Go, Hillary!

There's a phrase you probably didn't expect to hear from me. But I mean it, I'm serious: go, Hillary, go! As in, go away. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

It's time for the media to give Clinton the Ron Paul treatment: play her for laughs, but recognize that the nomination is not and cannot be hers and stop giving her credence she has not earned. She is not a viable candidate for the White House.

Her campaign could be quirkily quixotic, a la Huckabee, but she is neither gracious nor charming nor apparently hanging in for the sake of principle while acknowledging the writing is on the wall. She seems to be fueled by an unnerving combination of of ambition and delusion.

Hillary Clinton is the new Joe Lieberman. The Democrats of Connecticut spoke and told Joe he was done; but he wouldn't take "go away" for an answer, and now he's standing beside John McCain, correcting his foreign policy gaffes. Hillary, America has spoken.

She claims the opposite; she's arguing it's anti-democratic to call a candidate out while there are still votes to count. Tell that to Edwards, Richardson, Kucinich, Dodd, Biden, Giuliani, Huckabee, Brown, Tancredo, and Romney. (Did I leave anyone out?) Sure, Hillary's closer in numbers to Obama than sideshows like Giuliani ever came to McCain, but that's academic. The result is the same: she cannot win the nomination.

Okay, well, sure, she could, if the superdelegates got together and decided to thwart the expressed will of the voters. But let's take a look at the trend. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has won more than twice as many superdelegates as Clinton. The tide is not in her favor. Any way you want to slice this, by any metric, Hillary has lost and cannot win.

Hillary seems to think that the fact that she is "close" (she trails by 700,000 votes and nearly 200 pledged delegates) entitles her to...well, I'm not sure what, exactly. The nomination? John Kerry was "close" to Bush in 2004, but what did that matter? Second place is second place.

Bill Clinton called the media coverage of Obama's anti-war position "the biggest fairy tale I've ever heard." That must mean he'd never heard Hillary's tale of landing in Bosnia under sniper-fire. Meantime, following the Reverend Wright dust-up, Gallup discovers that Obama leads Clinton nationally by a margin-of-error-proof 10%.

Why is anyone still supporting her? She invented the Bosnia story out of whole cloth -- and repeated it on multiple occasions -- to buttress the myth that she has significant foreign policy experience. As one wag put it, "Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle." She either has a poor memory, is delusional, or is mendacity incarnate. Which of these qualities becomes a president?

Barack Obama was a relative newcomer on the national stage; he came from more than 20 percentage points behind to overcome and surpass a candidate who truly was inevitable, and we are supposed to believe that she's the one with superior judgment and administrative capacity? Did I mention that her campaign has $8.7 million in unpaid bills? I don't understand. What do people see in her?

Last week it was reported that 28% of Clinton supporters said they would vote for McCain instead if when Obama gets the nomination. This is, I think, more than coincidentally close to the 27% threshhold of the Theory of Crazification. I know; in the past, I myself have entertained the thought -- and may even have spoken aloud the threat -- of voting for McCain if Hillary is the nominee. But then I thought about it. I thought about who would get to fill vacancies on the Supreme Court. I thought about who would appoint the next Attorney General while we have innocent people languishing in undisclosed locations around the world. I thought about the war in Iraq. I thought about universal healthcare and the housing crisis and the environment and civil rights and tax cuts.

And so, while I may believe that Hillary deserves to lose, I believe America does not. America needs to win. America needs to firmly reject the Bush Administration and its supporters and apologists and reclaim its moral standing in the world.

All things considered, Hillary Clinton would probably make a good president. Certainly a better one than John McCain. But Barack Obama is a better choice yet; and the voters have already chosen him. It's time for Senator Clinton to step aside and support the people's decision.