Death Wish

With Barack Obama winning the majority of elected delegates and with more and more superdelegates following the popular-vote results to support him, Hillary Clinton has once again demonstrated how pathetically frantic she is to head off his inexorable nomination.

Resisting calls to bow to the inevitable and drop out of the race, she told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader newspaper that back in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was also seen as the certain Democratic nominee - only to be killed at the height of his triumph. "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?" she asked. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

Putting aside the fact that her memory of 1992 is somewhat faulty in that Bill Clinton actually clinched the nomination in early April, her RFK comment was like something out of a bad gangster movie. I can just see Clinton and her hired goons walking up to Barack Obama and sneering, "You wouldn't want anything bad to happen, would ya?"

It was pretty appalling, even for someone as seemingly hell-bent on political martyrdom as Clinton. She backtracked almost immediately, claiming she simply misspoke and she doesn't actually want Obama dead.

But it was no accident. She made pretty much the exact same statement to Time back in March:

We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.

She got away with it that time, so now that her only hope of winning the nomination is to convince the superdelegates to support her, she dragged it out again. The only difference is that this time around, she got caught.

In any event, she played right into the hands of all those loonies who claim she leaves a trail of corpses wherever she goes.

If this is really what she's been reduced to - raising the specter of something happening to Obama - then she's forfeited whatever support she may have once held. She used to be seen as a smart, savvy candidate who knew the ins and outs of Washington, but now she's been revealed as just another power-mad politician who is willing to do and say anything to win.