In general, McClellan describes the president as someone who lacks inquisitiveness and is also deceitfully self-delusional. Long money quote: "As I worked closely with President Bush, I would come to believe that sometimes he convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment. It is not unlike a witness in court who does not want to implicate himself in wrongdoing, but is also concerned about perjuring himself. So he says, 'I do not recall.' The witness knows no one can get into his head and prove it is not true, so this seems like a much safer course than actually lying. Bush, similarly, has a way of falling back on the hazy memory defense to protect himself from potential political embarrassment. Bush rationalizes it as being acceptable because he is not stating unequivocally anything that could be proven false. If something later is uncovered to show what he knew, then he can deny lying in his own mind."

McClellan's account adds another set of insider anecdotes to the already heaping stack built by previous Bush officials and advisers. Paul O'Neill first described the president's blindness to inconvenient facts six years ago when he talked about Bush's lack of appetite for "analytical rigor, sound information-gathering techniques and real, cost-benefit analysis." The list of administration officials turned bashers includes John Dilulio, Larry Wilkerson, Rand Beers, Richard Clarke, David Kuo, Paul Pillar, and Matthew Dowd.

On Wednesday, Republicans collectively went completely berserk after Obama said a great-uncle had helped to liberate the Auschwitz death camp at the end of World War II. Once they realized Obama had a great-uncle who had actually helped to liberate Buchenwald, the first camp liberated by Americans, and Obama just misspoke about the Nazi camp in question, conservatives slinked away, waiting for the next manufactured outrage to come up.

But before we leave this non-story altogether, it?s worth pausing to consider what else Obama?s GOP detractors said about this.

Fox News, for example, was even more shameless than usual. One of the hosts of ?Fox and Friends? said, ?It wasn?t Auschwitz. It was a labor camp called Buchenwald.? As part of the same segment, Fox News ran this all-caps message on its bottom-of-the-screen ticker: ?Ohrdruf was a work camp, rather than an extermination camp.?

Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors and a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of Holocaust survivors, who was not at all pleased with Republican smear efforts this week.

I never thought I?d see the day when the Holocaust would be used as a tool for ?gotcha? politics. But over the last two days, we have seen John McCain?s supporters at the Republican National Committee and at Fox News launch tasteless attacks on Barack Obama. In their attempt to score a few political points, they have diminished the experience of those who suffered and died at Buchenwald, and disrespected the service of the heroic American troops who liberated them. [?]

Here are some facts about Buchenwald, which is one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. At this ?work camp,? prisoners were often worked, starved, tortured, or beaten to death. Sometimes they were simply murdered. Roughly 250,000 people were imprisoned there between 1937 and 1945, many of them Jews. Over 50,000 people lost their lives.

At the moment, Electoral College obsession is once again overtaking the punditocracy, so please forgive me if I'm pointing out the obvious: The Electoral College very rarely matters, and our current fixation on it is mostly a product of memories from the Bush-Gore race. Before that year, only once in American history--1888--had a candidate won a popular-vote plurality while legitimately losing the presidency in the Electoral College. (The election of 1876 doesn't count, and in 1824 the vote went to the House of Representatives.) In both 1888 and 2000, moreover, the national popular vote was extremely close--a margin of 0.8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.

A woman? Yes. But not that woman.

It is the platitude of the moment, an automatic rejoinder to any suggestion that Hillary Clinton has struggled so desperately -- and so far unsuccessfully -- to grasp the Democratic presidential nomination in some measure because she is female.

It isn't the woman part, the rationale goes. It's the Clinton part: that "polarizing" persona and "unlikable" demeanor. The unappetizing thought of President "Billary." The more inspirational quest by Barack Obama to become the country's first black president.

Yet the question remains: If not now, when? If not Hillary, who?

A federal appeals court today upheld a lower ruling that the U.S. currency system discriminates against blind people because bills of different denominations are the same size, shape and color and cannot be easily distinguished by the visually impaired.

In a 2-1 ruling issued this morning, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the existing system violates the federal Rehabilitation Act and ruled that the Treasury Department must find a way to accommodate the needs of the visually impaired.

Obama is doing something altogether different. He is standing for an alternative vision of how America should operate in the world, and he is defending it tooth and nail. I'm not sold on the idea that negotiations without preconditions with hostile powers are the world's best strategy. If the US had some leverage over Iran that might be one thing, but, in our current state, we have little. Still, this is one of those cases where the symbolic message of what Obama did last Friday is more important, for now, than the substance. He said: These people have screwed up foreign policy and security. I have a different way of doing things. And I'm not ceding an inch.

Immigrants of the past quarter-century have been assimilating in the United States at a notably faster rate than did previous generations, according to a study released today...

The study, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank, used census and other data to devise an assimilation index to measure the degree of similarity between the United States' foreign-born and native-born populations. These included civic factors, such as rates of U.S. citizenship and service in the military; economic factors, such as earnings and rates of homeownership; and cultural factors, such as English ability and degree of intermarriage with U.S. citizens. The higher the number on a 100-point index, the more an immigrant resembled a U.S. citizen.

In general, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the more characteristics of native citizens he or she tends to take on, said Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor at Duke University and author of the study. During periods of intense immigration, such as from 1870 to 1920, or during the immigration wave that began in the 1970s, new arrivals tend to drag down the average assimilation index of the foreign-born population as a whole.

The report found, however, that the speed with which new arrivals take on native-born traits has increased since the 1990s. As a result, even though the foreign population doubled during that period, the newcomers did not drive down the overall assimilation index of the foreign-born population. Instead, it held relatively steady from 1990 to 2006.

"This is something unprecedented in U.S. history," Vigdor said. "It shows that the nation's capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong."

As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.

I won't miss episodes like the one in which liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a "big [expletive] whore" and said the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters -- one of whom had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee's official campaign Web site.

I won't miss Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.

Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette...

Would the silence prevail if Obama's likeness were put on a tap-dancing doll that was sold at airports? Would the media figures who dole out precious face time to these politicians be such pals if they'd compared Obama with a character in a blaxploitation film? And how would crude references to Obama's sex organs play?

There are many reasons Clinton is losing the nomination contest, some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the groundswell for "change." But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.