If you missed the two-night Hillary-O’Reilly lovefest extravaganza (as I did, deliberately), we’ve got an easier-to-digest six-minute highlight reel just for you:

Hillary seems to suggest that as goes North Carolina, so goes the nomination.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s was the second suicide tied to the investigation and prosecution of Palfrey’s escort service. Brandy Britton, a former sociology professor at the University of Maryland, who worked as an escort with Palfrey’s service killed herself in January of last year shortly before her case went to trial.

Greg Anrig, Jr.: It’s time for Dems to press their advantage and make an aggressive case that conservative ideology has been an unqualified failure.

More complaining from John McCain about that DNC ad on his 100 years remarks. As I’ve argued here, the DNC ad is rigorously accurate. It quotes McCain saying just what he said.

Says McCain: “It’s a direct falsification, and I’m sorry that political campaigns have to deteriorate in this fashion. Because there’s legitimate differences between myself and Senator Obama and Senator Clinton on what we should do in Iraq.”

Clearly, we need to keep things on the high road like calling your opponent the candidate of Hamas.

This seems to be the gloss that McCain believes the DNC should add to provide the proper context for his remarks: “”After we win the war in Iraq, and we are succeeding — and it’s long and hard and tough, with enormous sacrifices — then I’m talking about a security arrangement that may or may not be the same kind of thing we had with Korea after the Korean war was over.”

There’s a simple point behind the 100 years furor — or perhaps I should say the 100 years GOP apoplexy. Now it’s McCain and the Republicans who are adding words like ‘fight’ and ‘war’ and the like, which the ad does not use. But what’s really driving them nuts is that all you really have to do is line up three words, or two words and a phrase. “Iraq” + “Stay” + “100 years”. As Hillel might have said, all the rest is commentary. And as most voters would say, none of it really matters.

He said it. And more importantly, he means it. As Hertzberg aptly put it, “McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal–that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we’ll stay.”

TPM Reader NC ties together the threads …

What should be noted about McCain’s 100-year Scarlet Letter is the full context, beyond even the exchange in New Hampshire: He bet his nomination on Petraeus and improvement in Iraq. It worked. But now the myopic, hawkish bluster of “make it 100” (or “Bomb, Bomb Iran”) that served him well in January is a doozy to deal with in the general. The vast majority of this country doesn’t agree with him on Iraq and that is now paired with the momentary lapse in violence once again escalating. This isn’t only an issue of McCain’s careless word choice. It’s about his painful shortcomings (and the Republican Party’s) come November.

From the AP …

Former President Bill Clinton was in West Virginia on his wife’s behalf. In Clarksburg, he called her a scrapper and contrasted her appeal among working-class voters with the elitists he said support Obama.

“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” he said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”

Hillary launches a last-minute ad in Indiana declaring that her gas tax holiday would “save families $8 billion” — “Barack Obama says that’s just pennies.”

Another TPM Reader chimes in …

I haven’t ever understood what context the famous 100 years sound bite is really lacking. When McCain is given a chance to provide the missing context it seems to me to boil down to, “I don’t want you to picture it as staying in an Iraq like the present one, I like to picture it being easier and more fun.”

But if you look at each instance of the McCain 100 year boast, he is saying it to make the point that we mustn’t leave the hard, deadly, actual Iraq. That’s the whole context that he is, I think, being mercifully spared. The entire, nuanced version seems to me to be essentially this: There’s no point to leave Iraq once we’ve turned it into Korea. (In fact, he says, it would likely prove a handy base.) But, furthermore, it is unconscionable to leave until then. So there exists in the McCain Doctrine, as I understand it, absolutely no level of violence, no level of stability, no turn of events under which he would advocate leaving.

For him to want to amend the 100 years sound bite by saying, “yeah, but picture it being much less awful” isn’t really a substantive amendment when he means for us to stay in either event.

I’m going to try to put together a longer post on this for either tonight or tomorrow. But basically, it’s not just all the horrible stuff going on in Iraq. It’s the fact that McCain doesn’t grasp that our weakening economic position is undermining our long-term national power — not least our hard military power — and that there are actual new great powers on the horizon that we’re going to be dealing with in the coming decades. So pouring our national power and wealth down the drain to roust street gang jihadist in Basra just doesn’t turn out to be such a hot idea. But he has Iraq myopia and he’s McCain so he’s absolutely sure that if we stick with this it’ll get better and we may even eventually figure out a reason why we’re there in the first place.