OverClinton.com

That Republicans would seize on Obama's accurate description of many Americans as embittered is to be expected. It flatly contradicts the Republican view of the world, which sees only by tax cuts to the rich, war profits enriching the coffers of Cheney and the corporatist cabal, and McSame with his half dozen homes while average Americans face foreclosures. But for the Clinton campaign to use it as an opportunity to imply that Obama is un-American is gutter politics, even for them -- although, unfortunately, no surprise either. Some in the punditocracy, apparently fearful that Obama's steady progress toward the nomination is not exciting enough news, are presenting Obama's remarks, delivered at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last week, as the kind of campaign-ending faux pas that the Clintons have been praying for. Others disagreed.

"It's unlikely to stop his march to the nomination," Joe Trippi, former adviser to the Edwards campaign told the Washington Post. It is more likely that the Clinton campaign did itself more damage by crossing the line and insinuating once again that Obama was somehow un-American."

As someone who's been what others would identify as a "liberal" or "worse," dating back to the time I helped organize my fellow high school students to oppose the bombing of Cambodia, it's always a little disorienting when I find myself agreeing with a Reaganite. But, for example, when Pat Buchanan writes "Iraq was an unnecessary war that may become one of the great blunders in U.S. history," I have to agree.

And now I find myself agreeing with Peggy Noonan. A reader called our attention to her March 2008 Wall Street Journal commentary titled "Getting Mrs. Clinton."

A reader called our attention to Christopher Hitchens commentary in Slate.com on Hillary's serial misstatements on Bosnia. Lying about dangers at the airport and environs, it would seem, is the least of it.

On April 3, the Washington Post reported on a "heart-rending anecdote" that Hillary Clinton used regularly in her stump speeches.

I remember listening to a story about a young woman in a small town along the Ohio River, in Meigs County, who worked in a pizza parlor.... She got pregnant, she started having problems. There's no hospital left in Meigs County, so she had to go to a neighboring county. She showed up, and the hospital said, 'You know, you've got to give us $100 before we can see you.' She didn't have $100. So the young woman went back home.The next time she went back, she was in an ambulance. It turned out she lost the baby. She was airlifted to Columbus. And after heroic efforts at the medical center, she died."

The New York Times picked up the story on April 5, when an executive of the hospital in question demanded that the Clinton campaign stop repeating the story, which they asserted was false.

On Friday, April 4, the Wall Street Journal reported that Clinton chief campaign strategist and pollster, Mark Penn, had "met with Colombia's ambassador to the U.S. on Monday to discuss a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact the presidential candidate opposes." The Clinton campaign's initial response was that Penn "was not there on behalf of the campaign."

The story prompted immediate comparison with Obama campaign advisor Austan Goolsbee's meeting with Canadian officials in which his attempts to offer a nuanced interpretation of Obama's position on trade was seized upon by the Clinton campaign as evidence that Obama's policy positions and rhetoric were inconsistent.

Salon.com's Andrew Leonard described Goolsbee's "folly" as that of a political novice "being frank in a politically charged atmosphere," in contrast to Penn, who could hardly be accused of political naievete.

The Times of London's Gerard Baker has an excellent piece on the Clinton's penchant for "misspeaking".

Misspeaking, says Baker, is a "well-formed habit" for the Clintons.

In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, in an interview with Vermont Public Radio, urged Hillary to withdraw.

There is no way that Senator Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination. She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama. Now, obviously that’s a decision that only she can make. Frankly, I feel that she would have a tremendous career in the Senate.

On three successive days noted NY Times columnists highlighted Hillary Clinton's dwindling chances of winning the nomination, and increasing chances of damaging the party and its nominee.

First, on Tuesday, March 25, it was conservative David Brooks with The Long Defeat"

"Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet," he wrote, "but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign."

In a new article at The New Republic, E.J. Dionne asks if Rev. Jeremiah Wright is "as far outside the African-American mainstream as many of us would like to think?"

Not surprisingly, his answer is no. Dionne notes that another "black leader who was capable of getting very angry indeed is the one now being invoked against Wright. His name is Martin Luther King Jr."

Dionne quotes King's February 4, 1968 speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church:

God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war.... And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.