REPUBLICANS FOR HILLARY

And so the drama continues.

I must admit, as a political commentator, I enjoy the endless stream of material generated by the battle between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama for the Democratic nomination. But, I'm seriously starting to wonder if it's doing us any good at all. The results of the past few primaries don't seem to be giving the people any true clues as to who the best candidate would be. Barack Obama is spending all his time trying desperately to distance himself from his fiery preacher, Reverend Wright, and hardly any time clarifying his positions on the hard issues. At the same time, Hillary Clinton is doing her little clap-dance over her victories that were largely handed to her by line-crossing Republicans. With half the left-wing media supporting her and the right wing media doing all the dirty work for her, are we getting a clear sense of what the fall run-off would really look like?

I don't think so.

That is, unless you seriously believe that the Republican cross-overs will still be there for Hillary come November.

It's deception of mammoth proportions. My prediction is that Hill will win the Republican-controlled state of Indiana this May 6th (in a large part due to the Republican cross-overs) and will lose the North Carolina primary. And nothing will change. The Hillary supporters will continue to point at her surge as evidence of Obama's weakening candidacy. But is it really? In the fall it's highly unlikely that Hillary will enjoy the passive support of Republicans like she does now and will most likely never regain the support of black voters who are growing more and more disenchanted with the workings of a Democrat delegate system that seems to work on a caste system designed to empower the elite within the party.

And right wing talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham could not be happier.

Should they get their wish of a Hillary nomination, they will have a huge cache of material that they aren't even trying to put out there yet. Just this week Hillary made a big foreign policy miscue when she stated that a nuclear attack on Israel by Iran would result in the United States trying to "totally obliterate" Iran. This is just the kind of rhetoric the hard -liners in Iran need to keep up their contention that the U.S. is simply an extension of Israel. For her to state something like that publicly shows that Hillary is simply not the foreign policy genius she claims to be.

And yet all I heard from the right-wing talk show hosts this week was Reverend Wright this and Reverend Wright that.

Let's compare Hillary's statement to the hoopla that was generated when Barack said that he would attack Al Queda strongholds in Pakistan if we had actionable intelligence. Or even Senator McCain's off-hand comment that we may be in Iraq for a hundred years. The press ran off with opinion column after opinion column about how unprepared they both were for the reality of foreign policy. But which one is the worse of the three statements? I actually agree with McCain's assessment and with Barack's, but Hillary's is off the charts. The U.S. should not touch off a nuclear Holocaust without first searching for world support and other solutions.

As the race continues, we all need to be mindful of one reality. This is no indication of what the race will look like once the Dems have chosen their nominee. The Right will go back to attacking and dismantling whoever the nominee is. For Barack, we're already seeing how this will play out. They will continue to try to assert that Obama is a clandestine Muslim who hates white America despite the fact that he is half white himself. They will continue to try to attach Reverend Wright's ideology to Barack through endless loops of his sermons. But what will their attacks on Hillary look like? For now, we have no idea. H.C.