In many ways, it appears that the Clinton campaign is replicating a typical hardball Republican campaign – or for that matter a Republican administration. Instead of self-restraint and self-criticism, it’s all about going on the attack, never admitting mistakes – and treating critics like enemies.

Who does that sound like?

Having achieved peace in Northern Ireland and single-handedly passed the children’s healthcare bill, it wasn’t surprising to hear Hillary Clinton’s long tall tale about her dodging sniper fire in Bosnia, in a combat experience that never happened.

I have been waiting for Bill Clinton to emerge with a speech about “the two candidates who have seen military combat, John McCain and Hillary Clinton.”

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has been accused in recent days of padding her foreign policy resume while First Lady, admitted today that she may have exaggerated about an encounter she said she had with al-Qaeda terror mastermind Osama bin Laden in 1998.

In an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, Sen. Clinton told host Tim Russert, "I wrestled bin Laden in his cave in 1998 and had him pinned to the ground before the bastard got away."

Pride in the United States? In these circumstances? Assume that dreamy racial progress the neo-Confederates are celebrating. It’s still not the country most of us knew even 35 years ago, when a proven anti-Semite and pathological liar occupied the White House and nearly got away with his crimes. But he didn’t. The one in there now gets away with it every day: Torture. Extraordinary rendition. Secret prisons. Guantanamo. Domestic spying. Two wars. Abu Ghraib. Haditha. Deaths by the tens of thousands. Terrorism undermines morality, certainly. A president, however, ought to reinforce it. Not this one. He undermines it more than terrorism could. And that’s without touching on his domestic devolutions — his Taliban-like ban on embryonic stem-cell funding, his daily prayers to Darwinian economics, his devotional tributes to God, gut and graft.

Once, during the commodity-rationing days of the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt publicly mentioned that the White House might substitute salads for desserts to help conserve unrationed sugar and hence keep it that way, which promptly caused a run on sugar, which thereby forced its unscheduled rationing. Later, the puzzled, Congressionally chastised and somewhat shaken first lady commented, "It never crossed my mind that you couldn't tell the American people the truth and count on them to behave themselves accordingly."

And now comes Barack Obama, who surely felt as shaken as Eleanor Roosevelt in the wake of the nation's outcry over a few mostly truthful words about America's role in the world.

He did not say that the mess he is in has as much to do with religion as with racism--and, indeed, religion is the reason why our political discourse in this country is so scandalously stupid.

Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography. Examples of well-behaved and comparatively atheistic societies like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark--which surpass us in terrestrial virtues like education, health, public generosity, per capita aid to the developing world, and low rates of violent crime and infant mortality--are of no interest to our electorate whatsoever. It is, of course, good to know that people like Reverend Wright occasionally do help the poor, feed the hungry, and care for the sick. But wouldn't it be better to do these things for reasons that are not manifestly delusional? Can we care for one another without believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is now listening to our thoughts?

Obama was surely wise not to mention that Christianity was, without question, the great enabler of slavery in this country. The Confederate soldiers who eagerly laid down their lives at three times the rate of Union men, for the pleasure of keeping blacks in bondage and using them as farm equipment, did so with the conscious understanding that they were doing the Lord's work. After Reconstruction, religion united Southern whites in their racist hatred and the black community in its squalor--inuring men and women on both sides to injustice far more efficiently than it inspired them to overcome it.

Hard to say what's more dangerous -- McCain's approach to the economy or McCain's approach to the world. The thought of him answering the red phone at 3 a.m. fills me with foreboding. Hell, I don't want him answering the red phone at 3 p.m.