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!".

Hillary - The Ads And The Reality!

The Night Before Armageddon

'Twas the night before Armageddon, when all through the White House

Not a creature was stirring, not even Bill's, er, mouse;

My pantsuit was hung on the chair with aplomb,

That little grey number that makes me look strong;

My aides were nestled all snug in their beds,

While policy statements danced in their heads;

When right by my side there arose such a clatter,

I sprang up in the bed to see what was the matter.

It rattled and clanged, Bill uttered a moan,

I shuddered with horror; 'twas the Red Telephone.

The ultimate nightmare! With a hand that was lead

I lifted it up and listened with dread.

My stomach it churned, I let out a wheeze,

No lawyer from Yale should hear facts such as these:

In the Mid-East I'd done what Code Pink had decreed

And withdrawn all the troops with the greatest of speed

Now all was in chaos and ruin and wrack:

They told me bin Laden was back in Iraq!

And nearby Iran had perfected their nukes

To eradicate Israel by hook or by crook;

And Moscow had called the whole country to arms

And would be in Warsaw before the next morn.

I gave Bill the elbow. He continued to snore

And mutter of Monica and one or two more.

I looked at the damn phone; they needed an answer.

Oh I wish I had died at fifty with cancer!

Or stayed in the Senate and continued to drone

of Tubman's Post Office and Treasury loans.

I thought of my staff, all four hundred and forty,

But they were as dumb as the rest of the Party.

There was only one answer I saw in a flash

To stop the whole world turning to ash.

I held up the receiver, my voice was quite steady,

I had the experience, the ads said I was ready,

But when reality bites, it's not quite the same

So I told them quite clearly: "Get John McCain!"

Adapted from 'Twas The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore, who may not have written it at all! See the fatuous ad here and read Camille Paglia's trenchant comments thereon.

Irish Catholic Church Disappears Down Political Correctness Boghole

Ireland, that plucky little island on the NE rim of the growling Atlantic, used to be known the world over for rain, writers, rebellion and religion. Now, climate can change, writing talent can dry up, rebellion either triumphs or fizzles out but it was ever the conventional wisdom that the Gaels would never forsake the Faith of their Fathers for which so many of them down the cruel centuries suffered and died.

So much for conventional wisdom! The gradual erosion of traditional values, encouraged by a secularized liberal elite as smug, shallow and repugnant as any in the Western world, became a landslide with the revelations of clerical pedophilia and the squalid attempts by the ecclesiastical authorities to cover up the scandal by shuttling the ordained predators from one unknowing parish to another. Such an abdication of responsibility, of course, turned isolated outbreaks of evil which could have been contained by forceful and forthright intervention into a loathsome epidemic. Yet this was a crisis, not yet a catastrophe. The Faith of the majority was shaken, not destroyed. The Irish Church from its tiny island home had sent missionaries to spread the Gospel and give witness to Christ even in the remotest corners of the globe. It now needed to concentrate these Apostolic energies in its native land and fight back against an imminent collapse.

And is the Church fighting back? Is it, hell! While the Irish clergy have always been noted more for the rigor than the vigor of their intellectual accomplishments, their flock had neither. Their faith was strong but unreflective and essentially static, grounded in history, culture and group identity. Personal conviction stood at the apex of this process not at its base. This left the Church Militant in Ireland with neither the weapons, armor or morale to withstand the extended Tet Offensive launched by the secular left whose march through the institutions - media, political parties, courts, local and governmental bureaucracies, schools and universities - is now complete. Outflanked, fifth-columned, sniped at and then defeated in one pitched battle after the other, the Church, tactically inept and strategically bereft, retreated in confused rout to sanctuary, presbytery and episcopal palace. Now and then an eminent emissary emerges with yet another white flag masquerading as a brave banner of defiance to signal that the capitulation is complete.

A recent case in point is the Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, Dr. Diarmuid Martin. Ireland is struggling with the same severe problems of mass illegal immigration that confronts the rest of the West. Who are those exacerbating these difficulties according to this polemical prelate? The media shills, craven politicians, smug bureaucrats and jejune judges who have conspired to thwart at every turn the democratically elected Government's muddled efforts to deal with the crisis in accordance with the people's wishes? Not even close!

The object of this pastor's righteous wrath is his own flock. They are , apparently, hell-bent on sending their children to, get this, Catholic schools. This causes the Archbishop considerable anguish. The Irish Examiner tells us that "[h]e criticized parents who deliberately opt out of diversification" by refusing to send their children to schools with large cohorts of (mostly) illegal immigrants who are neither Catholic nor English-speaking. By avoiding participation in such schools they are, he lectures, "putting their [children's] education above the 'common good'”! Among the many horrors that will result from parents discharging their God-given duty to ensure those in their care get a decent education the doughty Diarmuid declares that Catholic schools will commit the gravest of the many post-modern mortal sins and become "elitist"and "not open to diversity".

Thus the Primate of Ireland hectors his flock to sacrifice their children's future on the oh so secular altar of politically correct multiculturalism, a thoroughly discredited tin-god whose devotees have caused havoc everywhere they've practised their voodoo social engineering. Was it for this that Saint Patrick labored so mightily! The right-thinking reverend hasn't quite got around to advocating the adoption of Sharia Law but he's well on the way.

Meanwhile, in what Catholic progressives would insist is a completely different development, Holy Mass has been canceled in the County Donegal parish of Kilcar this Sunday because they have no priests to say it! A spokesman for the local bishop observed that "[w]e need to prepare our parishioners and explain to them what will happen in the future, because there are so few new priests".

His hand-wringing may prove unnecessary in the near future. If the clergy continue to follow Archbishop Martin's lead - and the vast majority of them do - they will end up in short order with as few in the congregation as they have at the altar.

NYT Shocker - McCain A Closet Hispanic

Having firmly established in the public mind that John McCain is not an adulterer and does not shill for lobbyists, the New York Times has finally nailed George Bush's heir presumptive with a genuine real live fact - he was born in Central America. Panama to be precise about it, and the Old Gray Lady, as we know, likes to be as precise as a Dowager Duchess at a Windsor tea party. Reporter Carl Hulse feels not only the Senator's deep pain but empathizes with that vast multitude of Americans who through the long years since the Revolution have silently, nay invisibly suffered the anguish and uncertainty of giving birth on foreign soil to children doomed to live out their lives under a black cloud of despair and discrimination.

"The question," Hulse agonizes, "has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president?" He goes on to point out that for "Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming". Indeed why stop at the Republican candidate? Senator Barack Obama was also born ( is this a coincidence or a Vast Clintonian Conspiracy?) "outside the continental United States" in Hawaii, a group of volcanic islands literally thousands of miles from a significant landmass of any kind. As we read on it becomes apparent that the caring Carl is setting geography at nought, though geography in and of itself goes to the heart of the question he is raising, and means the phrase "continental United States" to comprehend the whole of the US, its islands and territorial seas.

The rest of the piece consists of much lawyerly humming and hawing about the "natural born" restriction on citizens occupying the Presidency (and of course the Vice Presidency, though this is not specifically mentioned). Scholars, we are told, declare that "the intent of the framers" is not clear. (Now where have we heard that before?) Professor Sara Duggin of the Catholic (no less!) University, having "studied the issue extensively" plants her learned posterior firmly on the fence, as lawyers invariably do when nobody is paying them to pontificate one way or the other. "It is not," opines the Prof, " a slam-dunk situation." Metaphors, especially sporting ones, always bring a lambent clarity to legal conundra, don't you find? Atlanta attorney, Jill Prior, we discover, delved into the question twenty years ago in a Yale Law Journal article. She thinks McCain should be o.k. but lectures us mere mortals that "[i]t is certainly not a frivolous issue".

Of course, proclaiming something "not frivolous", even while symbolically wagging your Ivy League Law School finger at the rest of us, doesn't prevent it from being so.

The only people who take lawyers more seriously than lawyers themselves are defendants in class action suits. All this torturous parsing and analysis is the 21st century equivalent of how many angels Duns Scotus could squeeze onto the head of that darn pin St. Thomas Aquinus lent him! Members of the Bar are now in the role once played by the medieval Schoolmen while the Constitution and the correspondence of the Framers take the place of Holy Scripture and the ruminations of the early Fathers of the Church. How very gosh-darned American! If it goes all the way to the Supreme Court we can happily expect the Becloaked Ones to find constitutional penumbras, emanations and even, perhaps, an ectoplasm or two to resolve the thorny question.

This whole non-story is a futile exercise in quasi-legal obfuscation for nakedly party political purposes. The basic premise is ludicrous. A man, who, while fighting for his country, barely escapes death, suffers severe injuries and endures the torments of the damned in the cess-pit of the Hanoi Hilton at the hands of America's sworn enemies, is barred from being Commander in Chief because he isn't American enough! And all this on a technicality which can only be conjured into turgid existence by an obnoxious combination of legalistic nitpicking and bloody-minded partisanship. To add further to this foul miasma the man in question would not be vulnerable to such judicial expropriation of his birthright but for the fact that his father was in foreign parts on military service protecting the country which is now to stiff-arm his son for that very reason!

Don Nickles, a former Republican Senator from Oklahoma, tore the mask off all this pious tut-tutting, though he didn't quite know it, when he innocently remarked to the Times that, though he believed McCain should have no constitutional difficulties, "I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if somebody is going to try to make an issue out of it”. Earth to Don! Earth to Don! This is exactly what's happening under your nose, even as the NYT scribe jots down your words of concern while searching the trusting expression in your eyes for any hint of the bitter cynicism his paper has long inspired in anyone decent enough to look askance at Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Yup, pardners, the Hole in the Donut Gang are back in town and shootin' up the saloon agin! They're a-yellin' an' a-hollerin' that there's gold in them thar canals way down in Pan-am-ay an' they say they panned fur it till they got the'selves a passel o' paydirt an' now they're gonna go an' buy the'selves a great big white house in one o' them thar big cities back East an' invite all their swanky tenderfoot friends in an' have the'selves a right ol' hootenanny fur the next four, mebee even eight years. They shore talk big, them Hole in the Donut Gang!

They sure do, old-timer, but, take it from me, all they have for their efforts is a pan-full of mud. And, believe me, slinging mud about is no way to get yourself a White House.

Clinton, McCain Champion Radical Campaign Reform

We can confirm rumors that have been swirling around the Beltway in recent days that John McCain and one of his Democratic rivals, Hilary Clinton, are cooperating in a rare bipartisan effort to rush a new campaign reform bill through Congress in time to take effect before next Tuesday's vital primaries in Ohio and Texas. The McCain-Clinton 'Restriction of Eloquence and Control of Charisma Act' will outlaw - except in very carefully defined circumstances - excessive personal magnetism and the use of soaring rhetoric by any candidate for the Presidency.

"How did we ever let things get this far?" lamented Howard Wolfson, head Hillary Honcho. "The use of cleverly structured rhetorical tropes in a superbly modulated baritone together with an instinctive feel for the emotional rhythms of the audience amounting to genius was all very well for Black preachers in rural Alabama in the 1960s but it has no place in the secular arena of 21st century Presidential politics."

Fellow Clinton adviser, Harold Ickes Jr. agrees: "When you get down to it," he said with a shake of the head, "it's about the separation of Church and State, the most fundamental principle of the our way of life, apart from abortion, busing, racial and gender based quotas and membership of a teaching union, of course, while not forgetting the right of progressivist college professors to promote their personal political ideology in the classroom."

The Candidate herself is said to have been 'passionate' about this proposal 'from Day One'. Senator Clinton was so "overwhelmed by George W. Bush's powerful rhetoric and matchless eloquence" campaign manager Maggie Williams told CMOL that she voted for the Iraq War "in a kind of trance." When she eventually came to her senses, Ms Williams explained, "she was appalled at what she had done. She's determined that the voters in Ohio and Texas won't have to suffer as she did."

Senator John McCain, renowned for his laid-back temperament, was characteristically more insouciant. "I don't have a dog in this fight,", he said flashing his trademark tight-lipped grimace, "I'm as old as dirt, as articulate as roadkill and have all the charisma of a leper colony, but I learned in the Hanoi Hilton that fine phrases, a million dollar smile and a devilishly attractive personality are not the qualities needed in a Commander-in-Chief." Pressed as to why he was throwing his support behind the measure, McCain smiled shyly and said "I never came across a reform proposal I didn't want to put my name to, especially if it involves Democrats. My record speaks for itself."

McCain-Clinton proposes sweeping changes in the way candidates can conduct themselves in their efforts to 'connect with the voters'. A Presidential hopeful is mandated to use "only that kind of language a reasonable person would expect to hear at the cash desk in Wal-Mart, in an auto repair shop or a homeless shelter". Figurative language is severely restricted. Such well-loved phrases as step up to the plate, a swing and a miss, a Hail Mary, two peas in a pod, don't count your chickens before they're hatched, if life gives you lemons make lemonade and the like are exempted as being too difficult to police. However any references to having dreams of equality and unity, seeing visions of a bright, prosperous future, calling for sacrifices for the common good are banned as 'inflammatory' and 'likely to inflame the voters with unrealistic feelings of hope and joy that the dogs in the street know can never be realized'. Such oratory is also held to unfairly disadvantage 'more nuanced, experienced, issues-rich candidates' who are constitutionally incapable of 'waxing poetic'. In a controversial move McCain-Clinton specifically bans 'any and all invocations of change' except with reference 'to a candidate succeeding to an office once held by a close family member'.

There are explicit exceptions embodied in the bill. Minority candidates need not comply with any of the above restrictions provided that on 'all occasions of public oratory' with 'audiences of more than seven persons' they wear 'garb, dress, costume or any other habiliment associated with their ethnic identity". Thus a Japanese-American candidate would be required to gain 300 pounds and wear a large diaper of the kind used by Sumo wrestlers. A Latino would need to get hold of a pancho, a sombrero and enter the auditorium on a mule and call a halt midway through proceedings 'for the purposes of siesta'. African-Americans aspiring to the Presidency are mandated to wear 'colorful local dress common to that part of Africa from which their progenitors emerged'. Spears, shields, clubs and 'other implements connotative of traditional internecine tribal strife' are also necessary.

Little opposition is expected in Congress. McCain-Clinton should be on the President's desk by Monday. 'Providing it is ear-mark free' a White house spokesperson said that he will 'immediately' sign it into law. "He never uses his powers of veto," she explained. "It's an important part of his legacy."

A Clinton insider told us that the Senator hopes to add a rider to the bill making it retroactive to January 3 of this year. "She's not committed irrevocably to that date", he added. "There is some flexibility. January 1 or 2 would be equally acceptable."