It's a good thing for Hillary Clinton that she and her political-bodyguard husband aren't Republicans. She'd be out on her ear for race-baiting alone.

Do you remember a few short weeks ago when Hillary suggested that the real mover and shaker on civil rights was not MLK but LBJ, without whom MLK's efforts would have been for naught, essentially? Do you remember the Clintons' surrogate, Robert Johnson, smearing Barack Obama with allusions to his youthful drug experimentation?

Liberals, including the mainstream dinosaur media, circled the wagons around her, insisting she couldn't possibly have intended racial slurs. Even many conservatives hastened to defend her against this charge.

Had a Republican made a statement like Hillary's about the respective accomplishments of MLK (an African American) and LBJ on the heels of making a similar comparison between Obama (an African American) and herself, liberals would have savaged him and driven him out of the race. They would have invoked the irrebuttable liberal presumption that conservatives are racists. Just ask Trent Lott.

With Democrats, the opposite presumption applies. Hillary couldn't possibly have intended a racial slur, nor could she have been guilty of racial insensitivity, because she is a liberal Democrat and liberal Democrats are enlightened and incapable of racism. You need look no further than the race-based assaults by liberal cartoonists against Condoleezza Rice to understand the magnitude of this double standard.

In fairness -- a fairness that liberals never extend to similarly situated Republicans -- Hillary might not have intended for her MLK allusion and Robert Johnson's reference to Obama's drug use to have subtle racial undertones. And because of the double standard that gives a pass to liberals for such insensitivity, Hillary likely wouldn't have to worry about this matter any further except for one stubborn fact. Apart from the MLK and Johnson statements, the Clintons really did, in the brilliant light of day, brazenly adopt a strategy designed to racially charge this contest to capitalize on national demographics: There are fewer blacks than whites and Hispanics.

Bill Clinton's feigned lament -- repeated loudly and often -- that voters were choosing their candidates on the basis of race and gender was intended to spark a backlash among non-blacks. Clinton's Machiavellian ends were so transparent that even stalwart Clinton supporter Ted Kennedy called him onto the carpet for them and now has publicly endorsed Obama.

A sweet aroma of irony fills the air as the Clintons' loathsome, sinister tactics, being used against fellow Democrats for the first time in a big way since Bill's first presidential primary contest, are coming back to bite them. Continued...