Now she's done it.

I'm trying not to pay too much attention to the dogfight passing for the Democratic primary contest these days. Whoever wins, I tell myself, has to be better than McCain. (And surely please even the most rabid Hillarista or Obamaniac will see that.)

But Clinton keeps making that hard to do. She seems incapable of remembering that somebody has to beat John McCain come the fall. Her inability to come up with anything positive to separate the two candidates leads to a relentlessly negative campaign - against a fellow Democrat - which is disgusting and counter-productive. After telling voters that McCain would be better than Obama, how the hell will she campaign for the latter should he gain the nomination? Worse, her foreign policy pronouncements are increasingly hawkish, as though she has to prove she has the balls to fight a war even if we don't need to.

Her latest? A promise to "obliterate" Iran if they deliver a nuclear attack on Israel.

Leave aside the fact that Iran hasn't got nukes. Leave aside the fact that they don't actually seem to be trying to get them. Leave aside the fact that, you know, Israel isn't part of the US. Or that the reflexive "defend Israel at any cost" stance is more associated with the neo-cons who got us into Iraq than any liberal (not that, my brother's rants to the contrary, I have ever mistaken either Clinton for a liberal) position.

Clinton just promised to "obliterate" an entire nation. WTF?

As Robert Scheer says (my emphasis):

On primary election day in Pennsylvania, even with polls showing her well ahead in that state, Hillary went lower in her grab for votes. Seizing upon a question as to how she would respond to a nuclear attack by Iran, which doesn’t have nuclear weapons, on Israel, which does, Hillary mocked reasoned discourse by promising to “totally obliterate them,” in an apparent reference to the population of Iran. That is not a word gaffe; it is an assertion of the right of our nation to commit genocide on an unprecedented scale.

Shouldn’t the potential leader of a nation that used nuclear bombs to obliterate hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese employ extreme caution before making such a threat? Neither the Japanese then nor the Iranian people now were in a position to hold their leaders accountable, and to approve such collective punishment of innocents is to endorse terrorism. This from a candidate who attacked her opponent for suggesting targeted strikes against militants in Pakistan and derided his openness to negotiations with other national leaders as an irresponsible commitment on the part of a contender for the presidency.

Clearly the heat of a campaign is not the proper setting for consideration of a response to a threat from a nation that is a long way from developing nuclear weapons. Obviously the danger of Iran’s developing such weapons can be met with a range of alternatives, from the diplomatic to the military, that do not involve genocide and at any rate must be considered in moral and not solely political terms. Or is it base political ambition that would guide Clinton if she received that middle-of-the-night phone call?

If so, it cannot be assumed that Hillary Clinton as president would be less irrationally hawkish and more restrained in the unleashing of military force than John McCain. The latter, at least, has personal experience with the true, on-the-ground costs of militarism gone wild. Yes, I know that McCain still holds out the hope of winning the Iraq war that both he and Hillary originally endorsed, but for Clinton to raise the rhetoric against Iran in the midst of a campaign is hardly the path to Mideast peace, whether it concerns Israel or Iraq. It is bizarre that a politician who bought into the phony threat about Iraq’s nonexistent WMD arsenal now plays political games with the alleged threat posed by Iran.

Congratulations, Clinton. You've made me decide to support Obama as more than a default candidate.