When I saw the headline at WashingtonPost.com "Closing the Whopper Gap" with columnist Ruth Marcus's name next to it, I naturally assumed this had to be another hit piece on John McCain akin to what my colleague Mark Finkelstein reported last week. 

Yet, upon closer examination, it turned out Marcus's target of disaffection this time was -- wait for it! -- Barack Obama.

And, she even defended Rush Limbaugh.

I'm not kidding.

In fact, Marcus went after the junior senator from Illinois in such an aggressive fashion that she not only will likely be eviscerated by her typically adoring fans in the liberal blogosphere, but also could end up being named Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" next week (emphasis added throughout):

In a Wednesday column decrying John McCain's condemnation of the Supreme Court's ruling giving Guantanamo detainees access to the courts, former Washington Post reporter and editor Ruth Marcus illustrated that no matter how unexcited conservatives may be about McCain liberals still see him as dangerous as she expressed fear of what McCain's efforts to appease conservatives will mean for the Supreme Court if he wins:

As his evolving reactions to the Guantanamo case may indicate, legal issues are not at the center of McCain's policy interests. But they are a top priority for conservative activists, which makes me all the more nervous about what a McCain presidency would mean for the court.

Marcus, the Post's deputy national editor from 1999 through 2002 (bio), noted that “the oldest justices are also the most liberal,” so she worried “a President McCain could shift the court significantly to the right” while, she lamented, “a President Obama would be lucky, even with a Democratic Senate, to nudge the court even a bit in a liberal direction.”

In a revealing moment of MSM elitism, WaPo editorialist Ruth Marcus, discussing the decision of Silda Wall Spitzer to appear with her husband Eliot yesterday, wanted people to know Mrs. Spitzer is a Harvard law grad and a "serious" person, not a Tammy Wynette type.

Marcus was interviewed by Contessa Brewer on MSNBC this afternoon, and the pair turned to the question of why political wives tend to appear with their husbands who have been caught up in sex scandals.

RUTH MARCUS: I just don't think that we should also lump all these women together. And to use a line that got Hillary Clinton in some trouble back in the 1992 presidential campaign, Eliot Spitzer's wife is not some Tammy Wynette, stand-by-your-man kind of woman.

She continued . . .