Hillary Clinton courts bigots

Hillary Clinton hasn’t been able to stop Barack Obama with “35 years of experience,” “Ready on day one,” “He’s a cokehead,” “He’s the new Jesse Jackson,” “He’s stirring up false hopes,” “He’s all talk,” “Change you can Xerox” or any other of her approaches to voters.

So yesterday, with just eight days to go until must-win contests in Ohio and Texas, Clinton played her last card — the “Barack Obama isn’t really American” card.

If you have an ounce of doubt in your mind about the inspiration and source of this week’s Obama costume drama, read this post on The New Republic and watch the accompanying video. It features Clinton supporter Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, insinuating that Obama is a foreigner — three times.

One of the more interesting parts of this story to me is that it puts good people who support Clinton in the position of having to defend their candidate’s naked appeal to bigotry.

Some, like JerryT at Blog For Democracy, are honest and upset:

I’ve rationalized quite a bit of crap to justify my support of Sen. Clinton, but I am running out of excuses.

Some, like MelGX and Phlange, are positively Baghdad Bob-like in their refusal to acknowledge the obvious:

“I don’t think it matters who sent it out.”

“Can we just agree to hold off on accusing HRC of doing this until proven guilty??! Thought this was the land of Innocent Until Proven Guilty.”