redblueamerica.com

Hillary Clinton can still win the Democratic nomination. But the only way she can do it is to make herself unworthy of support in November.

The Los Angeles Times explains:

Under current Democratic rules, a candidate needs 2,024 delegates to win the nomination, and Obama will probably emerge from Tuesday's voting about 200 delegates from that goal. But Clinton has started to argue that 2,209 delegates are needed to win. Her claim is that the party should seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of participating in the nomination fight as punishment for moving their primary election dates earlier than allowed. That argument, of course, benefits Clinton, who won both states handily and would win a large share of their combined 366 delegates, allowing her to dig into Obama's lead.

The Times rightly calls this "moving the goal line of the nominating process." And since we're using a sports metaphor here, let's ask ourselves what we would call it if the goal line were actually moved during the middle of a game.

We'd call that cheating.

Understand, it's probably not right that Michigan and Florida were excluded from the Democratic nominating contests -- all in the name of preserving (and pandering to) the Iowa-New Hampshire starting gun for caucuses and primaries. But those were the rules that everybody -- Clinton included -- agreed to beforehand.

One of the reasons that Democrats and liberals have been so angry -- yes, bitter even -- during the last eight years is because we sense the Bush Administration has been, well, cheating. Starting with the Supreme Court decision to halt Florida vote-counting in 2000, moving on to the warrantless wiretapping program clear on through to the tricky lawyers' memos saying the Geneva Convention doesn't apply when we don't want it to, the entire Bush presidency has seemed to be one long exercise in dodging both the spirit and the letter of numerous laws.

And now we have a Democratic candidate who is willing, apparently, to take the same approach to campaigning. Which gives us, I think, a pretty good idea of how she would govern as president.

Spun in the best light, Hillary Clinton would have us understand this means that she is just as tough as the Republicans. And that is a tempting argument, to be sure, for a party that really, really wants to take the White House back.

But most of us understand, though, that replacing a Republican cheater with a Democratic cheater means that, in the end, we get a cheater as president. Ends very rarely justify the means; in this case, they'd be indistinguishable.