First of all, it wasn't a debate -- it was an ordeal by ankle-humping.

Dickerson apparently thinks this is funny. This was HRC's last big chance to put enough of a distance between herself and Obama that her past hopes for a landslide in PA might return to possibility. Since that's what Dickerson wants, you'd think he's be more exercised by that, but he apparently thinks his horse can win on a slow track.

Why does Dickerson so want a return to the Clinton years? Does he seriously think a party putsch that would result in booting Howard Dean from the DNC and installing some Clintonoidal jerk like Ickes instead is anything but a formula for disaster?

We got dragged into Vietnam by a "greatest generation" obsessed with the "lessons of Munich." Now, will we be dragged into another bog (and deeper into Iraq) by DLC bozos (like Dickerson) who think the "lesson of Vietnam" for the Democratic party was that we were too shrill and off-center in our opposition to the war?

And I note that Dickerson doesn't like it that Obama tells us what he's going to do after he's elected, because it's more "Presidential" not to commit to anything. He wants a President who tells us that it all depends on what we mean by "is." By that standard, Obama is intolerably candid.

But worst of all, this:

"Obama also added to his penchant for troubling moral equivalencies when he equated associating with Ayers to talking with one of his conservative Senate colleagues, Tom Coburn, who once suggested giving the death penalty to abortion doctors. Not a good parallel."

So why isn't it a good parallel? Aren't people who advocate murdering doctors terrorists? Weatherman was, for its time, pretty racy and terroristic, sorta. Mostly, its scary aspect was a confection whipped up by J. Edgar Hoover. The worst you can say about Billy Ayres (whose name Dickerson gets wrong -- who does the fact checking for this bozo?) is that he had friends who got caught up in awful crimes, and either blew themselves up or spend decades in jail. Somehow for Dickerson, the double standard according to which US sponsored terrorists can murder nuns and wipe out whole refugee camps and that's all fine and dandy, but let someone blow up a toilet at the US Capital and he's the spawn of satan, continues to exist and prosper. Does he really believe this crap, or does he just pander to it out of habit?

I agree with most of what you say - but you should probably know that Ayers wrote a book and said he wasn't sorry for anything he had done in 2001 - which makes him pretty despicable. But he's led a regular life for decades, he is not a friend of the Obamas, he sits on a board with him (or did) and Obama was 9 when the Weather Underground was active. It was a question that was literally handfed to George Steph from Sean Hannity (he asked for it on camera) and ABC not only planned an ambush, they asked for a photo of Ayers from UPI. The ratio of trivial, tabloid, divisive questions that ABC asked Obama vs. Hillary was 5:1. If there was any mention of Mark Penn, Colombia, Bill's Chinese deals, how a woman who is worth $109 Million could call anyone elitist, Bill's Dubai deals, the fact that record show she lied about NAFTA support, I sure didn't hear them.

One thing for which I should apologize is that I somehow got Billy Ayers' name lodged in my brain wrong, and have misspelled it for some thirty years -- not that this has been a big feature of my life; in fact, it didn't come up until just now, so I guess I owe the jerks at ABC a favor.

It's true that they went easy on HRC. It's interesting to me that in a supposedly brutal and assaultive campaign season (it's been all that, but it's almost all coming from one source) the press has gone really, really easy on Hillary Clinton.

Could this be because she's lived a remarkably circumspect life of completely MOR public service? Or is it because "reporters" like the Slate boys and the tee vee idiots don't notice a scandal until it's dropped on their plates, marked "scandal" (or "gaffe") and helpfully supplemented with scare quotes?

DOn't apologize for spelling. There's a national correspondent for a major network who misspells Ayer's name every day (and brings him up everyday). But I agree with you on Slate - they haven't discussed the Clinton's relationship with China, ($1.5 Million in profits), with Colombia ($800,000) in profits, Mark Penn's relationship with the Blackwater Security firm, the fact that Hillary didn't pay her own employee's health care premiums on time and has run a dreadful campaign, the Clinton's relationships to radicals (like, say burning your draft card), the notion of a co-presidency, why so many Clinton administration officials have either a) not endorsed Clinton (like say, his VP), b) endorsed Obama (like say, his Secretary of Labor), or are working for Obama. It doesn't speak well of the Clinton administration.

On the other hand, you could say it speaks very well of the Clinton administration, that so many of its members remain active in the party and still have sufficient national respect that their endorsements mean something. Ask yourself, looking forward eight years, how many of Bush's cabinet officers and inner-circle types will matter at all to Republican party politics. I'd say probably not many.

As a side issue, blaming Billy Ayers for the sixties, and then blaming Obama for him in turn, seems an odd stretch, and HRC is getting trashed for it today, which is only fair. It's odd that in Chicago, which was most polarized city in the sixties (and, at that time, the second most racially segregated city after Johannesberg), the Mayor, who's Dick Daley's son, was among the first to stand up for Ayers when Hillary attacked him. There are lots of old lefties doing good in that city, from Helen Shiller to Slim Coleman to Bobby Rush.

In Chicago, the war's over. At least THAT war is. I don't understand why elsewhere, red-baiting is still such a power move. I actually suspect it's not; that the only people who are convinced by red-baiting and race fear are a few crackpots who post a lot on the internet.