HOW much player-hate can fester in one man’s heart?

Apparently, quite a lot if you’re the Windy City’s World-Class Windbag.

Jesse Jackson has spent his entire life in love with the microphone. He knows them intimately.

He’s such an aficionado of the mike that Detroit’s beloved late mayor, Coleman Young, dismissed one of Jackson’s failed vanity bids for the presidency by noting that “all he’s ever run is his mouth.”

Jackson’s claim to have been caught unbeknownst by a “hot mike” slurring and threatening Barack Obama is complete hogwash.

Somewhere, deep down, he wanted the world - and Obama - to know how much he wants to “cut his nuts out.”

Veterinarians and doctors talk about cutting nuts “off.” Only a thug or a gangster cuts a man’s nuts “out.”

And Jackson knows better than most the vicious symbolism of castration and its blood-soaked link to lynchings in the Old South.

Nor is this the first time Jackson bared his anger. Last year, when Obama wasn’t sufficiently politicizing the beating prosecution of six black teens in Louisiana known as the “Jena Six,” Jackson said Obama was “acting white.”

What accounts for Jackson’s latest animosity toward the Democratic nominee? He said it’s because Obama was “talking down to black folks.”

In a Father’s Day speech, Obama told black churchgoers that a father’s responsibility “doesn’t just end at conception.”

“What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child - any fool can have a child,” Obama said. “It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.”

Maybe this struck a little too close to home for the Rev. Jackson, who just a few years ago finally owned up to fathering a child outside of his marriage even as he was busy counseling President Bill Clinton on his dalliances with a White House intern.

Charles Hurt is The Post’s Washington Bureau chief.

Through maneuvers and manipulating of BOTH PARTIES that is how we have no choice!!! Republicans have decided to win by forfeiting the principles that they ONCE believed. They’ve surrended to become like the dems. The likely choice would be neither in November! I refuse to vote for the least of the 2 evils. There is no real difference as I can see.

Seriously, McCain needs to stop talking with the Communists and Socialists. I don’t think I can vote for this guy. I might have to throw my “neocon” ways out the window and vote for Barr. At least he wants to secure the borders.

Senator McCain has famously said, “Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war.”

How, then, should we describe a clearly unbalanced presidential candidate who jokes about killing innocent civilians as part of a larger war-mongering foreign policy? “A fool or a fraud” barely cracks the surface. There are a few other f-words that might suffice, but in lieu of those, might I suggest “unhinged maniac” or “tasteless hack” or “creepy, twitchy, psychotic hoople without any internal monologue who shouldn’t be allowed within a hundred square miles of the nuclear launch codes”?

Yesterday, Senator McCain was asked about an AP story in which it was revealed that during the Bush years there has been a significant increase in American exports — including cigarettes — to Iran. First, Senator McExperience admitted that he hadn’t heard about this news story. That’s bad. But not bad enough for the corporate media to wet-nap the barbeque sauce off their fingers so as to successfully pen a news item about it. But it doesn’t matter because Senator McShecky followed his ignorance with this reaction to the cigarettes exports:

“Maybe that’s a way of killing them.”
Then the uncomfortable, jittery, bottled-rage laughter and, “That was a joke!”

I sincerely hope so. I hope the Iranian government gets the correct tone-of-voice in the translation, especially if what Senator Jackie McJokeman and his neocon wack pack are saying about Iran’s impending nuclear arsenal is true. I can only imagine how the Cheney-ish warhawks would react if Ahmedinejad cracked a similarly unfunny zinger about killing our citizens — or the citizens of Israel.

Believe me, McCain isn’t as scarey as Osama errr Obama, and he’s definitely the better of the two. However, I’m with starryflights on this one — yet it will never happen.

How in the world did we EVER end up with such a ridiculously poor choice — a liberal Republican and a socialist Democrat?

But you can always wonder how many minutes YOU would have lasted under Vietnameese torture.

The problem is, he’s not supposed to act like a prisoner to the left’s ideology.

The problem is, he comes across deceitful because he’s being deceitful.

The problem is, he’s giving us the wrong definition of a conservative—someone who holds the line in the place where the last liberal moved it.