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The jobs of the guys and gals who toil away in the Republican opposition research warrens were made a lot easier yesterday. Flowers and cards are surely on the way to unreformed leftist Tom Hayden, who authored an anti-Hillary piece for the unreformed leftist magazine The Nation. Why rely on conservatives to bring up Hillary's shady, radical lefty past when a lefty can do it for you?

By Hayden's telling — and he's a dude who knows what he's talking about — Hillary's sprint away from her radical heritage makes his wife scream in frustration. That's why he's so hurt that Hillary would try to pass herself off as a more moderate version of the radical lefty Obama. As Hayden notes, it's a disingenuous ploy:

[A]fter Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm's partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein's sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn't she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn't the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn't the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

So, in Hayden's eyes, defending violent Black Panthers and anti-American commies is "honorable." And the rants of Wright, he says, shouldn't just stick to Obama, but Hillary, too — since Wright represents "the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days."

This is why Democrats are so nervous, and probably screwed. Though Hillary is trying to sell herself to Democratic "super delegates" as a more palatable alternative to Obama, they are both hard lefties. And neither candidate will be able to outrun their radical records and history — the kind of record that Hayden has so helpfully noted with his embrace.

Thanks, dude. Smoke a bowl for me. (HT: Ramesh Ponnuru at The Corner.)