Please. If you see the coverage of Hillary as a "coronation," then I don't know what you're reading. Certainly not the letters sections of Salon, the Huffington Post, and other progressive sites. Certainly not the blogs. Certainly not CNN or the New York Times or MSNBC or right-wing talk or...

And the idea that this is some kind of "conspiracy" by Scherer and "Hillary supporters" is just too bizarre. Or it should be.

She has, for one reason or another, grabbed a large lead. I'm certainly surprised by it, but there it is. It's in polls, not secret deals in back rooms. And the front-runner gets the coverage. I don't know if that's a law of nature, but it's not a conspiracy. They do so many polls, they can't all be fixed. It's also clear that, once Hillary is out front, elements in the press, from the Rich/Dowd/Matthews axis of trivia to the Politico/National Review/Fox crowd, to find a chink in the armor, or, failing that, to make something up, so they can bring her down. The motivation for that is either psychosexual (Dowd, Matthews), to purely ideological (the right blogosphere), to a frustrated progressive wing.

Hillary seems to be like the Pats or USC: a well-run machine. Of course, Stanford beat USC, and the wheels can come off Hillary. I think the race will get closer during the foreshortened primaries. Obama or Edwards or one of the others does stand a chance, but they won't get it if they start sounding like Limbaugh on Hillary, or start cursing some cosmic conspiracy. That doesn't get people to trust you, or think of your candidate if Hillary is discovered calling up Satan in some coven in Dubuque.

A much better topic is, how did the primary season get so out of control? Why will it all be over so quickly? Whose idea was this? This foreshortened primary becomes, more than anything else, a money primary.

And Obama out-raised Hillary, and Edwards certainly had enough money. Why didn't they catch fire? Answering that question, and figuring out a way to get out of it, that's the trick you've got to pull.

Hillary is a very smooth campaigner. This is bad?

And by the way, if you want to call the question from the woman "staged," what are you going on? Did you ask her if the campaign had asked her to be there? Or is it just your "feeling," which seems to be a journalistic contagion when it comes to talking about Clinton? As long as the woman's dilemma is real, which I have no doubt about, putting her in the crowd and getting her to ask the question is fine -- if it happened. Remember the fellow at the Democratic debate for the unions? He got up and spoke about his wife not having health insurance? Very moving, very true, and very staged. Think it was an accident that he spoke? What are you, a rube? Oh, but it's only Hillary who is "contrived".

On the campaign trail, everything is a little processed. The candidates say the same things over and over again. They have to. That's the nature of modern campaigns. Modern, lazy journalists have an easy explanation: Hillary's not "authentic," so it's her fault.

I see the character assassins are out tonight. Amazing how many people 20% of the population can simulate.

That's what they're raising money for. The beasts!

http://www.clintonfoundation.org/index.htm?gclid=CM-UnqHlhY8CFSAZIwodcjFuwQ

Hunt around. You might want to give to some of the causes yourselves.

What the hell is wrong with you people? You have some perfectly good candidates. Write stuff about Obama or Edwards or Kucinich. Write stuff about how crazy the GOP candidates are, and hunt around for the scandals there, and there are lots of them. Write stuff about how Hillary is too centrist, or how this vote or that speech is the wrong approach. What the hell is the compulsion to start acting like the wingnuts of the '90s, unable to stop the Clintons so you hunt and peck for scandal after scandal? You're very sad people.

Bill has been raising money for tsunami relief, AIDS in Africa, and a whole bunch of charities. And? Oh, and some Democratic donors also give to candidates. And? A vague smear is a vague smear. Please, get a life.

On the other hand, Hillary has said she's for publicly-financed elections. So am I, if only because I'm tired of reading blather like this, that isn't anything but speculative guilt by association.

The enemy, Salon, is called the Republican Party, and the war hawks and extremists who run it. If you find out something substantive against Hillary -- or Edwards, or Obama or any of the other candidates or their positions, you'll tell us, right? Won't you? Or are you just a bunch of crunchy-granola lefties who won't ever elect a president of your own?

The Edwards who voted with Hillary? Surely he couldn't be a whitened sepulchre. He's one of the good guys. Who cast just as bad a vote as Hillary on that one, listening to the same consultants.

Meanwhile, Obama was like me: able to make up his mind quickly that the Iraq adventure was going to be horrible. But really, he wasn't under anything like the same pressure, though, was he?

Finally, Paglia shows her real stripes as a fan of the most useless Bush Dem of them all, Diane Feinstein. Very instructive.

But it doesn't matter so much. Remember, a record percentage of the vote in 2004 was evangelical. Even if there are "hands across the water" at the GOP convention -- where the bridge fell down, remember? -- it's going to be very hard for them to GOTV.