Hillary Rodham Clinton is demonized every day on a hundred or a thousand blogs and in a hundred or a thousand editorials as "Hitlery KKKlinton," the death-mongering anti-Christ of American politics. Where did this craziness come from?

It doesn't originate with Barack Obama. Whatever his real flaws as a candidate may be, including some surreptitious hanky-panky with the race card, his message is still relatively positive. Senator Obama may be vacuous, but it would be ridiculous to call him a hater.

It seems to me that two related factors have produced the unprecedented tsunami of hate-speech directed at Hillary Clinton:

Otherwise reasonable people who fall under the spell of Barack Obama's mesmerizing TV persona soon learn to dispense with common sense when it conflicts with the pretensions of their new Messiah. The latest example of this silliness is the claim that Rush Limbaugh gave the Indiana primary to Hillary Clinton.

Obama looks good on TV, and Americans are suckers for anything that looks good on TV.

Closer examination of anything about Barack Obama always turns up a vacuum, and his ridiculous no-mandate healthcare plan is typical of the whole empty mess. As Paul Krugman said:

If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance -- nobody knows how big -- that we'll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won't happen.

Barack Obama won the black vote in North Caralina 91-6%. Hillary Clinton won the white vote 59-36%.

If the black preference for Obama had fallen in the same range as the white preference for Clinton, she would have picked up the difference between 6% and 36%, which would have amounted to 30% of the black vote.

Since African-American voters comprised 33% of the vote in the North Carolina Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton would have received another 30% x 33%, or 10% of the total vote, and Obama would have received 10% less.

Instead of 56-40% in favor of Obama, the vote would have been 50-46% in favor of Clinton, and Hillary Clinton would have won the North Carolina Democratic primary.

The wonderful thing about having George Bush as President is that a commentator can write about the same subject repeatedly and it will always be timely and fresh.
-Christopher Brauchli, CommonDreams.org, May 3, 2008

I can't agree with Mr. Brauchli's contention that repeating the same old story about George W. Bush is always "fresh," and it doesn't look much like irony, since he links to virtually the same story about the Bush administration's distortion of science that he wrote in 2006.

Bush and his friends distort the truth about everything, but the only "fresh" thing about this story is the sense of intellectual superiority it imparts to bloggers and columnists and even their readers.

This happy feeling is unfounded.

"I'm outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Mr. Obama said.

What was it about Jeremiah Wright's speech at the National Press Club that so "outraged" Barack Obama?

It wasn't about "God damn America!" because Obama had already heard it, and he didn't get "outraged." He threw his grandmother under the bus instead.

Obamabots everywhere have been celebrating Jeremiah Wright as a great American hero and truth-teller for the last 3 months, and now Obama throws Jeremiah Wright under the bus!

Harharharhar!

CommonDreams is currently running a column by Tim Rutten opposing toll lanes on the LA expressways. "Diamond Lanes for the Rich" cites Michael Harrington, author of The Other America, as an authority about "the roots of American inequality," and the idea is that toll lanes for whoever can afford them are about to become another "root."

It’s funny or sad or ironic or whatever to see Michael Harrington presented as a working-class hero in a story about traffic, while a dozen anti-war stories are posted on the same website.

Yesterday I wrote about racially skewed voting in the Democratic primaries; specifically, Barack Obama's 92-8% majority among black voters in Pennsylvania, and similar percentages in other states.

"Racism" is the sort of word that can mean more or less whatever anyone wants it to mean, and its de facto manifestations always find a way around de jure definitions.

Way back 1912, when Hiram Johnson founded the Progressive Party, the jewel of their platform was initiative and referendum, most prominently implemented in California, allowing a sufficient number of voters to unite and write propositions directly onto the ballot. This populist triumph was supposed to be all about "good government," but it wasn't.

It was all about money.

For some of us, the choice between a sociopathic con man and a former First Housewife isn't stupid enough! We want a choice of candidates even stupider than the drooling, diapered American public! Embrace your inner imbecile! Vote Tancredo/Putin 2008!

According to three-time Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tom Friedman, the formerly starving shit-hole of India has been transformed by the miracle of globalization into a nation of software mavens, and now they tell me that those same mavens are worshipping a two-faced baby!

It should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a second that Karl Rove, who dominated American politics for the last 8 years, is much smarter than Markos Moulitsas, who may have influenced a couple of local elections somewhere.

So when Newsweek hired Kos to "balance" Karl Rove, it was a really a gift to the Republicans, but more or less immune to criticism by Democrats, who hate the idea of hierarchies of any kind. We Democrats are always down on all fours together, and the highest form of human thought is our "collective wisdom," common sense, or whatever euphemism we can dream up for a hash of the latest buzz-words: Change, Hope, Mom, Apple Pie...

Hillary Clinton never had a better hit-man on the blogs.

I slammed Obama here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and in other venues too numerous to mention.

Now I quit!

The media have been flooded with paternalistic excuses for Jeremiah Wright, and Barack Obama's was the most condescending of all. First, Reverend Wright was Obama's crazy old "uncle," and now he's a dinosaur mired in the tarpit of segregation:

For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.

Poor old guy! He thinks it's still 1951. Don't wake him up!