Maybe it was just me that missed the last years of the Clinton presidency...

But kudos for pushing your version of the Rush Conspiracy.

I feel like I'm watching a horrible accident unfold in slow motion and everyone around me (in the progressive movement) is blind to it.

Wow, what a privilege to be you.

Here's an alternate hypothesis: Most democrats aren't stupid enough to take their talking points from Limbaugh for a very good reason. They actually know what they are doing, and it is you who are blind.

So let me get this straight - when Rush Limbaugh says that Obama is the easier candidate to beat, you are prepared to take his claim as frank and honest. When anonymous poll respondants (who only may or may not be, as you style them, "wingnuts") say that they prefer Obama to McCain, you infer that they are lying in order to build up a false confidence among Obama supporters. In other words, when the evidence suits your prefered conclusion you will trust it and when it does not you will dismiss it. I dare say that there is no conclusion which cannot be vigorously defended if one is prepared to adopt that approach to the data. Suffice it to say, this good faith skeptic is not much swayed by your argument.

Look, Limpbuagh is taking credit for a common phenomenon, voters crossing over to cause a little mischief in the other party's primary when the candidate their party has already been determined.

I did it a number of time in Washington state primaries.

Here's what Jason Kinney, an Indiana native, had to say on the subject.

The “Limbaugh Effect” is a myth -- and the national media, urged on by the Obama campaign, are just throwing gasoline on this blowhard’s already raging ego. A large percentage of Indiana Republicans “crossed over” and pulled a Democrat ballot because most of the contested primary races (President, Governor, CD-07) were on the Democratic side. It’s a fairly common practice in the state and smart campaigns build specific GOTV strategies around it. And guess what? According to exit polls, Republicans who pulled a Democrat ballot voted for Clinton over Obama by a similar margin as the state as a whole. So what’s all the fuss about? Limbaugh points to the seven percent of HRC voters who said they’ll be voting for John McCain in November, a higher number than Obama’s 2.2 percent. But is this a statistically-significant difference when looking at an exit poll with at least a four-percent margin of error in a state that’s hard to exit poll? And isn’t this simply a direct function of HRC’s counterprogramming pitch to working-class moderates, some of whom are undoubtedly anticipating a return home in November? Silly reporters . . . tricks are for kids.

And that, Forsythe, is exactly why we will lose in the fall.

What else is he going to say. Oh shucks, now we've really lost in the fall?

The doped-up pedophile couldn't get his boy Romney nominated even while bashing McCain nonstop and commanding his zombies to support Mittens. He is not as powerful as people think.

We must also remember that if Gore had won his own state then Florida (and Nader) would not have mattered and Gore would have been president.

What Limbaugh and the wingnuts think doesn't matter. they may think that A or B is the weaker candidate, but they might well be wrong.

Some Democrats actually wanted Reagan to win the nomination in 1980 since he'd be a fringe figure who they could demonize. Be careful what you wish for!

Democrats should always pick who they like best and can get excited and rally behind. If they do that, they'll have better chances than trying to pick based on "electability". (We tried that in 2004 and it didn't work so well)

Quote: "I feel like I'm watching a horrible accident unfold in slow motion and everyone around me (in the progressive movement) is blind to it."

And I feel like I'm the Queen of England and nobody knows it but me.

What kills me are the basic unspoken premises of your comment:

a) The wingnuts are a monolithic, perfectly uniform conspiracy. They are all of one mind on which Democrat would be easiest to beat.

b) Rush Limbaugh is the official spokesman of this conspiracy, rather than just some fatheaded pill popping blowhard, a self-described entertainer, who will say whatever the hell he has to say to keep his dimwitted fans tuning into his fatuous program.

c) You have a special ability to tell when Rush Limbaugh is telling the truth and when he's just talking out of his ass and, surprisingly, it turns out Rush is telling the truth whenever he says something you already agree with.

d) Now that Obama has been nominated, the Vast Wingnut Conspiracy has finally broken its once strictly held code of silence and authorized Limbaugh, its Minister of Propaganda, to taunt us with a supervillianish "buhahahahaha, blind fools, you've played into our hands!" Oh, the horror.

e) And, of course, the definining symptom of the mass case of PTSD suffered by many of Hillary's (and some of Obama's) supporters, the belief that those perfectly monolithic men in the Vast Wingnut Conspiracy are omniscient and omnipotent. If they believe Obama is the weaker candidate, it must be true. They know all and can do anything, have the power to permanently cloud minds and can fool all of the people all of the time. It is not even remotely possible that they're just a bunch of self-deluded dopes who are desperately denying the extent to which the ground has shifted beneath their feet since Katrina and the Schiavo debacle laid bare the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of their politics and their philosophy. No, it is, and always will be, 2002. Nothing has changed in the country since then. Nothing at all.

Kindly spare me the defeatism. Hillary's campaign is over. Obama is the nominee. The only question is whether you want to pitch in and help us win or whether you'd rather sit on the sidelines and try to Chicken Little us into defeat with a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom, as Democrats had been pathetically prone to do for the last twenty years.

I once again recommend to everyone's attention the motto on the T-shirt worny by extremely tough looking woman who voted at the early voting site I monitored for Obama on Saturday: "Are you gonna cowboy up or just lay there and bleed?"

(Those shirts availible at the link below, by the way. Please buy one for every Democrat you know.)

http://www.rusticranchtack.com/catalog/item/1100818/623812.htm#image_1