SET YOUR PHASERS TO "CLINTON." I don't understand why a Clinton's every action triggers mass episodes of idiocy among our press corps., but it's become depressingly clear that the last few years haven't in any way blunted the effect. The other day, in Iowa, Hillary had this exchange with reporters:
Mrs. Clinton’s comment about “bad men,” meanwhile, was one of the more memorable moments of her trip to Iowa, her first time since 2003.
She delivered the remark with touches of humor. She first summed up a question from John Wood, a man at the town hall forum here, putting it this way: “What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?” Then she paused a few beats, setting the audience atwitter with laughter, and appeared to be blushing, her face down. Then, after deciding where to go with her answer, she said: “On a slightly more serious note, I believe a lot in my background and a lot in my public life shows the character and toughness to be president.”
At a news conference later this afternoon, where she was asked several times which bad men had been on her mind, Mrs. Clinton indicated at first that she was thinking about the need to capture Osama bin Laden, but a few moments later she said she was just being playful with her delivery.
“You guys!” she chuckled after the third question from a reporter on the topic. “I thought I was funny. You guys keep telling me, lighten up, be fun. Now I get a little funny, and I’m being psychoanalyzed.”
One reporter then asked her if she might have been thinking in some way about her husband.
“Oh, c’mon,” she said in a low voice, and then moved on.
Unsurprisingly, this was reported in The New York Times by Patrick Healy, a reporter whose obsession with Clinton's sex life long ago tipped into the pathological. Notice, too, the language used: Hillary delivered what's clearly a joke with "a touch of humor," suggesting that she was, beneath a thin membrane of levity, dead serious. Then, after the fourth question, her voice goes "low," indicating that the reporter has hit too close to home, and Hillary's strained jocularity can't hide the touchy bitterness resting inches beneath the surface. And now, here comes The Politico's Ben Smith, showing that when it comes to HRC, his new publication will be no less insipid and devoted to BS pop-psychology than its lumbering predecessors:
http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2007/01/post_2606.html#015280I know many of you have seen my "National Anthem" thread.
Yes, it's stupid, silly and predictable.
and the 10th time it will happen it will be just as stupid, silly and predictable.
But what of the 100th time? the 1000th?
How can she get her message out with the press and the RW echo chamber constantly latching onto miscues, real or imagined, and dissecting every verb, subject, noun, participle and past participle of every thing she says just to make her look like some sort of out of control Bride of Frankenstein liberal bitch from hell?