"He [Obama] stirred up leftists into hating Hillary Clinton and using old Republican accusations on her to get her out of the race..."

point 1: I've seen zero evidence that Barack Obama personally took any active role in fomenting antipathies to Hillary Clinton.

point 2: Many of the people holding negative views about Hillary Clinton came to their conclusions long before Barack Obama announced his candidacy. Most of them, in fact.

point 3: those people can't simply be ideologically pigeonholed as "leftists"- a term that's become so vague, overused, and inappropriately used that it's typically difficult for me to know its intended meaning, unless/until I read enough additional context to get a sense of the writer employing the label.

point 4: when it comes to accusations/allegations, what primarily matters is whether or not they're baseless. If they have merit, it shouldn't matter who purveys them. Considering the source should only matter if the accusations are slanderous.

point 5: for what it's worth, I noted almost nothing in the way of public references during the primaries to the various scandalous allegations that circulated throughout the era of Bill Clinton's presidency- or to a more recent Clinton-allied fiasco that was seemingly tailor-made for partisan attack: the apprehension and conviction of Sandy Berger a few years back, for repeated instances of theft of classified documents from the National Archive. Berger was one of the top foreign policy advisers for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Contrary to the numerous complaints about the intensity of the attacks on the Clintons in the primary season, I got an overall impression of considerable restraint (blog comments aside- but it's like that.) Even the Republicans were holding their tongues- or perhaps "holding their fire" is more like it.

"all the things that are usually held up as badges of our superiority, like morality and love and ethics, and courage, are all clearly stuff evolved painfully by out animal ancestors and visible in all the nonhuman animals around us, especially mammals..."

I think you're unclear on the concepts known as "morality", "love", and "ethics."

I could provide so many examples of various mammal species- including the higher primates- adhering to instinctual patterns of behavior that play out in ways generally considered "cruel" and "heartless" by humans that it would make terribly depressing, and graphically gory, reading.

The poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature, offers a germane commentary on the topic:

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.

The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.

When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.

If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.

Lions and lice don't waver in their course.

Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,

in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun

among the signs of bestiality

a clear conscience is Number One.

Let's just say that Wislawa Szymborska could have resorted to considerably more pungent and unsavory imagery to get that point across.

I'll grant that occasionally other species of animals behave in ways that, over and beyond anthropomorphic speculations and projections, may actually authentically demonstrate instincts of caring or compassion. But I can't think of any such examples that aren't terribly circumscribed.

Concepts of "morality" and "ethics" are dependent on notions of law and principle, and I've never found the slightest evidence that other animals have what it takes to put anything nearly that systematic together.

As for "love"- there's another oft-used word that defies a single consistent definition.

Have I personally encountered compelling evidence that any non-human animal species has the capacities of consciousness advanced enough to formulate an ideal of "universal love"- as in "an all-pervasive feeling of the heart, consciously awakened to encompass all of creation with love (etc., etc.)"? No.

The late John Lilly would disagree with me- he was a proponent of the notion that cetaceans like dolphins and large whales had access to capacities of consciousness exceeding those of humans. He never provided any support for this other than a few highly subjective personal anecdotes.