Oooh, nuance!

and just three to go before the American people have all cast their votes (in VERY high numbers!) for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.

It was a split decision: a giant victory in Kentucky for Hillary, and a large victory in Oregon for Obama. Let's do a little number crunching, shall we?

35 percentage points.

That's the number by which Obama lost to Hillary in Kentucky.

Now, we can do the simplistic thing and assume that Kentucky (and West Virginia, where she crushed Obama by 41) are both full of banjo-twanging, dentally-challenged racist rednecks; or, we can look a little deeper into the exit polling.

The Wright Factor: Still In Play.

78%.

That's the amount of respondents who felt that Obama shares the views of his pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to some degree.

22%.

That's the percentage of people who responded "Not at all" to the question of whether or not Obama shared Wright's values. NOT surprisingly, they voted overwhelmingly (65%) for Senator Obama.

What's the Matter with Bitter, Clinging Working-Class Voters?

67%.

That's the amount of respondents who stated that the economy was the most important issue. Hillary Clinton's voters made up 69% of that number.

So no, all you people who think Barack Obama made some kind of profound statement with his BitterCling remarks. Those voters are NOT voting because of religion, love of guns, fear of immigrants or racism. They are voting their pocketbooks, and they like the cut of Hillary's jib on that issue. Who wouldn't? The economy was her husband's strongest issue, after all.

Now, let's get to the numbers that should be giving the Democratic Party agita if they actually want to win in November.

33%.

That's the percentage of Hillary's voters that would be "satisfied" if Barack Obama was the nominee. Yowch.

28%.

That's the percentage of Kentucky voters who would be "satisfied" with either candidate. (A bit of decent news here: 48% of Hillary's voters said either candidate was fine...and 48% of Barack Obama's voters said the same thing.)

74%.

That's the total amount of Kentucky voters who would be satisfied with Hillary Clinton as the nominee. In contrast, 42% would be satisfied with Barack Obama as the nominee.

Look, we can be like the rabid Obamans at Daily Kos who moan about what ignorant fools they be in Appalachia, or we can take a good hard look at these numbers and figure out how to actually beat McCaca in November. (I just had a terrible thought - what if McCaca picks Colin Powell as his VP? Holy crap!)

I feel that Hillary Clinton must be the nominee, or we will lose our opportunity to expand the electoral map in a truly amazing way. (I even saw a head-to-head poll matchup against McCaca in North Carolina where McCaca beats Obama, but LOSES TO HILLARY. My Jeebus!)

Whether Obama is her VP or not is an open question - Kentucky voters say no, but only by 8% - but it seems to me that the voters we need are speaking in very loud tones.

We would be idiots to ignore them.

I know that John McCain will not.

Despite the personally insulting nature of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's recently-publicized sermon, it took Senator Hillary Clinton about a week to say anything even remotely critical about Obama's 20-year mentor, pastor and friend. (Wow, she sure is evil and diabolical and would do "anything to win!") She kept her mouth shut until she was asked directly about what she would have done had she been in Obama's place. Her comments were that you can't choose your relatives, but you can choose your church, and that she would not have chosen that church. When pressed to say more, condemning Wright the way that Obama himself has done on numerous occasions (including in the Greatest Speech Evah), she would not do so, calling religion a "personal choice," and that everyone would have to evaluate what Obama had done for themselves and make their own decisions.

Well, duh.

There is so much bullshit and apologia going around about Obama's spectacularly poor judgment in choosing this church that it absolutely astonishes me. My favorite one is this:

"You can't pigeonhole the message of this church with a few soundbites!"

Oh, really? Then why did the church create that video and put it on the TUCC website for sale? Weren't TUCC and Wright the ones creating the soundbites and promoting them as representative of the church's message?

Look. If Hillary really were the caricature the haters make her out to be, then she would certainly have been hammering away at Obama over this the second it came out. Obama would be done for in about five milliseconds. Instead, it was Obama who took the low road (as usual), by putting out a photo of Bill Clinton shaking Wright's hand ten years ago. How pathetic. Obama did the same thing with a photo of Hillary, as First Lady, shaking Reszko's hand. Yes, public pictures are the exact same thing as close 17-year and 20-year relationships!

Who is Obama trying to "bamboozle" with this ridiculous false-equivalency crap? Why, his own followers, many of whom are already going from the assumption that Hillary and Bill are genuinely horrible people. (Never mind why they think this, they JUST KNOW IT!!!11J!!!!) Don't you love a "unity" candidate who repeatedly and constantly smears his opponent while pretending to be a pure and holy person? Remind you of anyone else who said he was a "uniter, not a divider?"

Let me tell you who is REALLY destroying the Democratic Party. It's the folks that insist that one candidate is a saint, and the other is a monster. It's the folks whose candidate repeatedly said he would not support Senator Clinton if she were the nominee and has only recently changed his tune. It's the folks whose candidate has been negative from the very beginning of the campaign. It's the haters, the irrational, the ones who make their decisions on emotions, not facts.

As I've said before, Senator Obama's Hatin' Hillary supporters don't seem to understand who the enemy really is. But true-blue Democrats know: it's Senator John "More Wars, My Friends" McCain.

The sad thing is, they won't even get it once Obama is being pummeled by McCaca and the right-wing scream machine after his nomination. They'll cling to their delusions of Obama's electability even then.

And then, when we inaugurate President McCaca in 2009, whose fault will it be?

Why, Hillary Clinton's, of course.