Bitch Nostalgia

Take a gander at this and tell me if you don't think this is a glimpse of the real Hillary Clinton:

Hmmm.  Aside from the absence of profanity and throwing hard, blunt objects, this is the Hillary Clinton we've heard and read about for years but somehow have never seen over the past seven years in the U.S. Senate and the past year of this presidential campaign: a caustic, sarcastic bitch.

Now is this an indication of desperation on the Empress' part, her raging frustration finally overpowering her Nixonian iron self-discipline; or could it be the calculation of a candidate with little left to lose that ridiculing her opponent's aura of idolatrous veneration might be the most effective means of poking holes in it, and possibly deflating his mounting momentum?

The strategy is earning praise of a sort from some of her enemies, to wit, that at the very least this is something neither Clinton has heretofore ever publicly displayed - genuine authenticity:

Being mean to Obama in this particular way stands at least some chance of helping her. Leaving aside the twaddle about "special interests," the rest of what she says comes off as sincere — or at least as sincere as Hillary has been able to be since the age of, I dunno, twelve. This kind of meanness is different from the lame, calculated meanness about "change you can Xerox." Surely she really does hold the Obama-as-Messiah routine in contempt. As surely she should.

I think the woman is mean and vindictive. I dislike her; I really, really dislike her. But when she's being forthrightly mean and vindictive and is making a valid criticism, I find that a good bit more appealing (and infinitely less nauseous) than the "poor me" Hillary or the clap-and-nod Hillary or the socialist-den-mother Hillary. If she attacks Our Savior in Tuesday's debate, she will of course get booed by the faithful, but it might not be a bad idea to acknowledge the boos, face up to them, and continue to press the attack. It would draw attention to the one virtue, outside of intelligence, that even her critics grant her. She's tough.

No, she's a ball-busting cunt.  If she were really tough, there never would have been a "poor me" Hillary or the clap & nod Hillary or the socialist-den-mother Hillary.  She wouldn't have taken a gimme Senate seat eight years ago but would have challenged then-incumbent Republican New York Governor George Pataki in 2002, won, and added some bona fide executive experience to her resume, and the accountability that comes with it.  She would have taken on George W. Bush in 2004 and sent him home to dig postholes in Crawford, Texas.

Or not.  But she would have tried.  She would have taken on tough challenges with sky-high stakes instead of the easy route and a 2008 coronation that, to my everlasting surprise, hasn't materialized.

Hillary Clinton is the antithesis of tough; she's a pantywaist.  But she's also a bitch, and if she can harness her bitchiness with substantive grist that can make an issue of Barack Obama's gaseous evasiveness and force him to get more specific than just amorphous bloviating about "hope" and "change," she has a chance to snap the Donk base out of B.O.'s spell and get them to take another look at her.

Which, given the identicalness of her issue platform, and similar lack of congressional experience and utter absence of executive experience, plus being grating and abrasive and really, really, really hateable, and the evident inability of the Arkansas Mafia to compensate for all her weaknesses via corruption and intimidation, is dramatically less than an unmixed blessing.  But it's the best shot she has left.

How ironic that the presumed heir to one originally messiahnic presidency should fall before the onset of the next one.  I'm not convinced that will be the outcome, not yet; but a more fitting end to Hillary Clinton's lifelong dreams of absolute power and world domination I cannot imagine.