Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.

In any case, Farrakhan is a complex character, and any honest appraisal of him will necessarily be nuanced. Personally, I think that Farrakhan has on balance done more harm than good -- and that aside from my suspicion that he had a hand in Malcolm's assassination -- but a good portion of that harm stems from having made himself such an inviting bogeyman for white bigots, the most recent instance of which is Cohen's bizarre insistence that Obama denounce his pastor for having praised Farrakhan twenty-five years ago.

So I guess any uppity negroes thinking of running for a Democratic nomination need to be aware that denouncing Farrakhan is one of the litmus tests for separating the good negroes from the bad negroes. Sounds easy enough, but don't worry, there'll be others -- an endless supply of others.

I think in the end that this is going to backfire badly on the Clintons. They're not going to peel black voters away from Obama by putting on their white hoods, and anyone who isn't offended by the racism is going to be offended by the implied insult to their intelligence. And speaking as a white guy from the burbs, every time the Clintons or one of their Clintonista surrogates turns my stomach with this garbage, I want more and more to vote for Obama in the primaries just to give them the finger.

If nothing else, we should view this as a prime opportunity to make a thorough list of all of the Dem racists who come crawling out of the woodwork to support Clinton.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

Here's just a few...

COHEN (8/11/05): The same holds for the other women associated with this [New York Senate] race--even more so if Hillary Clinton eventually runs for president. In effect, she will once again invite us to dissect her marriage and why she stays in it. She is clearly up to it--but why she is up to it is something many of us will never understand. The life of a politician, ever strange, is getting stranger and stranger.

COHEN (2/13/07): It was about the only thing I got right about the war, which, the record will show, I supported. If I were running for the presidency, I might call my position "a mistake" and bray about being misled. But it was really a lapse in judgment. For reasons extraneous to this particular column, I thought the war would do wonders for the Middle East and that it would last, at the most, a week or two. In this I was assured by the usual experts in and out of government. My head nodded like one of those little toy dogs in the window of the car ahead of you.

So I do not condemn Clinton and other Democratic presidential candidates -- Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and John Edwards -- for voting for the war because I would have done the same. I fault them, though, for passing the blame to Bush as the guy who misled them. They all had sufficient knowledge to question the administration's arguments, and they did not do so. Not a single one of them, for instance, could possibly have believed the entirety of the administration's case or not have suspected that the reasons for war were being hyped.

COHEN (9/18/07): This week Hillary Clinton announced her health care plan. Good for her. But you never had any doubt, did you, that she was going to have one -- and a plan for everything else. The issue with Hillary Clinton is not whether she's smart or experienced but whether she has -- how do we say this? -- the character to be president. Behind her, after all, trails the lingering vapor of all those gates: Travel, File, Whitewater, and other scandals to which she was a part only through marriage. In a hatless society, she is always wearing a question mark.

Let's not rush to conclusions about who's fingerprints are on these hit pieces, ok?  It only flames the fires that are being massaged by the media.