If you actually wanted to help Barack Obama (who is, as you note the presumptive Democratic nominee) you would give him advice in private and praise him in public. Telling him that he shouldn't disrespect white people is neither necessary nor helpful. You might at least pretend to believe that some of the people who voted for your preferred candidate were voting for her, rather than against him.

That's when Terry McAuliffe says it will be over.

I can live with that.

Matthew Mosk of the WashPo has it:

Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers.

Taxpayer ripoff: check.
Environmental disaster: check.
Lobbying checks for McCain's once-and-future staffers: check.
Benefits to McCain's fundraisers: check.
Participation by Cindy McCain: since her tax returns are secret, how would anyone know?

Just another carefree day on the Straight Talk Express.

When a pilot (let's just say, to choose an example at random, of a Navy A-4 Skyhawk) goes off course and can't figure out where he his or which direction he's headed in, he is said to have "lost his bearings."

When a candidate who promises to run a "respectful campaign" smears his opponent by trying to falsely associate him with a foreign terrorist group, that candidate can fairly be described as being off his intended course. Saying that he has "lost his bearings" seems appropriate, especially if that candidate used to fly A-4 Skyhawks.

Nothing about the phrase "lost his bearings" has anything to do with age, directly or by implication. ("Lost his marbles," maybe, though I associate that phrase with insanity rather than dementia. But "lost his bearings"? No. That's about navigation, not aging.)

So when Marc Salter of the McCain campaign accuses Barack Obama of "raising John McCain's age as an issue," you can only conclude that the McCain team had no decent defense for McCain's smear and wanted to change the subject. (Think about it: since Hamas presumably understands U.S. politics, the natural implication of an "endorsement" of one candidate by a Hamas spokesman is that Hamas very much wants to see the other candidate elected. Given how wonderful two Bush terms have been for Hamas and its allies, it's not surprising that they should be eager to see a third Bush term under McCain. But since when do we let foreign terrorists choose our leaders for us?)

But if your candidate is 72 and having senior moments all over the place, why on earth would you want to change the subject from his dishonesty to his age? As Obama's spokesman says, Salter's crazy response just shows that you don't have to be old to lose your bearings.

Kevin Drum says a cap and trade carbon reduction program is only 'real' if the allowances are auctioned to emitters, not given away. He's wrong, so much as I like thoughtful attention to global warming, I need to weigh in, especially given how completely lost his commenters appear to be on this issue. I desperately want to offer a pocket-sized statement of this program: non-specialists have a right to understand something this important without taking a semester course. Something like, "Social Security is basically a bank: you put your money in while you work, and you take it out with interest when you retire." Unfortunately, simple and clear as that characterization of Social Security is, it's entirely wrong, and I can't provide a responsible one-sentence soundbite for cap and trade either.

Here are the key elements of greenhouse gas reduction, described from the point of view of a government deciding how to proceed:

Marc Ambinder points to Juan Williams's attack on Obama, which compares to McCain's purported history of "working across party lines" with Obama's "rhetoric and wishful thinking." Williams says of Obama: "He doesn't have a record."

Ambinder says of the attack, which he predicts the Republicans will be using in the fall, "The substance is not dismissible out of hand."

Dismissible? No. But it's disprovable, and without excessive effort. Obama has more genuine bipartisan achievement to his credit in his short career than McCain does in his long one.

Obama has several substantial bi-partisan accomplishments. In Springfield, he sponsored successful bills for children's health care, an earned income tax credit, ethics and campaign finance reform, and videotaped police interrogations (an anti-torture measure). In Washington, it was ethics reform again and work with Richard Lugar on loose nukes. That is not a thin record. (Charles Peters has the details on Springfield, and Hilzoy has two long posts on Obama in the U.S. Senate and on Obama's style of bipartisanship.)

Against that , Williams cites two items only from McCain's 25-year career: campaign finance reform and comprehensive immigration reform. McCain did indeed co-sponsor McCain-Feingold, which his campaign is currently violating by exceeding the primary election spending cap after having agreed to take matching funds and gained both financial and ballot-placement benefit from that agreement. McCain also worked on immigration reform, which crashed and burned in the Senate because he couldn't get his own Republican colleagues to stand by him, and which he has now abandoned in favor of an enforcement-only approach that is not bipartisan at all.

What else does McCain have?

* A long run as Chair of Senate Commerce, where he helped preside over the bipartisan acquiescence in the massive consolidation of media control in the hands of outfits such as Clear Channel and News Corporation.

* Opposition to torture, until he switched sides and supported Bush in using torture as long as the CIA rather than the military had to do the dirty work.

All that leaves as a real accomplishment is McCain's work with John Kerry to bring reconciliation with Vietnam and discredit the Rambo-powered POW/MIA racket. Both of them deserve great credit for that. But that's not really much of a record for more than two decades on the Hill. And what has he done for us lately?

So while I agree with Ambinder that the Republicans will very likely run on the lie that McCain has a record and Obama has a speech, I'm not very worried about that particular lie, because the record refutes it. Obama confounds the distinction famously made for young Carl Hayden by old Frederick Talbott: Obama combines the capacity of a "work horse" with the style of a "show horse."

There's no way we could elect a President who deliberately embraces a preacher of hatred.

Is there? Well, technically, yes there is. It depends the object of the hatred.

... that I'd like, but don't expect, to see reporters asking relentlessly:

If the multimillionaire second wife who has financed your entire political career continues to refuse to release her tax returns,

what assurance do we have that your official actions have not favored her business associates, as they so clearly did in the case of Charles Keating?

As Paul Krugman points out, all of the "economic growth" in the first quarter consisted of inventory build-up: consumers aren't buying stuff as fast as factories are turning it out. Worse than that, purchases of goods actually fell; the "growth" was mostly in the imputed rental value of owner-occuped housing and in medical care.

But wait, it gets worse: consumers can't even afford the amount of spending they're now doing.

U.S. consumer borrowing jumped more than double the amount economists forecast in March, indicating a slowing economy is forcing Americans to accumulate credit-card and other forms of debt.

Consumer credit increased by $15.3 billion for the month to $2.56 trillion, the biggest monthly rise since November, the Federal Reserve said today in Washington. In February, credit rose by $6.5 billion, previously reported as an increase of $5.2 billion. The Fed's report doesn't cover borrowing secured by real estate, such as home-equity loans.

Consumers are turning to credit cards after banks tightened standards for home-equity loans and other borrowing. The March figures brought U.S. consumer borrowing in the first quarter to $34 billion, the most since the first three months of 2001, when the economy entered its last official recession.

And no, they really can't afford it. They're falling behind on their bills.

Overdue payments at the six largest U.S. credit-card lenders reached the highest since November 2004, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An average of 4.11 percent of loans were at least 30 days late in February and March, according to reports filed by American Express Co., Bank of America Corp., Capital One Financial Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Discover Financial Services.

So we have (1) measured economic growth (some of it fictitious imputed rents) not fast enough to keep up with the growth in the labor force plus normal productivity gains; (2) based on inventory build-up, which puts downward pressure on next quarter and the quarter after; (3) financed by unsustainable consumer debt, which puts more downward pressure on next quarter and the quarter after.

"Recession"? I think so.

h/t Peter Cohan

In church on Sunday, after a string of impeccably orthodox and instantly forgettable Ascension-tide hymns, I was woken up by the amazingly incorrect but rousing Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Wow! You think. Go Sherman! Go Grant! Die, evil slaver Rebs! But then you realize: this is what it feels like to be a crusader, a warrior in the name of God - a jihadi.

The Telegraph says that Obama has figured out how to connect with the working man: Pabst Blue Ribbon.

At the Raleigh Times bar in downtown Raleigh yesterday, Mr Obama arrived in the late afternoon with his wife Michelle only to find himself momentarily beerless.

"Where's my beer?" he asked, loud enough for the reporters to hear.

It's always amazing what crazy sh*t normally intelligent people will believe when fear and hatred and group prejudice get the better of them. Why, I can think of a highly-educated, insightful, brilliant black preacher who believes that the U.S. government invented HIV to destroy black folks. And I can think of a law professor at a legitimate university, who also commands a blog audience of 100,000 readers a day, who thinks that Barack Obama is a socialist. Yes, that's the same Barack Obama whose most admired economic thinker seems to be Alexander Hamilton and who supports the market-oriented cap-and-trade approach to containing global warming.

These are not information problems. These are psychiatric disorders, or cynical manipulations appealing to the ignorance and psychopathology of the audience.

Footnote And no, using the word "fascist" to describe an administration that practices torture, distrusts reason, despises the legal system, and believes that in wartime the Leader has ultimate power is not comparable. It's not a label I'd use — "fascism" properly speaking is corporatist, which Bushism isn't — but it's not a bad shorthand description of a major set of tendencies. No one who wants to leave the means of production in private hands can sanely be called a socialist.

I've wanted the primary season to be over for a long time. But Marc Ambinder is right: how is more important than when. If Hillary Clinton were to go back to waging a positive campaign (which, in Democratic terms, includes full-throated criticism of McCain) and leash her attack dogs so they stop talking about how white people won't vote for Obama, having her concede after Obama's big win in Oregon on May 20th or even after his likely wins in Montana and South Dakota June 2nd would be even better than having her concede now. Among other things, now that the Clinton camp has planted the notion that enforcing the DNC's rules is "disenfranchising" the voters of Michigan and Florida, those delegations have to be seated in some form, and it's better for a deal to be reached before the race is formally over.

It's easy to see that running a clean, positive campaign from here on out — losing gracefully — would be in Senator Clinton's interests, and those of her staff and her husband. But is it in their character? So far, the evidence isn't encouraging. They seem more interested in creating talking points for Rush Limbaugh. Of course, Limbaugh sounds natural saying "working class" when he means "white working class." But what does a Democratic operative think he's doing when he uses that language?

Update It gets worse. Isaac Chotiner of the New Republic catches this doozy from Thursday's USAT.

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Why, yes. There is a pattern emerging: a pattern of the Clinton campaign appealing more and more blatantly to racial prejudice. "Hard-working Americans, white Americans"?! No one who's black works hard?

Either HRC has completely lost her moral and political senses, or she's just so tired she's not capable of saying what she means. In either case, it's time to get the hook.

The other day John McCain, pandering to the wingnuts, went after Barack Obama for voting against confirming John Roberts as Chief Justice. That would we the same Justice Roberts who decided to disenfranchise a bunch of elderly nuns in Indiana for the crime of not having driver's licenses or passports in order to
"prevent" a form of voter fraud of which there is no evidence in the first place.

If I were Obama, I would be comfortable having that argument.

And if I were John Conyers, I'd want to have some hearings with videotape of those nuns.

Clinton supporter James Carville says that Barack Obama isn't man enough to be President, but that Hillary Clinton is. "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two." Clinton supporter Taylor Marsh cheers him on, and links gleefully to a story about how Clinton is "ballsy" and has the "testicular fortitude" Obama lacks. Now can we hear some more from the Clinton camp about the misogyny being deployed in this race?

1. Obama +15 (232,000) in North Carolina. Clinton + 1.8 (22,000) in Indiana*. There's still a tiny bit out in Indiana from Obama's strong areas; final margin might be near 20,000. (*Update: near-final numbers: Clinton spread in Indiana down to 18,500, or just under 1.5%. Updated update: final spread 13,000, or 1%. In NC, Obama's spread shunk a little, to 223,000 or 14%.)

2. Obama's NC margin more than balances out Clinton's margins in Indiana and Pennsylvania. So even if you believe that "total popular vote" means something in a mix of primaries and caucuses, and even if you want to count Florida, Clinton now can't catch Obama on that metric.

3. Obama now within 200 delegates of clinching the nomination. With his shares of the 200 pledged delegates and 60 add-ons still to be chosen, he needs about 40 of the roughly 220 currently uncommitted ex officio superdelegates to get there.

4. Tim Russert on Ms-NBC "We now know who the Democratic nominee will be."

5. Clinton has reportedly cancelled all of the public appearances she had scheduled for tomorrow.

6. Obama gave a pitch-perfect speech, starting out with gracious congratulations to HRC on winning Indiana and with kind words about his supporters in Indiana and the voters there, and then launching into his general-election stump speech.

This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country. Because we all agree that at this defining moment in history — a moment when we’re facing two wars, an economy in turmoil, a planet in peril — we can’t afford to give John McCain the chance to serve out George Bush’s third term. We need change in America.

... and then to a litany of all the people who need help and "can't afford four more years" of Bushism. He's learning how to link his soaring oratory to voters' bread-and-butter concerns.

6. Clinton continues to threaten a scorched-earth campaign focused on Michigan and Florida, but promises to work hard for the Democratic nominee in November. Others have described the speech as rambling and disconnected; I'm no fair judge of a Clinton speech; you can watch and judge for yourself. Two things struck me: she mentions campaigning in West Virginia and Kentucky, but omits Oregon, the largest to the remaining primaries; and she claims that she would carry Kentucky in the November, which is more likely than having the Rapture occur before then, but only barely so.

7. It appears that the new Clinton campaign management team of Wolfson and Garin managed to violate Mencken's Law: on the gas tax holiday, they lost votes by underestimating the intelligence of the voters. (And also gave Obama a chance to play to his strength and change the topic from Jeremiah Wright.)

Footnote Obama hit his 1.5-million-donor target sometime yesterday evening.

Si, se puede!

Sal si puedes!

Like most bloggers, journalists, and academics, I've been focusing on the contempt Hillary Clinton has displayed for the whole project of reasoned discourse about public policy by insisting that the gas tax holiday is a good idea even though she can't find anyone knowledgeable to agree, or even explain herself how it's supposed to work. I can forgive taking silly positions — no candidate can escape it entirely — but not deliberately making a silly position into a major campaign issue. On the gas tax, obliterating Iran, and now the empty threat to break up OPEC with a lawsuit, she has managed to look completely un-Presidential, negating her claim to policy expertise based on long experience.

But there's another aspect of the story that hasn't, so far as I know, gotten any attention: the contempt her actions display for her voters. By embracing an idea that only a fool or an ignoramus could actually believe, she has advertised to the world that she regards her voters as easy marks, children easily distracted by shiny objects.

I can imagine an independent-expenditure TV spot on this theme.

Overweight middle-aged man with a "mountain" accent, dressed in jeans, standing in front of a pickup truck with a gunrack and an American flag bumper sticker, looking straight at the camera:

Senator Clinton, you say that cutting the gasoline tax oil companies pay would save money for consumers. Everyone who knows the oil companies knows that's not so. The companies don't have to pass their savings along to us, and of course they won't. You can't find a single expert to say the idea would work. So why do you expect us to be dumb enough to believe it anyway?

Tell the truth, Senator, it makes me sorta angry. I don't cotton to being played for a fool.

Senator, I didn't go to Wellesley College or Yale Law School. I don't have a fancy house or millions of dollars. I don't have your experience in Washington. But let's get one thing clear, Senator Clinton. I'm not stupid.

Now, do we understand each other? [Turns away in disgust.]

Footnote One bonus from this whole flap: the mainstream press has done to Sen. Clinton what it almost never does to a Republican candidate. It has made it clear that her plan is without merit. But of course at base the Clinton plan is the McCain plan; McCain had it first. So when Barack Obama comes at John McCain over this little bit of attempted bamboozlement, the press will already be committed to the narrative "truth-teller vs. bogus idea." The above spot works just as well with Senator McCain's name inserted, except that he has eight fancy houses, not just one, and you'd have to take out the elite education and add a rich wife.

Two posts yesterday attracted reader complaints about sex-biased language: one in which I speculated on what might happen if Sen. Clinton "clawed her way" to the nomination (which a friendly long-time correspondent found "sexist"), and another in which I credited Sen. Obama for "ramming a lie back down" Sen. Clinton's throat (which a hostile first-time correspondent found "misogynist," "rapey," and "patriarchal.") [In that case, the sentence expressed confidence that Sen. Obama would be able to treat Sen. McCain similarly.]

I've edited both posts. After all, a gentleman has been defined as someone who is never rude unintentionally, and I'm nothing if not a gentleman. And I'm completely sympathetic to the project of trying to clean up the linguistic remnants of old prejudices: our language does need policing. (George Will, that fierce enemy of the "politically correct language police," would no doubt take offense if I referred to his "Mongoloid idiot son." And he would be right to do so. But if we can and should learn to say "Down syndrome," why can't we and shouldn't we learn to say "Native American" instead of "redskin"?)

But that doesn't mean that every usage that someone finds offensive is actually offensive. I'm prepared to give most groups pretty complete control over how they're labeled, and expressions such as "jew down" and "gyp" deserve to be retired. But "claw"? "Ram a lie down the liar's throat"? I don't see it. In particular, I don't think anyone would have objected had I described Rudy Giuliani as attempting to "claw his way" to the Republican nomination or urging that someone cram George W. Bush's latest lie down his throat. Does "claw" become sexist whenever it's applied to a woman because cats have claws and women who fight (physically or verbally) are sometimes likened to cats? As to ramming someone's lied back down his throat down someone's throat (or making him eat his words), it seems to me a far fetch to jump from those phrases to an image of forced oral copulation.

There's no doubt that Hillary Clinton has drawn hostility because she is female, and that some of that hostility has been expressed in grossly sexist language. (When a voter asked John McCain "How are you going to beat the bitch," McCain made no objection.) But that doesn't make every attack on Hillary Clinton a sexist attack. And to impute sexism to sex-neutral "claw" and "ram down a lie" simply because in a particular instance the target is female seems unreasonable. But I'm curious about the reaction of other readers.

Gordon Liddy practiced burglary and proposed kidnapping, firebombing, and (according to his own memor) political assassination as one of Richard Nixon's chief thugs in the 1970s. He remains proud of that to this day, describing his stint in prison as being "a prisoner of war." As a talk show host, he reminded his viewers that ATF agents wear flak jackets, so in order to kill them you should "go for a head shot" ... "head shots, head shots ... kill the sons of bitches." John McCain took money from Liddy in the 1990s and appears on his talk show, praising Liddy "for adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."

What was that about "unrepentent terrorists" again?

Steve Chapman — a libertarian, not a liberal or a Democrat — has the details.

Even if you're not in Indiana or North Carolina, you have a chance to vote this week. The Obama campaign has a target of 1.5 million donors by Tuesday, and right now they're about 12,000 short. $5 is a lot more than nothing. It means you're taking a stake in the campaign, and striking a blow for citizen-driven politics. If you've already given, talk to your friends.

Click to cast your vote.

Update Obama picks up 3000 contributors overnight, now only 9000 shy of the target. As it happens, RBC gets about 3000 readers per day. Coincidence? Or did every RBC viewer contribute? We report; you decide.

A correspondent thinks I've missed the main point about both "obliterate Iran" and the gas tax holiday. For Clinton, who has run on being the grown-up, experienced policy wonk in the race, the willingness to talk complete nonsense when the situation is desperate not only contradicts her major claim to office, it raises serious questions about her character. Her behavior on those issues has, by contrast with the behavior of the Democratic candidate, profoundly un-Presidential.

"Experience," it is said, "isn't what happens to you; it's what you make of what happens to you." Which candidate looked "experienced" this week?

Ezra Klein gets it right: John McCain's proposal to wreck the employment-based health insurance market would leave us with "health insurance for people who don't need health care." Jonathan Cohen has the gritty details. Short version: without employer-based pool or a national system, there's no way to give decent health insurance to those with expensive diseases, and McCain doesn't even plan to try.

Not only is this pure madness substantively, it ought to be rotten politics. But that depends on having a candidate who can take an opponent's lousy policy idea and show the voters how and why it's lousy policy. I'm confident that the candidate who is now making Hillary Clinton wish she'd never thought about trying to bamboozle the public on the gas tax holiday will do an equally good job on McCainCare in the general election.

Hillary Clinton on This Week, challenged to name a single expert who thinks her gas tax holiday makes sense:

I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven't worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans.

[snip]

We've got to get out of this mindset where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans.

Note how completely Bushian these responses are. "Don't trust them expurts."

Of course it's the case that experts make mistakes, and that sometimes the expert consensus is wrong. And it's perfectly appropriate for a political leader to say, "Yes, I know that most experts in this field disagree with my position, but here's why I think the experts are wrong about this one."

But Clinton doesn't do that. She doesn't try to explain why she thinks her proposal will work. Instead, she simply appeals to ignorance. Indeed, she more or less admits that she doesn't have a coherent plan, and certainly not one that would work for this summer:

I'm not going to put my lot in with economists, because I know if we get it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively.

But she continues to insist that making "the oil companies pay the gas tax instead of consumers and drivers" — even though the federal gasoline excise tax is already collected from refiners, not consumers — is somehow a good idea, even though she can't find an expert to agree with her and can't herself explain how it's supposed to work.

Of course Sen. Clinton is too intelligent and too knowledgeable to believe any of this. She hasn't parted company with reality. (I'm less clear about Sen. McCain; he's saner than George W. Bush, but not all that sane in absolute terms.) But by deliberately making a big campaign issue on a question where she has chosen what she knows to be the substantively wrong side, Sen. Clinton has definitely parted company with the reality-based community.

Update Bob Reich has more.

Second update A nice amateur video makes the point clearly:

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Kossack Parisgnome makes an excellent catch, finding a three-year-old Face the Nation interview transcript (pp. 2-3) in which Hillary Rodham Clinton embraces the John McCain idea that it doesn't matter how long we stay in Iraq, and the analogy to having troops in Korea:

Senator McCain made the point earlier today, which I agree with, and that is, it's not so much a question of time when it comes to American military presence for the average American; I include myself in this. But it is a question of casualties.

We don't want to see our young men and women dying and suffering these grievous injuries that so many of them have. We've been in South Korea for 50-plus years. We've been in Europe for 50-plus. We're still in Okinawa with respect to protection there coming out of World War II.

You know, we have been in places for very long periods of time. And in recent history, we've made a commitment to Bosnia and Kosovo, and I think what is different is the feeling that we're on a track that is getting better and that we can see how the Iraqi government will begin to assume greater and greater responsibility. The elections were key to that. The training, equipment, equipping and motivating of the Iraqi security forces is key to that. But so is our understanding that if we were to artificially set a deadline of some sort, that would be like a green light to the terrorists, and we can't afford to do that.

If Hillary were somehow to cheat her way to the nomination, I guess the DNC would have to pull those "100 years" anti-McCain ads, don't you think?

I know this isn't a really important issue, like whether you wear Chinese-made costume jewelry on your lapel, but can we hope that some reporter will ask Sen. Clinton when she changed her mind about this?

Stephanopoulos gave Clinton a chance to back off her "obliterate Iran" statement, but she chose to reiterate it instead.

This is madness, on two different levels.

Morally: Seventy million people live in Iran. They are currently ruled by a religious dictatorship covered by a thin veneer of "controlled democracy": the voters can vote, but only for candidates the mullahs approve in advance. Threatening to "obliterate" them because of an action by the government they didn't choose means offering to outbid Hitler, Stalin, and Mao in the mass-murderer auction.

Diplomatically: The current Iranian regime has an unsure grip on power. Younger people and the educated urban elite (think of it as the Iranian version of the Obama constituency) hates the current ruling clique and would like to move toward democracy and civil liberty. Iran's wealth and military power make it a key player in the Middle East, and the fact that Iranians aren't Arabs means that Iran isn't necessarily part of the anti-Israel coalition. (The Shah was strongly pro-Israel, and that wasn't what caused him to fall.) Bringing about regime change in Iran by fostering the growth of democratic forces must rank very high on any intelligent list of American foreign policy objectives: much higher, for example, than achieving a stable Iraq.

Even within the current ruling group, Ahmadi-Nejad's fanatic anti-Western stance is controversial. He could easily lose his position in the elections next year.

Anything that strengthens Ahmadi-Nejad against the less bomb-happy fundamentalists, and anything that strengthens the fundamentalists against the democratic forces, is very bad for the world. A threat from a major American politician to obliterate Iran, which is sure to be repeated endlessly in the state-controlled mass media there, is a gift to the bad guys.

Even during the Cold War, no American President ever explicity threatened to "obliterate" the Soviet Union. Clinton's comment raises serious questions about her fitness for the office she holds, let alone the one she is seeking. It is precisely because the United States has the biggest stick in the history of the world that we can and must talk softly.

Like the gas tax holiday, "obliterate Iran" is a position that none of Clinton's sophisticated supporters can embrace. It was designed to please the boobs who confuse bluster with strength, and those Jews so full of hatred of all things Muslim that they have lost hold of whatever moral principles they used to have. Having embraced voodoo economics (and even the Republican idea that listening to experts is elitist) in the gas tax holiday, Clinton has now embraced cowboy dip