Responding to the item on Drudge that Wolf Blitzer has been warned to not focus too much on Hillary during Thursday night’s debate, Jonah can’t understand why people are buying to the idea that asking her about Gov. Spitzer’s driver’s licenses-for-illegals proposal was somehow unfair.

I can’t understand why any “top Clinton adviser” would be heard pre-emptively whining and issuing “warnings” to Wolf Blitzer. This all but guarantees that Blitzer has to hurl a bunch of hardballs Thursday night.

If Blitzer doesn’t, he’ll face the charges that he knuckled under worse than GQ in the face of Clintonite pressure. And those complaints won’t just come from the right — they’ll come from John Edwards, probably Barack Obama, and some corners of the MSM.

Beyond that, have we seen any serious backlash to Russert in the aftermath of that last debate? (Besides death threats on a conference call organized by the Hillary campaign?) If anything, Russert is credited with asking the questions that cracked Hillary’s facade, and that stirred up what had been turning into a very dull Democratic primary. “Take it easy on Hillary or we’ll rough you up the way we roughed up Russert” isn’t the most dire of threats.