Umm, except Michel Obama's thesis is available.

Maybe, you should like, read the article before you claim it is "so diffuse, even inchoate, that it's llike some ancient blunderbuss".

Because you evidently missed the link to Politico publishing the said thesis:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8642.html

That ultimately cost the Clinton's the primaries. Face it, the origin of the worst of this isn't going to be identified with the Republicans, but rather the Clintonistas. In short the backlash is not falling on the Republicans, who have figured out how to come out clean, but on Hillary Clinton and the wankers who supported her in this manner.

While if Hillary had not given McCain a huge advantage by setting up the Republican slime machine for him, this would ordinarily have limited effectiveness - the effect of people going out and finding the facts were a load of bullshit would have balanced out the effect of people believing the bullshit - thanks to Hillary, the backlash is going to go against her and not McCain. The email campaign is made of win for the Republicans.

negative reviews that don't even have the common decency to be funny.

As a Crankylander right up until the venerable Mr Cranky got bored and went away, I demand some more bite to the biting reviews.

The religious left.

Not the right, they pay lipservice to the idea of God as being the originator of all virtue but in truth their God is one of hell, not heaven. The problem here is the religious left.

The religious left throughout the millenia has allowed the theft of human good by human gods. They define virtues as "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Jewish" or "Hindu" and then wonder why Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus engage in things like genocide.

When you declare a virtue particular to your particular tribe you define those not of your tribe as not having those virtues. This is why the religious left is poisonous - and this is why Obama's families religious affiliation is suddenly so important that rumours around it are hurting him in the elections.

If Obama is not your brand of Christian he isn't really human to you, he doesn't really have your "values" to you because you define those values as being of your particular section of your particular tribe.

This helps McCain, who runs under the Republican banner of "Faith is good."

The Republicans can get away with murder because while we are all focussing on stuff that is really between the president and himself, and maybe his wife in the case of infidelity, the Republicans are proposing things like invading the second largest oil producer in the world during an oil price crisis.

There is no option here, McCain would be a disaster unrivaled in American history not simply through his own flaws, but also through the fact that he would face a hostile reception on the world stage.

Americans like to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't matter, but the thing is, the rest of the world is who you are trying to sell your products to. They are the people you owe money to. They supply you with their products, some of which you need in order to make your products to sell back to them.

Being seen as assholes is not going to help you as much as a lot of idiots seem to think it will. You need the guy who comes across well, you need that salesmanship and you need somebody who isn't seen as Bush III running the country or your business is doomed.

But you don't need a Democratic Congress or Senate. Too many Democrats have rolled over and given President Bush precisely what he wants, this is because they know you have no real choice in November, third party doesn't stand a chance and the Republicans do mean the death of America as a super-power if they win. Everything they do for Bush at this point they do with an eye to Obama having the same degree of power.

However, this can be averted. Independent candidates are available for the Senate and Congress, vote for them. Sure, the president will be a Democrat, but with enough indepentents to form a swing vote in the two houses, maybe the harm done to America's legal system can be reversed.

Whatever you are smoking boet.

Blaming bigotry is a cop-out that ignores the far more basic problem.

And that problem is stupidity and lying.

I mean, I am ambigious about Obama right now. His FISA vote really disapointed me and left me feeling that perhaps I had been wrong about him the whole time.

Then I come onto this board and see this shit that the Hillary supporters spread, it reminds me of precisely why I couldn't support Hillary - the whole lot of it is bullshit.

I mean, there are real reasons to question Obama for his conduct - particularly his FISA vote, but instead we get this insipid lying where Obama is "connected to terrorists" or is automatically guilty of some form of vote fraud for following the rules set by a DRC that was stacked against him, or any of the rest of it.

All of this noise makes it hard to find things to genuinely change your support, because sources you might listen to if they were, you know, sane cannot be trusted because they have somehow elected to inhabit a fantasy land where their candidate is an angel and the other candidate is the devil.

Now I am not calling for a return to civility, civility was never that great for honest discourse, but rather for a return to honesty. Lets at least argue the points as they really are, not as you really wish them to be.

Obama won fair and square, the sooner Clinton's supporters accept that, the sooner they can get back to being considered something other than sore losers.