Continuing their war of words from the You Tube "debate," Obama lashed out harshly at Hillary Clinton for criticizing his answer that he would meet face-to-face with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela in his first year in office. Seth Gitell has the story for the New York Sun:

Dismissing Senator Clinton's foreign policy as "Bush-Cheney lite," Senator Obama is serving notice to his main rival that the days of well-mannered debate in the Democratic presidential race are over.

In an appearance here yesterday, Mr. Obama electrified his grassroots supporters by using his toughest language yet against Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama stood by his pledge to meet with the presidents of Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba during his first year in office if elected president.

That promise, made in Monday night's debate, has been the focus of a week of sparring between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, making the contest feel this week increasingly like a two-person race. In likening Mrs. Clinton to President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Mr. Obama is making an appeal to the party's left-wing activists, with whom both Messrs. Bush and Cheney are deeply unpopular. The effort mirrors prior attempts to define centrist-minded Democrats as outside the confines of the party, such as last year's primary challenge to Senator Lieberman of Connecticut.

Read it all at the link above. Obama may be stepping up his appeal to the extreme left, but he is also exposing himself as someone woefully naive on foreign policy and diplomacy, and hopelessly unprepared for the Presidency. This is entirely a self-inflicted wound, too - there might have been some fleeting damage from his thoughtless debate answer if he had come out the next day and said, "No, I didn't mean I would PERSONALLY meet with these leaders, I meant we would conduct diplomacy with these regimes without preconditions. I misinterpreted the question."

Instead, he has invested his entire candidacy on the notion now, once more proving he is "not ready for prime time." Appealing to the frothing-at-the-mouth anti-American left in this way may seem like a good idea given their control of the Democratic Party, but it's absolute electoral suicide in a general election. If Democrats' main doubt about Hillary is her "electability," Obama just handed her a golden shield - because he isn't, either.

Still, the biggest loser in the exchange is John Edwards, who is increasingly irrelevant as it becomes a two-man race.