Hillary - As Unputdownable As A Bestseller?

In the movie Elizabethtown Alec Baldwin turns to Orlando Bloom and laments: "The American psyche is in turmoil. We have miscalculated." So it is. And so we have. As voters in Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas and Vermont exercise their franchise and, in the case of ever larger-than-life Texas, take it for a second, after dinner workout, Planet Pundit is in a disarray that reflects that very turmoil which, like a ornery rodeo bull, has thrown every "expert" who figgered to tame it.

Hillary , remember, was "inevitable". After Iowa she was, in Dick Morris's wishful phrase, "toast". In New Hampshire she became the Crybaby Kid with a comeback of truly Bubba-like dimensions. South Carolina saw the self-same Bubba not utter the N-word but look like he really really wanted to and her political stock did an Enron.

In the wake of a clutch of big state Super Duper Tuesday wins that never quite coalesced into a triumph, she was on the ropes again, a battered bleeding hulk, mesmerized and pulverized by an opponent who truly seemed "to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee". It was, wise heads proclaimed with a weirdly gleeful solemnity, all over for her. Like Lady Macbeth, another insightful strategist, they told her baldly "to stand not upon the order of [her] going but go at once".

The world was witnessing, it became apparent to all in the know, The Fall of the House of Clinton, an epochal event at least on a level with the demise of the Romanovs and Hapsburgs. The Days of the Paris Terror came to mind. Bill, a blubbery expostulating Louis Capet on his tumbril, Hill, Marie Antoinette to a tee, haggard but haughty to the end, though sadly lacking the spectacular embonpoint.

There was "no coming back". Ohio, that desolate cemetery of Industrial Capitalism, yawned before her like only a political grave can. Texas, the Lone Star State, twinkled malevolently on the horizon. Super Tuesday II - like that other portentous All-American event, the Super Bowl, it also gets its roman numeral - became a date with destiny when the Lioness of Chappaqua would be fed to the Christians - and the Jews and the Atheists and the Pantheists and the Wiccans and the, horror of horrors, Muslims.

And yea, I say unto ye, the Day of Atonement drew nigh, the very Yom Kippur of the American Left when all enlightened progressives could with a clear conscience not only reject but also denounce, not only denounce but also reject the squalid Reality Show that was the Clinton Years. But as YK-Day drew ever nigher there fell upon Planet Pundit a strange silence that moved across the face of the deep. Well, not a silence really - these are Pundits after all - but a kind of huffing and puffing, a confused shuffling of mental feet, as the great twin gods of the Planet, Zogby and Rasmussen, may their names be ever referenced, frowned at the glib wisdom of their worshipers. And they threw mighty polls like thunderbolts that made all the Pundits run hither and yon and they began to sprinkle their pronouncements with such maundering modifiers as "but" and "yet" and "maybe" and "all things else being equal" and even "it isn't over till it's over".

And so it seems that the Irish wake planned to mark the passing of the pantsuit from the stage of history has been canceled. The "mourners" who so anticipated the arrival of the corpse now, between sips of flat Guinness, mutter awkwardly of a miraculous recovery, praise the Lord.

And we, mere Earthlings, whether we be Hillary Haters or Hillary Huggers, look "at each other in wild surmise" and whisper in awe, "Jeez, but she's one tough old broad!".