And all this time I thought she was praying for an aneurism

Responding to a question from the Sioux Falls Argus Leader editorial board about calls for her to drop out of the race, she said: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don't understand it," she said, dismissing the idea of abandoning the race.

The response has been as any reasonable person might expect.

Even the statement about her husband campaigning to June of 1992 is false. Though he did not have had enough delegates to be the nominee until June, all of his meaningful opponents had dropped out and the race was basically over by early March. The 'campaigning' after that was for the general election.

Her statement that Bill Clinton was still campaigning in the primary in June, like the sniper fire episode in Bosnia, is just more historical revisionism.

But this -- what she said today as rationale for remaining in a contest she cannot win any other way -- was nothing short of inexcusable. It breaks down like this: if she had no malignant intent, then she is clearly not poised enough to be President. If she meant what it sounded like she meant, she is no one to be defended.

Imagine for a moment what the uproar would have been if the roles were reversed and Barack Obama had said: "I want to be Hillary's vice president, because, you know, JFK was assassinated in office."

One positive that I can see from all this: Obama has been freed of the burden of making Hillary his vice-presidential pick. He probably has been under a lot of pressure from party insiders to select her for the sake of unity. But after these comments, no one is going to hold it against him if he doesn't.

(As I post this Keith Olbermann is about to say it, in one of his Special Comments, better than any of the rest of us ever do. I'll update this post with it once it's online.)

Update:



Excerpt:

"I was discussing the Democratic primary history, and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged California in June in 1992 and 1968," she said in Brandon, South Dakota. "I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That's a historic fact.

"The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy. I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive, I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever."

"My view is that we have to look to the past and to our leaders who have inspired us and give us a lot to live up to and I'm honored to hold Senator Kennedy's seat in the United States Senate in the state of New York and have the highest regard for the entire Kennedy family."

Thanks. Not a word about the inappropriateness of referencing assassination. Not a word about the inappropriateness of implying - whether it was intended or not - that she was hanging around waiting for somebody to try something terrible.

Not a word about Senator Obama.

Not: I'm sorry.

Not: I apologize.

Not: I blew it.

Not: please forgive me.

God knows, Senator, in this campaign, this nation has had to forgive you, early and often. And despite your now traditional position of the offended victim, the nation has forgiven you.

We have forgiven you your insistence that there have been widespread calls for you to end your campaign, when such calls had been few. We have forgiven you your misspeaking about Martin Luther King's relative importance to the Civil Rights movement.

We have forgiven you your misspeaking about your under-fire landing in Bosnia.

We have forgiven you insisting Michigan's vote wouldn't count and then claiming those who would not count it were Un-Democratic.

We have forgiven you pledging to not campaign in Florida and thus disenfranchise voters there, and then claim those who stuck to those rules were as wrong as those who defended slavery or denied women the vote.

We have forgiven you the photos of Osama Bin Laden in an anti-Obama ad.

We have forgiven you fawning over the fairness of Fox News while they were still calling you a murderer.

We have forgiven you accepting Richard Mellon Scaife's endorsement and then laughing as you described his "deathbed conversion."

We have forgiven you quoting the electoral predictions of Karl Rove.

We have forgiven you the 3 a.m. Phone Call commercial.

We have forgiven you President Clinton's disparaging comparison of the Obama candidacy to Jesse Jackson's.

We have forgiven you Geraldine Ferraro's national radio interview suggesting Obama would not still be in the race had he been a white man.

We have forgiven you the dozen changing metrics and the endless self-contradictions of your insistence that your nomination is mathematically probable rather than a statistical impossibility.

We have forgiven you your declaration of some primary states as counting and some as not.

We have forgiven you exploiting Jeremiah Wright in front of the editorial board of the lunatic-fringe Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

We have forgiven you exploiting William Ayers in the debate on ABC.

We have forgiven you for boasting of your "support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans".

We have even forgiven you repeatedly praising Senator McCain at Senator Obama's expense, and your own expense, and the Democratic ticket's expense.

But Senator, we cannot forgive you this.

"You know, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

We cannot forgive you this -- not because it is crass and low and unfeeling and brutal.

This is unforgivable, because this nation's deepest shame, its most enduring horror, its most terrifying legacy, is political assassination.

Lincoln. Garfield. McKinley. Kennedy. Martin Luther King. Robert Kennedy.

And, but for the grace of the universe or the luck of the draw: Reagan, Ford, Truman, Nixon, Andrew Jackson, both Roosevelts, even George Wallace.

The politics of this nation is steeped enough in blood, Senator Clinton, you cannot and must not invoke that imagery! Anywhere! At any time!

And to not appreciate, immediately - to still not appreciate tonight - just what you have done, is to reveal an incomprehension of the America you seek to lead.

This, Senator, is too much.

Because a senator - a politician - a person - who can let hang in mid-air the prospect that she might just be sticking around in part, just in case the other guy gets shot - has no business being, and no capacity to be, the President of the United States.

Will McCain walk Ellen down the aisle?

Maybe McBush is going for that base of Hillary's support who feel they can't ever vote for Obama ...

Republican John McCain says same-sex couples should be allowed to enter into legal agreements for insurance and other purposes, but he opposes gay marriage and believes in "the unique status of marriage between a man and a woman."

"And I know that we have a respectful disagreement on that issue," the likely Republican presidential nominee said in an interview for today's The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

That's not the funny part. Here's the funny part:

DeGeneres needled McCain on the issue, arguing that she and the senator from Arizona aren't different. ...

"We are all the same people, all of us. You're no different than I am. Our love is the same," she said. "When someone says, 'You can have a contract, and you'll still have insurance, and you'll get all that,' it sounds to me like saying, 'Well, you can sit there, you just can't sit there.'

"It feels like we are not, you know, we aren't owed the same things and the same wording," DeGeneres said.

McCain said he's heard her "articulate that position in a very eloquent fashion. We just have a disagreement. And I, along with many, many others, wish you every happiness."

DeGeneres steered the conversation back toward the humor she's known for.

"So, you'll walk me down the aisle? Is that what you're saying?" she asked.

"Touche," McCain said.

That wasn't a 'no'.

And click into the comments for the most fun, where I posted the following:

"I just don't like gay people who 'rub it in my face' all the time!"

Translation #1: I want to discriminate against you openly, comfortably, and securely, and when you do things that lend evidence to our common humanity, I get that icky guilt feeling. Knock it off, dammit!

Translation #2: I am deeply closeted and intensely jealous that you are not. Also, I have a sexual obsession with box turtles.

"Recount" premiered in Houston this week

We got back into town yesterday in time to attend this but were too pooped to do so:

The Baker Institute for Public Policy is a familiar stop for big names in politics and international relations. ...

But the Rice University think tank moved into People magazine-style celebrity Tuesday when it hosted the premiere of Recount, an HBO movie based on the 2000 presidential election and its ultimate resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Like Band of Brothers and The Sopranos and Entourage and the recent miniseries on the 2nd President of the United States, John Adams, I expect this will be no less excellent television. A teaser, if you don't have HBO (and why don't you, for crissakes):

(A)ctors Kevin Spacey and Laura Dern were there, on a real red carpet, accompanied by writer Danny Strong, director Jay Roach and executive producers Paula Weinstein and Len Amato.

They stepped from black Suburbans onto carpet rented for the occasion, mugging for a small platoon of television cameras. Inside, Spacey and Amato paid homage to former Secretary of State James A. Baker III for hosting the film, especially considering his role in the events upon which it is based.

A discussion on election reform, led by Baker and former President Carter, followed the screening. They worked on the topic when they chaired a bipartisan commission on the topic in 2005.

"I think it's an amazingly positive sign that James Baker is fighting for the reform of laws that ... were in his favor in 2000," said Spacey, who played Baker nemesis Ron Klain. Klain spearheaded the recount effort for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore, while Baker worked for Republican George W. Bush.

Baker's subsequent work on reform made the Rice campus an obvious place for the screening, Amato said. "What better place to come?"

Well, some of the reactionary 26-percenters who comment at Chron.com would have preferred elsewhere, but like the past seven and one-half years have been for the rest of us, too bad ...

It drew about 250 people, mostly donors to Rice and supporters of Baker's work who offered a few appreciative chuckles at actor Tom Wilkinson's portrayal of — and uncanny resemblance to — Baker as a courtly but tough partisan political operative.

Dern, on the other hand, played Florida's former secretary of state, Katherine Harris, for broad comic relief.

"When someone asks you to play Katherine Harris, you don't say no," Dern said before the screening.

Still, like Spacey, Amato and Strong, she said she also was drawn to the project by the hope that the film will spark public discussion about changing the nation's election laws. That's a topic Baker and Carter have discussed since their 2005 commission recommended dozens of changes, including the use of a national voter photo ID. None have become national law.

In their talk after the movie, the pair said America still faces problems with voter confidence in the way ballots are cast and counted.

"There's still a degree of unfinished business out there when you look at the election system in our country," Baker said.

Carter said the most important change would be requiring the use of a "paper trail" — receipts of a sort, that would help voters verify that their ballots have been cast as they intended on electronic voting machines. Paper trail equipment has been put to use in some states; Texas officials have resisted it.

Baker said the nation most urgently needs unified voter registration lists and the photo ID requirement. Democrats in the Texas Senate shot down a photo ID proposal last year; this year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the requirement in Indiana.

James Baker, consigliere to the Bush family, still fights for the right no matter how wrong it may be.