Sincere. Forceful. Unabashed.

And, most important of all, noble.

Watch Hillary’s finest moment. You will be watching history:

The Clintons have returned in force. Just like Caesar at Pharsalus, you think you have them pinned down and starved out, then you drop your guard for a moment and for the throat they go. In this case, they just got Hillary’s name entered as a possible Convention nominee.

The New York Daily News reported recently that Clinton had asked not to be nominated. But at a fundraiser last week in California, Clinton told supporters she was looking for a way to recognize them at the convention. “I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views respected, she said. “I think that is a very big part of how we actually come out unified.”

That “way” will just happen to be a parade of division, a muttering chorus of doubt like a bad case of tinitis.

Colbert was right. This isn’t just “catharsis.” It’s a whole damn Greek drama.

Why the DNC allowed this to happen is beyond me - like we need more mania, arrogance, disunity, incompetence, nostalgia, avarice, back-biting and partisanship in this campaign. It certainly isn’t for the cause of banding behind Barack, as recent events have shown.

First we had Bill using an ABC exclusive interview opportunity to gripe about the primaries and deny that Obama’s ready to be President:

Then it came out that, behind closed doors, Hillary had encouraged her supporters in “PUMA” (Party Unity My Ass) to find some way to express the will to nominate her at the convention.

All this is occurring with the backdrop of The Atlantic having published the e-mails of the Clinton campaign; e-mails that reveal:

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.

Also clarified was the strategy of the Clinton campaign against Obama - that being to always be on the attack; to go for his person, not his policies; to cast him as “foreign” and not Americans. These are the very strategies of the GOP, and they are attacks that the Clintons have never refuted - have, in fact, only underhandedly stoked. It is no surprise that they are attacks that still have edge and venom to them.

What is a surprise is that all of this amounts to the DNC and the Obama campaign spotlighting the Clintons at the Convention. Given key speaking slots - even for Chelsea - and central billing on the schedule, they will be dominating the coverage with their controversy, their undermining unpredictability, their swaggering spitefulness.

Already they’ve managed to secure a rotten plank in the DNC platform, one emetically toxic to the cause of feminism, that as much as states that Hillary’s primary loss was due not to Obama’s excellence but to “demeaning portrayals of women [that] cheapen our debates, dampen the dreams of our daughters, and deny us the contributions of many.” How proponents of the Clinton position cannot see that their planned “protest’s” tawdry emotionalism, passive-aggression and self-indulgent divisiveness would be pathetic regardless of gender is beyond me. That they are not only allowed, but even endorsed, and transformed into an animus to accuse media bias and therefore dismiss the failings of the disgusting Clinton campaign as non-existent is a slash through the hamstrings for both women’s equality and political progress.

It is likely that the foundation of the Convention will be further cracked as the insurgent cries of PUMA get to voice their open-throated outrage that their cult idol, Clinton, did not triumph - or in the hopes that she still will.

Why the Democrats are not preventing this, and letting the isolated and bankrupt Clintons just starve away in a pit of their plummeting poll numbers, is beyond me. They are putting the knife to their outstretched throats for the sake of some nebulous loyalty to the wheezing machine of the past. They just don’t get it - the last thing this xenophobic feeding frenzy of a race needs is more blood in the water.

Why they don’t get it is one of the chief reasons it took a city-annihilating hurricane, an economic topple, two debilitating and senseless wars, massive civil rights violations and a smattering of sex scandals to bring them back to something resembling power in 2006: The America of today does not crave complexity, revolutionary anger, minority sensitivity, heated debate and diversity.

The America of the 21st century is scared, tired, hopeless.

They want simple answers, unflagging positivity, overweaning pride, absolute loyalty and unity.

Until the DNC gets this, they’re never going to really hold the throne.

And if the ravenous Clintons - who have already muscled their way into turning the Convention into televised party suicide - have their way, that throne will be set on one of the prettiest and most promising pile of broken dreams we have seen in over a generation.

Brilliant observations on the Clinton campaign - and Cult of Personality - by Stephen Colbert:

Keith Olbermann weaves a jolly video recap of the Primary season. Music is the appropriate “The Hardest Geometry Problem in the World” from the ‘Rushmore‘ soundtrack, by the awesomely talented Mark Mothersbaugh.

It brings to my mind two things:

One, the smell and feel of Bisquik pancakes, made just right, which for reasons only Poe’s narrator in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ can connect, will ever be evoked by thoughts of Mike Huckabee.

And two, this simple prescription for the minor fissure in the Democratic Party: Debt or no debt paid off, Hillary needs to begin quietly showing up at the town halls of “hardworking Americans, white Americans,” and start informing them she lied:

About Farrakhan, about Obama’s inferiority to McCain, about Ayers, about Wright, about his lying about her NAFTA scandals, about being elitist, about all the scum she raked up and hurled randomly at him - viral Muslim sleeper agent e-mails to 3am Phone Calls.

She needs to look her supporters right in the face and say, “I was wrong then. I’m right now. Vote for the man I convinced you was a villain, less than the opposition candidate.”

Fortunately for us all, these are Hillary supporters. They’ll do whatever she tells them to.

The buzzer has sounded, and by the rules of the game, Barack Obama is the winner of the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency.

Barack Obama has effectively clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, based on an Associated Press tally of convention delegates.

Now it’s time for the umpires (DNC), fellow teams (superdelegates) and crowd (body politic) to drag the loser off the field, and for the sake of party, country and future, tell her that just stopping the harmful lies she’s been spouting isn’t enough - she needs to start some major apologizing.

If that sounds like I don’t expect she’ll do the dignified thing and follow the rules, well, she’s earned that lack of dignity.

But most importantly today, Obama has earned the Presidential nomination.

There’s no news that’s new these days. So, I give you a new edition of old news: The Clintons have gone completely bonkers.

Yesterday was swamped with stories of Bill and Hillary claiming to be the victims of a vast conspiracy involving the media - a “cover-up,” as Bill put it. What’s being covered up? To hear them tell it, Hillary’s awesome success with the electorate is. The evidence of this success? Polls and analysis! From where? Not the media!

In fact, these polls and analyses don’t exist. Why? The cover-up! And so, the sole source for these polls and analyses would be the Clintons themselves.

This Wonderland argument was capped by Hillary’s announcement that not only is she leading in metrics, she is leading in all of them:

“…based on every analysis, of every bit of research and every poll that has been taken and every state that a Democrat has to win, I am the stronger candidate against John McCain in the fall,” she said.

The shocking fact is that nowhere near “every” analysis favors Clinton. Most, in fact, according to Real Clear Politics, favor Obama. And this is not shocking because it means Clinton is lying.

It is shocking because there is no sane answer to why they should lie. They have either lost their sanity - a possibility, but unlikely - or their senses. In the latter case, here’s why:

This contest is over. In a week’s time, Obama will have secured that “magic number” of delegates. This leaves Clinton with a choice - bow out gracefully and hope you can mend fences with the nominee and the party behind him that rightfully calls for your apologies, or fight on to the convention.

If Clinton remains in the race and brings suit against the DNC to force them to take the Florida and Michigan delegates, the bridges she is burning now will blow fire all over the Party. Her Senate seat will be as good as sunk. If she simply clutches her long-shot hope of Obama hitting a landmine or a lone gunman between now and Denver, she will only earn acrimony.

One way or the other, the solution is to try and extinguish those bridges she set afire with everything from Muslim Manchurian candidate lies to attacks on patriotism to charges of Obama putting the nation at risk. Instead, she and Bill are setting dynamite on the burning bridge:

How? They’re lying to their supporters. They’re making it look like Obama - however inevitable - is being lied into his position of prominence and that they, the Clintons, are the lone and noble truthtellers. They have a week of political life left in this primary, and they’re expending it by making their own (former) allies look like traitors, liars, fools.

If the Democratic Party has any sense of self-preservation, they should do more than cut the Clintons’ mike, in money and political machine support, come June 3. They should do more than just counter or laugh off every comment Billary blathers out.

They should stop beating that dead Jabberwocky, and bury the Clintons’ madness where it can no longer soil the already muddled political scene.

In her typically inept way, Hillary illuminated us to her new strategy to sway the superdelegates in an interview with USA Today. It can be summed up in two words: Vote White.

This video highlights the core of her message:

There we have it - despite what actual voting trends show, namely that Obama benefits from overwhelming Democratic turnout compared to the GOP, and that he’s gaining more ground in demographics traditionally less favorable to him, Hillary is the white candidate who white people like.

It goes without saying that the Democratic Party best silence her, and silence her now. Her strident and uncouth statements strike a sore spot in the American psyche, one that the Democratic Party has striven hard to heal and relies on holding together. Whereas before, the tact of the Party seemed to have been to let her run out of steam somewhere in early June, it is becoming increasingly clear that its body politic might be critically injured by then.

Life imitates art, and with Hillary laying her factious plans bare, I offer to you, my readership, and to whatever superdelegates might be watching, a sample of what Hillary’s campaign will be like the next few weeks:

Do not click here. Like Hillary, it’s an aggravating, repetitive, empty-headed sequence of racial divisions - between “uneducated whites” and, as Hill-advisor Paul Begala called them, “eggheads and African-Americans” - that goes on forever until someone forces it to stop.

Do not click it. Instead write your local superdelegate to urge them to shut that annoying nonsense down for good by shutting down Hillary.

Campaign finance law prevents a campaign from accepting corporate contributions without limitation, but Hillary Clinton again proved that no one holds her accountable for anything as she accepted at least $31,240,000 from ABC.

I refer, of course, to the hour of “straight talk” that ABC will be broadcasting “hours before” Tuesday’s primaries. It’ll be a toasty “town hall” - an “everyman” chat with the voters so that they can find out Hill’s just normal folk like them. And to make sure it’s cozy as possible, ABC’s going to have little Georgie Stephanopoulos as the official fat-chewer.

My trusty research department has crunched the numbers on this. We discovered that the lowest ad rate on ABC was $355,000, for a 30-second spot during Extreme Home Makeover back in ‘05.

Accounting for 16 minutes of commercials, we therefore find that Hillary’s wet-eyed, aw-shucks bull session costs ABC - and their shareholders - a whopping $31,240,000!

This isn’t counting the many minutes of soft-focus screentime that will be spent before and after, hyping the interview and therefore hyping Hillary.

So there we have the numbers. We can put them alongside the Elton John concert and the Chinese dishwashers on our list of incidents when Clinton’s sodomy of our campaign financing system goes virtually undetected thanks to the lubricant of charm, sleaze and influence.

 Columnists at The Politico wrote a long overdue article today on the things Barack Obama could say about Hillary Clinton’s negatives were he not above doing so.

Thrown off his game by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright uproar, Barack Obama’s strongest answer to Hillary Rodham Clinton is one he won’t give: Senator, do you really want to get in a contest with me over who has more unsavory personal associations?

She most assuredly does not, as the article goes on. But she can, because both Obama and the surrogates connected to his campaign won’t touch Hillary’s slime. The only one that came close - Samantha Powers - was dismissed.

Since Obama can’t fire me and someone needs to fire away at Hillary, I am expanding on the article and giving you The Top Ten Things Obama Could Say To Smear Hillary:

10 - “You saw to it that criminals were appointed to the top levels of the Justice Department.”

9 - “You and your husband used the Presidential pardon power for personal reasons, helping out sleazy business associates, big contributors and a terrorist group that organized and executed attacks on American soil.”

8 - “You helped Chinese agents illegally funnel money to assist your political ends and you’re still doing it.”

7 - You claim you were active for Martin Luther King Jr., but you are known to have been active in the campaign of the Presidential candidate who opposed the civil rights movement. Which is it?

6 - “Hillirex Fhtagn R’lyeh!” (the words that banish her back to the Nether-realm)

5 - “The Republicans know they can kick your ass, and are totally ignoring you to go after the only real threat - me.”

4 - “Your plan may have changed, but you’re still the same divisive priss when it comes to health care, aren’t you?”

3 - “You voted for and supported the Iraq War … Hello? Is anyone listening? Is this thing even on?”

2 - “Your family secured a deal between a post-Soviet dictatorship and a family friend to mine nuclear materials that could be sold to Syria, Iran and North Korea.”

1 - “You actually are a pansy, you weepy, whiney, twitchy, dodgy, cackly, inept little liar.”

I encourage my readership to add to this not-nearly-comprehensive list.

As we cruise into the closing throes of the Democratic primary, and hold our breath for the big Clinton bash sure to come this weekend or Monday, ammunition against Clinton surfaces with a story about how she now decries the robbing of Indiana jobs her husband authorized.

The summary is this: George Soros and President Bill hooked up a major Chinese buy-out of an Indiana industry that sent jobs overseas to the People’s Republic eight years later. Hillary’s now knocking the deal as a blunder under Bush.

She never mentions that big-time Democratic contributor George Soros helped put together the deal to sell the company or that the sale was approved by her husband’s administration.

This is just another example of how Clinton’s Edwards-brand populism ignores the fact that she’s bought and paid for by multinationals and their foreign interests. Indiana best remember the sale, for it’ll be a chilling vision of things to come if they cast votes for Hillary.

Would it make you slightly less likely, less likely or more likely to know that Hillary has used the most conniving, dark-hearted trick in modern politics to spread lies about Obama?

That’s what a push poll sounds like.  And that’s just what she’s doing - using a push poll to mangle North Carolina’s understanding of Obama’s record.

The sick thing, people, is that these things work unless people know they’re poison, not truth.  So spread the word about this one.  E-mail, blog, make calls - do all you can to clue people on to what she’s doing.  And visit the site that discovered it, so that you have the proper sense of outrage when you tell your friends.

Update: She’s done it before, in California, and was caught too late.  The biggest asset of push-polling is that it’s under the radar, so be sure to tell everyone you can this is going on.

With Pennsylvania being the very model of an inconclusive contest, neither Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton has or even can acknowledge that this war is over, as is explained by a superb piece of analysis by Elizabeth Drew.

Drew notes the reasons Hillary Clinton will not win, deftly unraveling an argument often used by the Clintonites that has an advantage for Obama at its core:

…the congressional Democratic leaders don’t draw the same conclusion from Pennsylvania and also earlier contests that many observers think they do: that Obama’s candidacy is fatally flawed because he has as yet been largely unable to win the votes of working class whites. They point out something that has been largely overlooked in all the talk – the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries were closed primaries, and, one key congressional Democrat says, “Yes, he doesn’t do really well with a big part of the Democratic base, but she doesn’t do well with independents, who will be critical to success in November.”

I’ve pointed out this fact before - that Clinton’s sneering about her “big state” victories is hot air considering that the states she’s claimed are almost certain to go to Obama in a general election.

Still, even though the notion of Obama having to “close the deal” on a fight that he’s almost certain to win is contemptible vanity on Clinton’s part, that is what is demanded: A victory she is expected to win, must go to him. This can only be Indiana.

Will Indiana end the trench warfare? It would give Clinton a way to bow out without losing face. But it may be that nothing less than what brought an end to World War I will resolve it - a revolt in Clinton’s home base:

‘This is a war of attrition and it’s obvious that the numbers aren’t going to add up, so what’s the point?’” … “The hope is that at some point the superdelegates will get frustrated and join the Obama bandwagon.”

For the time being, we have scandal being stirred by surrogates this week. The week following, a smear job is sure to come on May 1st or 5th - Clinton’s “1918 Spring Offensive“; her last push for Paris, for redeeming the lost battle, for making the conflict too horrible for any to endure.

It is all quiet on the primary front now, but a week in the future, one can hear the guns of fear, lies and division sounding.

The top story buzzing about the Drudge Report and wire services this morning is a story on how tired the Democratic candidates are after all this campaigning. I, for one, am tired of those kinds of empty-headed puff pieces that seem to attract the American attention like a Sugar Daddy stuck to an old shoe.

In honor of my growing exhaustion with this campaign’s fixation on exhaustingly moronic topics, I bring you a Top Ten list of other stories that need to be put to rest:

10. Family Fluff - I don’t need to hear about these people’s kids. Let’s wait a few years before infusing their home lives with soap opera high hokum in an entertaining Shotime series.

9. Closing The Deal - Just let the fight go on without opining why a junior Senator hasn’t beaten the reigning Goddess of the Democratic Party in contests that vastly demographically favor her.

8. Heroic Verse - Contests should not be called “epic” by any press claiming a modicum of respectability. This goes for “bruising” 9-point losses and “bionic” opponents.

7. He Said, She Said - When one candidate accuses the other of something, and the other claims they’re distorting, do your damn homework and tell us which is right. Don’t just piddle on about “negative attacks” like they were in a schoolyard brawl and both need a time out. Explain.

6. Spinning Big States - When a campaign claims a Democrat might not win New York and California, they should be put out of their misery, not put on the air.

5. Blacks Not Allowed - Stories about how America’s “not ready” for a black president aren’t insightful, they’re ignorant of all glaring, honest-to-blog evidence to the contrary.

4. Getting Tough - Unless one has knifed multiple people to death or can drink Sterno like it was Squirt, they’re all a bunch of soft DC academes, and we don’t need to hear about their toughness. Truman was a nerd, and he crushed fascism and founded the Cold War.

3. Religion - God save us from an electorate that depends on its candidates embracing a belief in an invisible pro-American superhero named Jesus.

2. TIME Magazine - The penultimate pest, TIME is the most vapid, poll-driven, scandal-dependent, air-headed, phoned-in, random, spiteful rag on the Web. My theory? Mark Halperin and Joe Klein are pissed that their book, ‘The Way To Win,’ didn’t prove Hillary’s road map to the White House like it was intended.

1. Patriotism - Ironically, I think the qualification that matters least for the leader of the country is their love of it. Many a great leader - Claudius, Henry II, Napoleon - hated their country by all indications. Much more important is a love of things like social justice, truth and kicking ass. And if a candidate loves their country in the dewy-eyed, “yes, Master” way the Sean Hannity/Laura Ingraham crowd seems to demand, they’re not going to see problems to fix, but fanatic populations to exploit.

Hillary Clinton has hit new heights of shameless powermongering as she went so far as to assault her own party, and the impassioned Democrats who make things happen in politics. Now painfully aware that if nothing had changed since last spring, she would be on her way to the White House, Clinton complained that a pernicious force in the Democratic Party had connived against her. That force? Activists.

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the “activist base” of the Democratic Party — and MoveOn.org in particular — for many of her electoral defeats…

Clinton’s remarks depart radically from the traditional position of presidential candidates, who in the past have celebrated high levels of turnout by party activists and partisans as a harbinger for their own party’s success — regardless of who is the eventual nominee — in the general election showdown.

This should make it abundantly clear to whatever Americans have not yet received the memo, Clinton is solely in it for herself. It is not ideology that drives her, or dedication to a cause greater than her own gain, but rather a lust for power coupled with a thorough contempt for those opposed to her. It is further enlightening - and amusing - that it was an organization formed to assist Bill Clinton in getting past the Impeachment proceedings of the late ’90s that she is attacking, MoveOn, and how she’s attacking them.

Her sneering dismissal of choice? Take a page literally from Karl Rove’s playbook and accuse MoveOn of opposing the Afghanistan war:

Clinton:“MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers.”

“What we’re dealing with,” according to this self-touted champion of liberalism, is a group so dastardly that they might have opposed using military action to topple a government that, despite some nasty company, did not actually attack us. By that same rationale, we should have smoked Pakistan’s military junta a long time ago. Then again, MoveOn never used that rationale, because they never opposed the Afghanistan war.

But Hillary’s problem is not so much with the war, or liberal ideology or lack thereof: Her problem is with activism itself. The notion that she cannot simply babble on about two strictly contradictory positions without some blogger catching her appals her. The threat that comes from commentators or anchors for a moment exercising journalistic integrity and presenting the public with research that proves she lies, flies in the face of her sense of fairness. Indeed, just the idea that Democrats would vote for the candidate that is best qualified and best spoken, as opposed to the one with the most popular last name, guts her notion of political mechanics.

It is the complacent, not the active, she depends on. It is the obedient, not the intellectually curious, she needs. And in the end result, it is not the passionate or the clever, the visionary or the knowledgeable who get valued - it is the loyal. Those loyal above all else - especially above truth - are Hillary’s people.

Certainly not, as she showed last week, the Democrats. Certainly not Americans.

I don’t particularly like their aesthetic, but this group voices it well:

Apparently we will have to wait until Monday for Hillary to drop the other shoe, as Friday’s usually fatal Happy Hour featured only things to be cheery about.

First, three significant players in the Democratic Party - including the popular economic sage of the Clinton administration, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich - endorsed Obama late today.

Former Clinton Cabinet member Robert Reich said Friday he was endorsing Barack Obama — and not Hillary Rodham Clinton — in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Two other Democratic elder statesmen, former Sens. Sam Nunn of Georgia and David Boren of Oklahoma, also said they were supporting the Illinois senator.

Reich brings a lot of weight with him, especially given that his middle-of-the-road, progressive policies appeal to a wide audience of American consumers. A Rhodes scholar and close Clinton friend, Reich is also a frequent commentator on NPR, where he speaks with an economist’s pragmatism and a comedian’s wit, urging powerful pro-middle class approaches to today’s ills.

Nunn and Boren are centrists as well, with national security backgrounds nearly unrivaled in today’s political scene.

In this, Reich, Nunn and Boren bring a lot to Obama’s arsenal: They are Democrats with gravitas, politicians with singularly extensive experience and centrists who can court independents and swing voters. Boren spoke eloquently to this latter point; what I consider to be perhaps most attractive of Obama’s qualities:

“Our most urgent task is to end the divisions in our country, to stop the political bickering, and to unite our talents and efforts. Americans of all persuasions are pleading with our political leaders to bring us together. I believe Senator Obama is sincerely committed to that effort. He has made a non-partisan approach to all issues a top priority.”

The second big news item to break was a synopsis of the effects I’ve been covering in the last three “Battle of the Bull” articles - that Obama has emerged from this long road of trials only stronger for having endured them. Though diehard opponents to the Democrats may have a few more cartridges of ammunition in their larder, Obama’s reasoned and mature responses to his crises has inspired talk of elevating politics above scandal. Whether or not this will be the result, he has undoubtedly been tempered and proven tough.

Newsweek covers the story succinctly with the results of a poll showing Obama soaring above Clinton:

The survey of 1,209 registered voters found that Obama now leads Clinton by nearly 20 points, or 54 percent to 35 percent…

And lastly, the wire services have been abuzz with a piece rehashing Clinton’s woes - focusing on the inevitability of her defeat.

Clinton leads in Pennsylvania polls in advance of Tuesday’s primary there, with 158 convention delegates at stake. A victory is essential to her chances of winning the nomination, but far from sufficient.

It is in that paragraph that the crucial tone is found: That short of a blowout victory, Clinton will not be seen as changing the sure course of Obama’s rise to the candidacy. Even with such a victory, he still seems overwhelmingly likely. She cannot win PA for winning. The death knell has been struck.

Today ends with the clink of glasses rather than the crash of a kitchen sink, but surely the claws will come out. Clinton will deliver the hardest blow of her Tonya Harding Offensive some time soon, likely at late on Monday. Then we’ll see whether the storm Obama has weathered along this long journey to April 22nd will blow him over, or continue sailing him to victory.