...to ask all the Republican candidates (as you asked the Democrats) if they will pledge to cut off Federal aid to universities that bar ROTC? Will you ask them why they did not clamor for that cut-off during the years when the leader of their party was in command?

...to ask all the Republican candidates if they will pledge to cut off Federal aid to schools that teach the pseudo-science of "intelligent design"?

...to ask all the Republican candidates why they went to the mat to support a president who smiled benignly on the housing bubble?

...to ask all the Republican candidates why they went to the mat to support a president who stood by while New Orleans was drowning?

...to ask any Republican candidate besides John McCain why they have sat on their hands while the glaciers were melting?

Just when it was looking safe to come out and talk about grown-up, more-than-identity politics, Richard Cohen pours oil on the embers in this morning's WP column, smacking Barack Obama for having failed to denounce his church's magazine for having made an award to the loathsome Louis Farrakhan for having "truly epitomized greatness."

Defenders of Cohen say that this stuff is already "out there" in right-wing blogs, and that Obama had better show he can fend it off during the primaries before the Republicans have at him. But Cohen's tone is smarmier, more bristling than that.

It would be one thing to pin Norman Podhoretz's blood-lusty foreign policy on his advisee Rudy Giuliani. But the failure-to-denounce game easily metastasizes and can't be called back. Was Richard Cohen up in arms because John Ashcroft, in his incarnation as presidential candidate, sucked up to the unreconstructed Confederates?