Hillary's Never Leaving the Race

she's becoming a caricature. you gotta see the cartoon.

salon:
Tony Auth, the Philadelphia Inquirer's ultraliberal cartoonist, had it right last week [click here to view]: a bemused President Barack Obama sits at his desk under a 2009 calendar while Hillary, as a bug-eyed Energizer bunny relentlessly beating its 2008 drum, spins round and round the Oval Office rug. It's what Hillary's campaigning has come to: a monotonous exercise in showboating solipsism, like Shirley MacLaine as the geriatric mother in "Postcards from the Edge," hijacking her daughter's party and kicking up her heels to sing "I'm Still Here!"

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I'm puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary's graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons' tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn't they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end -- meaning the convention in August? It's now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there's no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times. The infusion of fresh new blood into the party -- especially women governors -- has already started. Who will want to resurrect all those 1990s mummies?

Republican operatives have been salivating for Hillary to be the nominee. Her vainglorious claim to have been fully "vetted" is ludicrous. She and her husband left a mountain of manure in Little Rock and Washington that hasn't even begun to be thrown. The mainstream media, despite its tilt toward Obama, has been amazingly protective of the Clintons during this campaign. Where were the chronologies of the voluminous Clinton scandals that voters (especially young ones) needed to evaluate Hillary's professional judgment and character? That the conservative Washington Times has now begun to make document drops about Hillary's stonewalling and duplicity (such as over the Rose Law Firm billing records) suggests that Republicans have concluded her candidacy is kaput.

Surely, given Hillary's claim of expertise on the basis of her service as first lady, every major or ambiguous episode in her husband's two presidencies should have been systematically reexamined by the media. I for one have renewed questions about the 1993 suicide of Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, Hillary's former law partner and longtime friend, whose files were purged by Hillary's staff before they could be examined for evidence. One must always be skeptical about Web rumors, but my interest was piqued last year by claims that Foster was shattered by the role he had played three months earlier in the outrageous order for federal agents to attack David Koresh's ranch at Waco, Texas, producing a conflagration that led to 76 deaths, including 21 children. Why has the Waco fiasco been forgotten? It triggered the worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, the 1995 revenge bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
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