The tiny right-wing Jewish minority is fascinating.

In this article, Dennis Prager, the leader of the suck-up to anti-semitic Christian pack, explains that Pastor Hagee is not anti-Semitic even though he said that the Holocaust was part of God's plan and that Hitler was essentially his messenger. In fact, Prager compares Hagee to Raoul Wallenberg who saved 100,000 Jews from the gas chambers designed by God's messengers.

This is the same Prager who denounces liberals, gays, Democrats, African-Americans, feminists and anybody who dissents from far-right policies on Israel as anti-Jewish, anti-Christian and anti-American.

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Sometimes there is simply nothing one can say. Words simply fail me. Luckily they don't fail Olbermann.

PS. Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told The Post, "She was talking about the length of the race and using the '68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone -- she used her husband's race in the same vein."

Not true. Until 1996, the California primary was always at the end of the process so things kept going until June. All the big California primaries were capstones at the end of the race. That is why Bobby was in California in June. And that is why Bill Clinton was there in June. There were hundreds of delegates still to be won.

But this year California voted in February and as June begins only Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana are still to be heard from. The analogy is ridiculous.

HILLARY RAISES ASSASSINATION ISSUE
DEFENDS LONG RUNNING CAMPAIGN

May 23, 2008 --

Hillary Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama.

"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. I don't understand it," she said, dismissing calls to drop out.

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Why are we playing the Republicans game?

Months ago the Republicans and certain Democratic campaigns began pushing the meme that Jews won't vote for Obama. That line was accompanied (what a coincidence) with millions of anonymous e-mails warning Jews that Obama was a Muslim, a Hamas lover, a friend of Israel's enemies.

Obama's Jewish supporters like me had no choice but to respond. And we did.

But enough is enough. Jewish Democrats who still do not intend to vote for Obama are not going to be persuaded. Read the coverage. Listen to what they say. They decided they would not vote for him the first minute they saw him.

They don't trust him. And they won't. And it would take surgery well beyond modern technology to change Obama into someone they can support.

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I have decided that there are only two criteria Barack Obama should consider when he chooses a running mate. The first is: would this person a credible successor? The Vice President cannot be someone who, should he or she become President, would reverse the course the President started on.

Other than that, I say pick the best debater.

Historians say that the only VP choice who carried his home state and thereby won it for the ticket was LBJ. That is probably true. But one VP candidate out of a few dozen hardly establishes a precedent worth following.

Nowadays the only time a VP candidate matters is when he debates his or her counterpart. In 2000, Joe Lieberman's poor performance totally humanized Dick Cheney and contributed to the Bush "victory." John Edwards was also disappointing in his debate with Cheney which hurt Kerry's chances.

We need a VP candidate who will not only destroy his opponent in the debate but also serve as Obama's surrogate in hitting McCain hard. That is how Ike used Nixon, Johnson used Humphrey, Clinton used Gore, and Bush used Cheney. A good VP is the best deputy a Presidential candidate can have,

Obama needs to figure out who that person is and go for it.

John Judis in The New Republic writes that Hillary Clinton might have lost the nomination due to her efforts at "winning the support of the pro-Israel lobby."

Specifically, Hillary's big mistake was backing the Kyl-Lieberman resolution which targeted the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. That resolution was drafted by Dick Cheney's office and Congressional neocons as a part of the run-up to war with Iran.

"Like her refusal to apologize for the October 2002 war resolution, her vote on Kyl-Lieberman may have stemmed from her ignoring the primary and thinking about the general election, or--as Helene Cooper suggested in The New York Times--it might have been an attempt to win support from the pro-Israel lobby,' which strongly backed the resolution. Whatever the case, her vote was a political disaster. It confirmed the worst fears of anti-war Democrats about her foreign policy inclinations. Her rivals denounced her vote, and she had to answer for it in ads, mailings, and debates through early January. It gave Obama an enormous push at a time when he seemed to be floundering and laid the groundwork for his success in fund-raising and in the Iowa caucuses."

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Watching Obama last night, I had to shake myself. As he said, it's been a long road since Iowa. And he's not President yet.

Nonetheless, it is fitting to think about the amazing victory he has already won. Barring accident (God knows this is a violent country so that caveat is always in order), the Democratic party is going to nominate a black man for President of the United States.

Yes, he is brilliant, eloquent, handsome and all that but he's also black. And despite the media's reluctance to discuss the race issue, it's there. And it's huge.

But not mostly in a negative way. Of course racists are coming out of the woodwork. I know people in Memphis who believe that if Lieberman wasn't on the ticket, Gore would have carried his home state in 2000. But so what.

Racists and haters are always there. The fact is that when Gore put Lieberman on the ticket, he did a great thing (regardless of Lieberman's post-2000 career). And a wall came crashing down.

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