Advice to Barack Obama: You Can Take Clinton Apart and Still Respect Yourself in the Morning (Profanity-Free For the Kiddies):
So, like, Barack, here's the conundrum you find yourself in: you wanna keep the Hope Train running, so you're shoveling coal into that engine like you're Casey Jones on the Illinois Central. You know that Hillary Clinton and her minions, like Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn, are gonna start tossing way, way more than the kitchen sink at you. You better be ready to duck, 'cause the whole house is whirling your way, Twister-style.

And you're stuck. You know you gotta start jumping in the mud with both feet, but you built this whole movement on staying so above-it-all. Here's the thing: you don't have to join Hillary Clinton for a wallow. You don't need someone associated with your campaign to go on CNN and question, say, whether or not she's a Muslim.

Yes, her bizarre refusal to release her tax returns means that she has something to hide, and it will become a trust issue in a general election, so you may as well make a huge deal about it now. Here's a couple of other tactics:

1. Question the legitimacy of her victories. Sure, sure, Ohio was clearly a Clinton victory. But that Texas win? Well, let's hear from rude reader CW:

"I can tell you that Clinton did not *win* the popular vote in Texas. We are the state of the 19-percenters, Huckabee-lovers and Hagee. Republicans knew that McCain would win Ohio and since in Texas we have open primaries, the RNC, Texas Repubs and Rush had been telling all their zombies to vote Clinton because they think they can beat her. My own mother, who hasn't voted for a Democrat for 40 years, told me that she voted for Hillary because 'you know, I support McCain, so I voted for her like everyone else up here.' My mother wasn't our only contact to verify our suspicions. All those rural counties with few votes...Republicans to the core and they HATE Hillary with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Although I live in an Obama county near the George HW Bush Presidential Library, we must have had a huge number of crossovers ourselves because Huckabee nearly beat McCain here."

Get some research going, man. How widespread was a Republican vote in Texas because of the open primary? How has the open primary benefited Clinton before because Republicans want to run against her and not you? C'mon, if her people can question the legitimacy of caucuses, you can question the legitimacy of the open primary.

As CW continues regarding Texas, "Watch the caucus results. Those are going to be far more accurate because only the true-blue Democrats return for the meetings after the polls close. The delegate representation is determined by how many supporters for each candidate show up for the caucus. The popular vote has nothing to do with how these delegates are chosen. At the caucus we vote on delegates to the county and state conventions as well as resolutions for the party platform, so the Republicans stay away lest they be outed or contaminated with our Democratic ideals."

2. Go after who is associated with her campaign. The hammers of Rezko and Farrakhan will keep bludgeoning you. So howzabout a little payback? If there's anything we've learned from the Rove school of media manipulation, little things can take the big things off the table: how quickly did we forget about whether or not George W. Bush blew off his National Guard duties once we were told that Dan Rather might have been given a forged document? Also, moral equivalency can be ludicrously imbalanced.

For instance, did you know that Hillary Clinton's "top election lawyer" in New Jersey, Peter Cammarano, is under investigation by the state Election Law Enforcement Commission for what seems to be a clear violation of the law? Yeah, Cammarano chaired a PAC that raised funds for Democrats while still an elected councilman. Funds might not have gone to the Clinton campaign, but this is exactly the kind of rule-bending that reminds people of what they don't like to remember about the Clintons (fairly or unfairly, but this ain't really about fair). And, c'mon, Clinton's election lawyer might be violating election law? Surely, there's a few superdelegates in the state that this might matter to.

It's a little thing, but the little things add up, Barack. They provide the foundation for an argument against someone. And that's where you are. You gotta say why not to vote for Hillary Clinton, not just why to vote for you.

Oh, and don't forget about McCain and Bush. But the Rude Pundit can't talk about that and keep his profanity-free pledge.