's, um, wrong about that.

8:55: Chuck Todd plays up the interrogative skills of Tim Russert. If your idea of an argument is the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says, rather than a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition, then Todd's got a point.

8:58: Todd says take a drink when Clinton says "shame" or Obama says "we agree." I say take a drink when someone says "mandate" (see above).

9:01: It's another sit-down debate. That usually makes them more reticent to launch attacks.

9:02: No opening statements? Williams launches right in with video of Clinton's schizophrenia strategy.

9:04: It's the Mark-Penn-Hillary right out of the gates. She became very disturbed over the last few days by fliers that have been circulating at least since the beginning of February.

9:05: Clinton again claims Obama's plan would leave people out. It's true; so would Clinton's plan.

9:05: Clinton denies any connection to the Somali-garb photo. Says she would fire anyone who plays that sort of politics. So she'll tell Stephanie Tubbs-Jones to take a hike?

9:07: Obama gets the first mention of "mandate" (and the second and third). Drink!

9:08: Have I mentioned that Obama is substantively right about this? The meta-point: Clinton's sent out plenty of anti-Obama fliers too; Obama hasn't been whingeing about it.

9:09: Clinton points out Obama includes a mandate for children. Is the ability to give consent that difficult a concept to grasp?

9:10: This is getting really nasty, really fast.

9:11: Obama says they agree, but doesn't say "we agree." Drink?

9:12: Like I said, average voters simply aren't equipped to sift through the minutiae of health care policy. The only relevant point is that Obama is holding his own, so the whole thing becomes a wash, and undermines Clinton's claims to be better-versed in policy.

9:13: Clinton goes back to Obama's "mandates for children" again. Honestly, adults can consent to things, children can't, it's not difficult.

9:14: Last point about health care: If you're going to propose a meaningful mandate, you have to propose an enforcement mechanism. Saying you have a mechanism (which Hillary does) is not the same as proposing a mechanism (which she doesn't).

9:16: Ah, onto NAFTA. They're both free-traders and they're going to lie their fucking heads off.

9:17: Awesome, Clinton whinges about the format, references a dumb SNL sketch. There's your kitchen-sink. A handful of boos, well-deserved.

9:18: Clinton claims she's always been an opponent of NAFTA. Um, right. She proposes a "trade timeout." What could be better for an ailing market?

9:20: Obama claims "the net costs of trade agreements can be devastating if they're not properly structured." The last qualifier is broad enough to make almost anything that comes before automatically true. But he's trying to pretend he's not a free-trader.

9:23: Russert confronts Clinton with her litany of pro-NAFTA remarks. She splutters, vows to renegotiate or pull out of NAFTA.

9:24: I'm obviously very biased. Does this look to anyone else like the most desperate effort ever? She can't decide whether to hate Russert, Williams, or Obama the most.

9:26: Russert asks Obama whether to opt out of NAFTA. Obama says they agree again. Drink!

9:27: Obama's really hedging hard on his past support of trade agreements. In the interest of balance and all that.

9:28: Russert's definitely going easier on Obama than Clinton. Much easier. Wow.

9:31: Clinton finally calms down and gives a good answer on the loss of jobs in upstate New York. Not good in the sense that she actually made any informative points, good in the sense that she hits the right keywords and has stopped looking like she's there for a streetfight.

9:33: Williams asks Obama about Clinton's comparison of Obama to Bush on foreign policy experience. Obama: I have better judgment than Clinton; I voted against the war. Kind of a softball --- will she ratchet up the attacks?

9:36: Williams to Clinton: are you prepared to say that Obama is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief? Clinton: Obama gave a good speech in 2002; there, there.

9:37: Wow, Clinton claims that "Obama threatened to bomb Pakistan." This is getting surreal. Incidentally, the subtext of her argument is that they have precisely the same issue-profile on foreign policy. Even if it were true, how is that a point in her favor?

9:39: Obama rightly points out that he did a lot more than give a speech; points out Clinton criticizes George Bush's judgment while trumpeting her own agreement with George Bush's judgment. Again, I can't look at this without bias, but this seems to be getting more embarrassing by the moment for Clinton.

9:41: Russert asks Obama whether we can make good on his pledge to withdraw from Iraq. He says yes we can.

9:42: Same question to Clinton; only Russert won't let her answer. He asks Clinton whether she would reserve the right to reinvade Iraq in the event of a disaster. She calls bullshit on Russert's Tomclancying. Good for Hillary.

9:45: The next Clinton attack: Obama hasn't held oversight hearings on the NATO commitment in Afghanistan. Obama: I became head of the oversight committee at the beginning of this campaign. That might not play well, but the fact is that any senator campaigning for president is going to be derelict as a senator.

9:47: Williams tries to cut to break, Clinton tries to cut in, Williams cuts her off and cuts to break.

9:49: First break. Maybe this just seems to be going fast and everybody seems to be agitated because I'm trying to watch and blog at the same time. On the other hand, apart from the gang-tackling the Republicans did on Mitt Romney in January, there hasn't been anything remotely like this in this campaign. Hillary is using every question to take a personal swipe at Obama. Will that win votes?

9:51: To be sure, Williams and Russert are doing their best to provoke a fight. To be further sure, nobody made Hillary trot out that stuttering sarcastic attack on "change."

9:54: Okay, the real problem with the kitchen-sink strategy is that it doesn't involve any themes that Clinton hasn't been hitting the whole campaign, she's just getting a lot nastier about them. But these are the very same attacks Obama has been practicing replying to for over a year, and he's gotten pretty good at it. So he comes off looking confident, she comes off looking like Ross Perot ("Can I finish? Can I finish?").

9:57: More economic bullshit from Clinton on interest rates. She is really, dangerously wrong about this.

10:00: Obama: "Clinton said in a previous debate that she voted for a bill, but hoped it wouldn't pass. Generally, when you hope a bill won't pass, you vote against it." Not exactly verbatim. Expect that to get replayed a lot.

10:02: Russert asks why Obama won't keep his word on public financing. Specifically references the McCain attack. Obama comes back pointing out McCain's own public finance waffling (McCain's, unlike Obama's, is probably illegal). Clinton is sketching out a note. I sense an attack coming. From a candidate financed by a rolling international financial crimewave.

10:04: Russert asks Clinton why she won't release her tax returns. Interestingly, Clinton for the first time floats the possibility of releasing her tax returns before becoming the nominee. She will "work towards releasing."

10:06: Just as I was about to point out how slanted Russert has been towards Obama, he tries to grill Obama on (unsolicited) support from Louis Farrakhan. And then tries to stick in the Jeremiah Wright shiv. And somehow brings Israel into it. This is disgraceful.

10:11: After Obama repeatedly repudiates Farrakhan and anti-Semitism, Clinton suggests Obama courts anti-Semitism. And there go the last dredges of her shame. She did just win both the VDARE and the Weekly Standard primary, so, congrats on that. (The subtext here is a Likudnik campaign to pretend Obama is an anti-Israel fifth columnist, based on the fact that he gets advice from --- cue sinister music --- Zbigniew Brzeziński.)

10:23: After Russert decides spreading innuendo about Obama's ties to the Nation of Islam is a good use of his time, there's a relatively pacific discussion of Russia and the succession from Putin. Neither of them knows the successor's name. It's Dmitry Medvedev.

10:26: Both are asked if they'd take back any decision. Clinton says she'd take back her Iraq vote. Yet it's still not a mistake. Obama says he should have stopped the Terri Schiavo circus. He should have.

10:28: Obama pre-empts Clinton and takes the high road: "I've been absolutely honored to be campaigning with Senator Clinton." Sure.

10:32: Clinton's last opportunity to show some class. Will she take it?

"It's been an honor to campaign with Barack Obama?" But, but....

10:34: No buts, she touts her own record. Reasonably decent way to go out, but anybody who watched this disaster needs a shower, stat.

Afterword: The defining moment of the night was the first one, Hillary Clinton citing Tina Fey to launch an attack on the press and the entire nominating process. It only got more petulant and off-putting from there. Give her credit for trying. But it failed, on pretty much every score. And there was the moment in which she insinuated that he's a covert anti-Semite. It's hard to see how this could have gone worse for her.

The AP's Nedra Pickler is facing criticism for her story about the fact that Barack Obama "may face grilling on patriotism." And it's true! Some of Barack Obama's political opponents may indeed question his patriotism.

And why shouldn't they? As Ms. Pickler reports, there are the internet hoaxes attacking Obama's patriotism that have been circulating through fever-swampy right-wing email chains for several months now. And, Obama doesn't wear an American flag lapel pin, unlike these upstanding American gentlemen. And, Obama's wife said something that, if you're determined to be willfully obtuse, you could misinterpret as indicating that she is covertly ashamed of her country. QED, what more proof could you need?

What, still not convinced? Okay then doubting Thomas, Pickler's got a real whopper of an expert witness: Roger Stone, professional rat-fucker and unindicted Watergate crook, who's spent his entire adult life organizing cheap and borderline illegal plumbing operations against Democrats. He's obviously got a disinterested take on the election, let's see whether he thinks Obama's patriotism comes up short:

Barack Obama is out of the McGovern wing of the party, and he is part of the blame America first crowd.

There you go, Roger Stone, professional rat-fucker and unindicted Watergate crook, believes Barack Obama isn't a sufficiently loyal American. Who would've guessed? Certainly not Nedra Pickler's readers, who are told only that Stone is "a Republican consultant," which is a bit like calling the Grand Inquisitor a Catholic priest.

Until recently, Stone's last foray into electoral politics was to make a threatening phone call to Elliot Spitzer's 83 year old Parkinson's-afflicted father, promising that the elder Spitzer would "be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Committee on Investigations on your shady campaign loans," and referred to "yourThe AP's finest reporting turns to: Roger Stone's C.U.N.T. phony, psycho, piece of shit son."

After a brief respite, Stone is back in the saddle, with a new anti-Hillary Clinton 527 called, charmingly, Citizens United Not Timid, which apparently exists for no other reason than to sell t-shirts with the graphic at the right. Hilariously enough, C.U.N.T. is being forced to divert resources that could have been put to calling Hillary Clinton a C.U.N.T., by legal challenges from an earnest right-wing lunatic outfit, David Bossie's Citizens United, which is perhaps justifiably aggrieved over the trademark infringement.

In the spirit of journalistic integrity with which Pickler wrote her story, and the spirit of fairness and propriety with which Stone conducts himself, here's a link to a (true!) National Enquirer piece on Roger Stone's experiences of wife-swapping, swinging, and the orgy circuit. Sources tell Jewcy that Stone "may face anonymous Googling of 'Roger Stone AND swinger.'"

As if the Hillary Clinton campaign's financial profligacy --- over $100 million pissed away, including fees for (incompetent) consultants and pollsters at 3-4 times the rate of Barack Obama's, $11,000 on pizza and $1,200 on donuts in January, $25,000 on rooms at the Bellagio, $5000 on rooms at the Las Vegas Four Seasons, with no investment in any of the caucus states or any primary or caucus since Feb. 5 --- weren't enough, there is a civil war in Hillaryland.

On one side is Mark Penn, the gelatinous mass astride Burson-Marsteller, the giant PR firm that represents the lawless, murderous Christianist mercenary outfit Blackwater. It was Penn who pioneered Hillary Clinton's flawless "inevitability" strategy, and once Clinton turned out to be evitable, decided that the "insult 40 states strategy" was a winner. Now that the campaign is on its last legs, Penn is urging an epic temper tantrum, to be fuelled by a McCarthyite portrayal of Obama as a fellow-traveler of the Weathermen terrorists. (Not that the Clintonites endorse attacking Obama with this information, mind you; they're just concerned about what will happen when Republicans get a hold of it. This from a candidate who almost certainly knew of, and personally benefited from, her husband's pardon of unrepentant FALN terrorists. Never mind, Republicans would never make hay of that.)

On the other side is Mandy Grunwald, head of media relations for the campaign, who, at least according to press accounts, has some conception of Hillary Clinton's and the Democratic party's best interests in mind, and is pushing for a positive campaign that will preserve her client's stature and give the Democrats an optimal chance to win the general election.

As March 4 approaches, the gap in Ohio closes, and Obama appears to have already reached parity or better in Texas, the Penn-Grunwald civil war is now being waged inside Hillary Clinton's own brain. Behold as Hillary expresses her feeling of honor at sharing a stage with Barack Obama, then (dishonestly) smears Obama as a Karl Rove acolyte within 48 hours:

With crushing victories in the Wisconsin primary and Hawaii caucus last night, by 17 and 52 points, respectively, Barack Obama extended his winning streak to ten consecutive contests since February 5, and all but wrapped up the Democratic nomination for president.

Obama's dominance in Wisconsin is particularly telling. On paper, Wisconsin is anHillary Clinton's path to victory ideal state for Hillary Clinton, with its large white-working class population, long tradition of organized labor, and few African-Americans. But exit polls from America's Dairyland show just how much Hillary Clinton's core support has hemorrhaged. Obama tied Clinton among women and won men 67-31. He won every age group except for 65 years old and up; he won every income group; he won the religious and the secular; he won college-educated voters and non-college educated voters; he won every region of the state; he won union and non-union households; he won on every issue except experience; he won the married and the unmarried; he won Democrats, Republicans, and independents; he won liberals, moderates, and conservatives; he won whites and blacks. In short, he won everyone and everything.

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It takes 2025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president. Of the pledged delegates awarded in primaries and caucuses thus far, Barack Obama has won 1134 to Hillary Clinton's 996. With only 1078 delegates left to be awarded, Obama would have to win 83 percent and Clinton would have to win 95 percent ofWhat the Clinton campaign thinks of your votes the remaining delegate pool to secure the nomination through elections alone, an impossible task given the Democrats' proportional allocation rules. Hence, the winning candidate will have to be put over the top by some of the 795 "super delegates" --- elected officials and party functionaries who are given an automatic vote at the convention, and are unbound to any candidate.

Or so it would seem at first blush. As we explained last week, there is no actual rule governing how pledged delegates may vote on the convention floor, and like superdelegates, they are free to vote for whomever they choose. In light of that fact, the Clinton campaign saw a potential inroad, as Roger Simon writes in the Politico:

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination.

This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.

In the general election in the fall, one candidate will almost certainly win a majority in the electoral college. Presidential electors are real people who meet about a month after the election to ratify the results, and they are technically free to vote for anyone. Now suppose that the losing candidate were to convince enough electors to flip their ballots to overturn the election. The term for a scheme like this is a coup. And it is precisely what the Clinton campaign intends to do to win the nomination.

Apart from contempt for democracy in general and for Democratic primary voters in particular, the most salient feature of the Clinton scheme is its mind-boggling stupidity. As long as Obama remains a viable candidate, the odds that any of his pledged delegates could be convinced to flip are vanishingly small:

The people who end up as pledged delegates for Obama will be among his most rabid and trusted supporters. Most of his pledged delegates will be local elected officials, party leaders, members of groups that endorsed him and fundraisers. These people will be among the least likely people in America to switch their allegiance from Obama to Clinton.

But most importantly of all, the first rule of stealing an election is, you don't talk to the press about your plans to steal the election.

From attaching asterisks to every state they lose fair and square, to claiming that African-American votes don't count, to denigrating Democratic voters who live outside New York and California, to floating plans to overturn the popular vote with superdelegates, to suggesting that primary and caucus results should have no bearing on deciding the nominee, to openly plotting to overturn completed primaries and caucuses, the chance that Hillary Clinton will make a dignified exit from the stage grow dimmer by the hour.

Related: The Clinton campaign denies the accusation; Simon stands by his story.