At the very least get your facts straight.

My record is public in the 2,000 or so articles I’ve published in these pages. Good luck finding anything I’ve written that puts me to the right of any liberal with common sense. (If you want to know where I stand on an issue, including the war or race and racism, there’s a search box to the right, or try the Google.)

You say you’re a liberal but you sound and act like a Bush Republican: You’re either with me 100%, or you’re my bitter enemy. And you are so blinded by your Republican-sounding Clinton-hatred that you have consistently ignored what I have said about my position on this race. I’m going to state it one last time and will type it very slowly:

I am only interested in winning.

I’m not into your cult of personality politics. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between Clinton and Obama on policy or leadership ability. Either could be a great president. However, I think Clinton has a slightly better chance than Obama to win but the race is McCain’s to lose.

The 1990s were all about irrational Clinton-hating, so if anyone is stuck there it’s you. The irony is you seem to hate Hillary because of her campaign’s negative tactics but you are far more vitriolic toward her than she is toward Obama. Or maybe you just hate all women.

Turns out the Obama-nation brand of politics is as much about unity as Bush’s “uniter not divider” crap, and just as nasty and divisive.

It is naive to think Republicans care if Democrats think they are racists. It hasn’t mattered since Nixon converted all the Southern conservative Dems to Republicans via his “Southern Strategy” in 1972, and there is not a shred of evidence that they will care this year.

The idea that Clinton will energize the GOP base is a Rush Limbaugh talking point that Obama-ists have picked up and spread around. Some of them apparently even actually believe it. Rush et al would love it if Obama is the nominee. The rightwingers know that among their listeners are millions of people who will not tolerate the idea of a black family moving into the White House.

Even the less racist, corporatist Republicans are, more than anything else, desperate to win. As they did in 2000 and 2004, they will lie, cheat and steal — and certainly countenance racist smears from their GOP brethren — in order to keep the White House this year. To assume otherwise is beyond naive, it is political suicide.

Clinton won reelection in New York State with 65% of the vote, which means she turned about 15% of upstate Republican Clinton haters into Clinton voters. That was way more than 50+1.

Unfortunately, 50+1 is not something the Dem nominee can opt in or out of. It’s the way the GOP has rigged the system. Unless something dramatic happens, that’s the demographic split the Dem nominee will face this year, like it or not.

If Obama is the nominee he will be lucky to get 50+1. As things stand today, it is extremely unlikely he can even do that. There is no possible way he will win any of the “Red” states Bush won last time. And as, noted, the evidence from Tuesday’s vote indicates he’d have trouble winning Ohio, and if Ohio is the swing state again this year. that will give the election to McCain.

The racists are worse than the Hillary-haters because, except in rare cases, racism is underground, secretive and harder to track and quantify, whereas the Clinton-haters are vocal and out in the open. Racism comes in degrees too. A lot of otherwise very nice people can be convinced by scurrilous advertising not to pull a lever for a black person. Just ask Harold Ford in Tenn. whose polling evaporated because of the “Harold, call me” ad.

Whether the nominee is Obama or Clinton, unless there is a dramatic shift in dynamics — a catastrophic terror attack that sends independents rallying around McCain or a macaca moment in the GOP that hobbles the McCain campaign, for example — the electoral map is going to look identical to 2004, with McCain taking the Confederacy, the Upper Midwest and Intermountain West, and the Dem winning the Northeast, Pennsylvania and the Pacific West.

It will likely all come down to Ohio again. The good news is, the GOP in Ohio is in a shambles. If the nominee is Obama, the bad news is, there are few more virulent racist enclaves anywhere in the U.S. than Cincinnati and southeastern Ohio. The results last night bear this out.

Finally, I would add that the idea that frontrunners can’t stumble and fall ignores history. It can happen in an instant, as it did with Howard Dean or in a cascade as it did with Gary Hart, or because an opponent gains sudden and surprising momentum as it did with Hillary Clinton.