And so the primary season rolls on.

The mighty Obama has taken some blows of late. He’s being tacked with every left-wing extremist Clinton can muster; Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan, and then Michael Moore comes along and throws his support behind Obama, like he somehow thinks his support counts anymore.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I’m for Obama.

But these recent tactics by Hillary Clinton have been bothering me long before Carl Bernstein wrote on the Huffington Post that she’s employing, in his rather esteemed opinion, McCarthyist tactics to taint Obama via the “guilt by association” method.

You know: Your friends are losers, so you can’t possibly not be a loser, too. That’s what it all comes down to.

But it’s so much worse. It’s so horrible to think that, in a time and age with so much division, we should allow a would-be president to say “You’re unsavoury because of the company you keep.”

I mean, oh, my god.

I’m too young to have lived under the threat posed by the McCarthy era, as are most of my readers, I would imagine, but I’m pretty familiar with the tactics employed in those days, and it terrifies me. (Think of an America like that one in the months following 9/11, where everyone’s a little scared and, where everyone informed on everyone else, embraced by a cult of suspicion. “Oh, he’s a communist/terrorist/radical, I heard him at a party.” Imagine speculation or rumour or guilt-by-association and context-twisting to cause you to have to testify at the notorious McCarthy hearings for “UnAmerican Affairs” and resulting in you losing your job because you’re a suspected “Red” or terrorist or radical. This is what Clinton’s doing these days, reopening old traditions of judging someone solely on the company they keep.)

I, for one, feel that Americans can’t get rid of one freedom-eroding president in trade for someone who’s either, a) a hypocrite and using false sentiment to raise trouble, or b) really does feel that guilt by association is viable or even reliable when it comes to judging someone’s character.

When this campaign began, I honestly felt like I’d like either Obama or Clinton as president, but some of these tactics have really worn out my loyalty to Hillary. It’s a real shame, too.

As readers of sex blogs, you, dear reader, should be alarmed at this method of guilt-by-association that Hillary Clinton’s using against Obama. Especially since she’s been really roasted over the years for her wildly, radically left youth spent working summers with a law firm that defended Black Panthers back in the bad ol’ days of the late ’60s. Is she a murderer because she’s defended a few?

If she was the one doing the judging now, she would be. She’s trying to tell us all that Obama’s a radical (with the middle name Hussein) because he associates with a now-mainstream former member of the extreme left, guilty of some bombings in the ’60s, when Obama was 8, but she’s been known to hang with some Black Panthers? Besides, her hubby used his presidential pardon to give Ayers, the “terrorist” guy Obama’s known on the board of some organizations, a full and complete pardon, for which his wife is now totally dragging the guy back through the muck.

It’s really, really incomprehensible. But as I mentioned, as readers of sex blogs, you, reader, could be some perverted sex-addled horndog that should never be left alone with children, or is that just a ridiculous assertion?

Yeah, do the math, right? It just doesn’t add up. That’s guilt-by-association for you, and it’s never a fair way to judge anyone. It’s tantamount to judging on appearances, because it’s easy to connect the dots into shapes you want, if you know what you’re looking for, right?

Sigh. I’ll be glad when the nomination’s finally made and I can just run with whatever the choice is, but I hope to hell it’s for Obama.

I know I’m Canadian, but the American election’s important to all of us this year. Look at the climate in the world with the oil crisis and the food shortage and the subprime mortgage disaster and the plumetting American dollar. Serious solutions are needed, and we’re all getting invested in what Americans decide this year.

And regardless of the sheen that’s come off his shine in the recent weeks, most of the world’s thinking Obama means hope for everyone. Crazy? Maybe. Maybe not.

Just play nice, Hillary. This is so unbecoming of you. A real disappointment. I thought you were better than this. Obama, at least, still seems pretty dignified. So, there’s that.