No, Madam Secretary, we do NOT want to know about your yoga habits!
Hillary Clinton’s press performance Tuesday afternoon was, truly, everything Americans could have hoped for from our former First Lady, Modern Joan of Arc, Lady Macbeth, Senate carpetbagger and eternal public Woman Scorned.
She was everything she has ever been, always was and ever will be.
We are fast approaching the 25th anniversary of our first date with the Clintons.
Though his roving and randy stripes have never changed, President Clinton is a brilliant and varied virtuoso on the public stage.
At once a struggling fat person alternating between eating McDonald’s and jogging in too-short shorts. A trailer park dog in heat, yet a devoted dad and husband dancing on the beach. A global, silver-haired elder statesman — who jet sets around the world with a reputed pedophile pimp.
Bill Clinton has always been a one-man traveling variety show where everybody laughs a little, gets their pockets picked and — if you are the right dimensions — a private soiree.
Hillary, on the other hand, has but one note, one act, one trick. She is a legal automaton. A disemboweled scandal-disposal robot. She is Franken-Secretary, the unkillable Political Zombie!
Run!
For!
Your!
LIVES!
America, are you ready for 10 — TEN! — more years of political Hurt Locker? Because that is exactly what we are about to get. Ten more YEARS of deafening shock, trauma, stifled talk-show screams, political slow motion, scandal, faraway voices, incomprehensible movements.
Then we emerge as if surfacing from underwater and there she is. Crystal clear. Smiling. Standing in the bowels of the United Nations, the very cradle of unelected, unaccountable political autocrats with Orwellian explanations for the bizarre fiats issued from committees and subcommittees with Orwellian names.
Hillary’s baked-on smile radiates beneath a helmet of blended blond hair. Waving like a beauty queen. One side. Then the next.
“I chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes,” she said, innocently.
“No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy,” she added. Innocently.
Those damned Republicans! That damned Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy! They are at it again! Going after Hillary Clinton for emails about her daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral!
And now they’re demanding all of her private emails about her yoga routines! I mean, really WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE???
Anyway, as she explained to the rabid jackals in the U.N. press corps, “I fully complied with every rule that I was governed by.”
Which, for those of you who do not presently recall every line of Clinton arcana, that just means Hillary Clinton violated “no controlling legal authority” when she illegally stored her emails on an illegal server in her basement.
But things are looking up for our eternally Scorned Woman.
“I want to thank the United Nations for hosting today’s events and putting the challenge of gender equality front and center on the international agenda,” Clinton began her press conference about her illegal emails.
“Twenty years ago, this was a lonelier struggle,” she said. “Today, we mark the progress that has been made in the two decades since the international community gathered in Beijing and declared with one voice that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.”
And now, she said, “We can say that there has never been a better time in history to be born female.”
You go, girl!
Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com, and on Twitter at @charleshurt.