"How come its okay for Billary to attack the Rezko connection, but if Barack were to bring up similar Billary dealings (Whitewater, Monica, et al) it would be horrible?!"

Well, it would be nice if you didn't call the former president and the senator from New York Billary, you know?

And anytime I want to hear what Obama supporters think about Whitewater (the Clintons lost $40,00, and the investigation came up with bupkus) and Monica (Bill didn't resist the flirtation, and he should have known the Republicans would spy on him), then I'll go over the the Obama-- er, the Huffington Post. All they ever found was the girl, you know? And she was alive, happy, and they dragged her in front of a grand jury for no good reason. I'm not sure who the scandal is about, Bill or the GOP's lust for power and tapping phones. But Obama supporters accept everything nasty any Republican has ever said about Bill. Hey, I hear he killed Foster, right? And ran drugs out of Mena, Arkansas. Track that down, will you?

The problem, Joan, is that you are sitting there on the Axis of Weasels Network -- except for Keith -- and you can't say the truth, because you won't be on anymore. Rachel Maddow found out: she spoke the truth about Matthews, and then got a job only after she made kissy-face with that psycho. MSNBC started the "let's get the chick" game when they joined the Obama campaign in the October 30 debate.

Matthews found out that wasn't an effective way to destroy Hillary, so on the day after, he starts claiming that it was race that lost New Hampshire. Really? On what evidence? Because women are racists? Because the more working-class Hillary supporters are racists, as Andy Kohut implied? It was right around then when all the shows started "looking again" at the LBJ-JFK comparison, and spinning relentlessly. Now it seems to be an undisputed factoid, like, "Gore is so insecure about his sexuality that he has to hire Naomi Wolf to tell him to be a man" became a given in 2000.

My only problem with Obama is that he has positioned himself, because he doesn't want to be taken as the Jesse Jackson candidate, further right than Hillary.

After all, wasn't race a part of this vote? Didn't the injection of race as an issue come from a) the Obama campaign and b) the news media, and c) didn't it help Obama?

It started right after New Hampshire: Hillary won because whites are racists (any evidence of that from studies? doesn't have to be), and the Clintons are being nasty (overlooking the incredible nastiness from Obama supporters from the summer on). The media goes with the narrative.

On the other hand, who's surprised that Obama won in South Carolina? He was expected to. He'll win in Georgia, too. At the moment, he's still trailing in almost all other states, and by a lot. So we'll see.

But I'm sad that you've lost your mind here, too. Bill compared Obama's wins with Jesse Jackson's? What the hell's the matter with that? When did Jesse become an evil man? Jesse won in South Carolina, twice. Fact. Bill hopes that Obama can be contained to the one state where he's been leading: Georgia. Does race have anything to do with that? You bet it does. Does gender have anything to do with Hillary's vote? You bet it does. I was too young to vote in 1960, but everybody I knew was very enthusiastic about JFK. He was Irish and Catholic. I believe that had something to do with his support, or part of it, where I lived. And we knew very well, and were cheered by, his address on the separation of church and state, reassuring the Protestants that he wouldn't be taking orders from Rome. Later, I found out he was lying about the "missile gap," which might have changed my leanings.

Point is, did Obama's race have anything to do with the blacks of South Carolina voting for him? Sure it did. Of course, the next sentence is, "but he got 25% of the white vote." Yeah, and the white candidates got 75%. And Hillary got 35% of the black vote, hardly small potatoes.

As for the "black candidate" thing, well, you have one unsourced report by the AP, and a ton of guessing and supposition to get to where that's evil.

And read Somerby to see how "Clintonian" Josh has been.

The truth is, one of Obama's biggest assets is this: big guns in the press in the '90s joined with the right in a group hate session of the Clintons. They continued with the War on Gore. And they've never been taken to account. And their names are hardly ever named, and never by anyone with any power in the press. The result is something like Iraq, if Judy Miller was still writing for the Times. They're going after Hillary just like they went after Gore. That's what you get when you don't clear the bastards out.

Indeed, I would like for race to vanish as a consideration. I'd love it if we just got analyses of policies, and of records. But if you try to understand anything through the mass media, you see as through a glass, darkly.