You heard me right. McCain's full-throated chorus of defenders has boxed itself into a logical trap: If you buy the idea that Wes Clark's comment about John McCain was outrageous, then it's outrageous to criticize him!

Before I present my argument, a little context. First, we are not wasting our...

Barack Obama's candidacy is an ongoing series of calculations and adjustments with a single desired outcome: victory. And, controversial as this may sound, I have no problem with that - if (and this is a big "if") it doesn't over-calculate and bring harm to itself or the party.

Obama hasn't...

There's room for a progressive critique of the Democratic Party, but Ralph Nader isn't the one to fill it. Here are some Nader gems from an interview with the Rocky Mountain News:

"There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate: He's...

I can't be the only one who's been privately warning Democrats: Obama and the party need emergency preparedness plans. Major events between now and November could change the course of the election - especially a U.S. strike on Iran, or a terror attack against Americans at home or abroad.

At an insurance conference last week, I saw a 10-foot video screen in one of the exhibitors' booths. It showed one of those video games where you can pretend to be a musician even if you can't play.
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A famous legal brief in the 1970s called...

Could high gasoline prices become a successful election-year sledgehammer - against Obama and the Democrats? That might seem unlikely, given that oil was trading at $24 a barrel when the GOP took office in 2001 and was floating between $134 and $140 this week. With a record like that, and...

The blogosphere's buzzing tonight with news that the McCain campaign is using the music of ABBA to woo disaffected Clinton voters. The excitement began with the "news leak" that Sen. McCain is fond of the Swedish popsters.

Well, fine. As Maureen Dowd would say if she were to...

It was moving to read Tom Hayden's reflections on Bobby Kennedy's candidacy of 1968, his own role in it, and the ways in which Obama's campaign has reconnected him with the spirit of those times. Yet I find it equally moving to consider the ways in which Obama and...

Sure, we've had our differences. We've seen the Clintons in very different ways, you and I - especially their campaign tactics. Where you've seen honest if tough campaigning, I've seen the cynical manipulation of divisive emotions and a desire to put self before others.

The race is over, so the...

Bo Diddley is dead. He was a living gateway between times and places who brought African rhythms and African-American chants into the Top Forty. Together with Chuck Berry, he built rock and roll. He also built his own guitars, from spare parts (his first one was made from a cigar...

There were a number of reasons why the Rules Committee made the decisions it did on Saturday, some of them easier to understand than others. But this weekend it continued to use words like "penalty" and "punish," which has been its tactical error all along. When people hear words like...

It's time to move on to the general election battle -- but we can't. It's not wrong for Hillary Clinton to keep running, but it is wrong to keep using reckless, irrational, and irresponsible arguments that delegitimize the future nominee and hurt the party's chances in November.

The "popular...

Hillary's rhetoric of the past 24 hours has gone from conciliatory to cataclysmic, turning on a high-speed dime like some UFO over the Florida swamps. An awful lot of Democrats are shocked and outraged at her use of civil rights rhetoric over the primary dispute, especially...

It's good to see Erica Jong, a passionate Clinton supporter, do the right thing and speak out for a united Democratic Party in November. And yet one of her first commenter promptly attacked her with a "Democrats should vote Republican" screed that pushes a new website called "McCainb4Obama."

Fine....

As Hillary Clinton's campaign winds down, commentators are talking about sexism. Good. It's infested this race, and many of us have deplored it. But reality is multifaceted. While Sen. Clinton has faced bigotry, so has her opponent. Maybe there will be a chance to learn from this hard campaign as...

Racism in the United States is real. Social scientists know it, the Republicans know it, the Clintons know it ... and African Americans absolutely know it. Racist appeals are being used against Obama, and a new "postpartisan" generation of white Christian preachers is in a unique position to respond.

Hillary's remaining advocates have said that she was only 'telling it like it is,' albeit with what they'd call a little awkward phrasing, when she told the AP last week that "hard working Americans, white Americans" will never vote for Obama. Okay. As long as we're telling it like is,...

It's Mother's Day in 2008 and somewhere a woman is about to be murdered for witchcraft. Just this week a crowd of 20 people in India gathered to beat a 75-year-old woman for being a witch. A judicial inquiry found that 150 women had been tortured for witchcraft...

For weeks Sen. Clinton and her supporters taunted the Obama campaign by asking, "Why can't he close the deal?" Fair question. If Obama is going to be the nominee, they argued, why can't he deliver some more decisive wins?

After tonight's results the question has to be reversed: Why couldn't...

A senior Democratic Party official outlined a new proposal that would allow only white voters to participate in the remaining primaries. Under this proposal the Party would only count the votes of Caucasians whose income level is considered to be "working class," and whose political orientation is considered conservative -...