I mean, Melissa has been scrupulously fair about covering the *issues* without attacking the *candidates* and she still gets called out on this all the time.

Really, zuzu, it’s not like you’ve actually put any thought into your posts or been keeping up with the news or anything. /sarcasm

That right there is why I’ve been tearing my hair out — the steaming piles of condescension.

…just “gah!” and thank you for not giving up completely.

And most of the really misogynist or racist stuff that’s been coming up seems to me to be either coming from loose cannon supporters that neither campaign can really control, or from the right where you’d expect it.

But neither actual candidate has crossed any lines that would prevent me from very willingly voting for either over McCain in the fall. They’re both pols, but they’re both pols that will get me better policies than McCain would, bottom line.

If Obama’s the nominee, we will see no end of this kind of stuff. And there’s probably some small benefit of getting a preview. But the simple fact is that we wouldn’t be seeing this stuff now if it weren’t for the fact that this is the kind of campaign Hillary Clinton’s campaign has decided to wage — often directly and at other times indirectly by not reining it in in her supporters when it crops up on its own. Wright is news today because Ferraro’s been news yesterday. Are her comments racist? That’s a loaded, too copious, word. And there’ve been cases where the Clinton team has gotten a bum rap on these matters. What I do know, however, is that Clinton’s campaign and her surrogates have injected the subject of Obama’s race into this campaign too many times now for it to be credible to believe that it is anything but a conscious strategy.

IOW, Marshall’s blaming Clinton for Wright, as if she wrote his sermons or she was the one who pushed this story. And like Ezra Klein, who so breezily assumed that this was a “Clinton oppo dump,” Marshall didn’t check his facts. Sean Hannity’s been flogging this story for a long time, and ABC News got its own videos. Obama himself tried to put a lid on Wright last year and minimized his public presence.

And the Josh Marshall of last year would have checked his facts (Ezra, I’m not so sure about). But he’s in the tank for Obama now, so he just passes along every unsubstantiated rumor that she’s the really really bad one and she’s the only one who’s gone negative.

I’m not trying to persuade you to vote for either of them. I don’t care which one gets the nomination at this point, they’re both mortally wounded by the racism charges. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t see how either of them can win now.

What I DO insist on, however, is that you don’t idealize Obama. He’s a politician, one with very conservative advisers. If that’s what you want, have at it - but don’t say no one ever told you.

And what does piss me off is the online bullying of Hillary Clinton and her supporters. It reeks of the schoolyard. I have no great love for the woman but she’s a decent person - and a decent enough Democrat. I respect her even though we don’t always agree.

And I won’t stand by quietly while a perfectly good Democrat who may, in fact, become the nominee, is ripped apart for the ego gratification of anonymous cowards.

Apparently you think this is “just” me when I’m only one of the few who will say it out loud. You don’t know what other bloggers are saying behind the scenes because they’re too intimidated to say it publicly. They see the way bloggers who stand up for Clinton are treated.

Yay for the online “community”!

Actually, I don’t count his work in the Illinois legislature for much. The first five years he was there, he got nothing passed because the legislature was under Republican control, and in his final year, he was given credit for a whole lot of bills that he didn’t do the work on, because there was a kingmaker helping him out.

As for the rest of your points, I don’t really care who went negative first. It’s politics; people go negative. I think that a lot of the “racial” stuff is overblown (i.e., the “fairytale” stuff. Hello?) and/or pushed by people like Kos.

However, I’m also not talking about the campaigns as much as I am the supporters. And there’s gleeful gender bashing aplenty. This guy is fairly representative of the kind of thing I’m talking about. And then you have people like Keith Olbermann, or Josh Marshall and Ezra Klein, who just casually smear Clinton by uncritically passing on their assumption that she was behind the Wright thing getting out — even though ABC News made it known that they purchased the Wright DVDs from Wright’s own website, and Fox has been hammering this for quite some time now.

Some of the best commentary on the raw, naked misogyny of Obama supporters in the blogosphere and in the media comes from a couple of people who hate Clinton, Avedon Carol and Susie Madrak. Somehow, they’re able to separate how they feel about Clinton’s accomplishments and record and how they view misogyny.