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I will preface this by saying that Peggy Noonan is not my cup of tea. Her writing leaves a cloyingly sweet aftertaste. (Her speaking, too.) Worse, it is too often metaphor in search of a thought. That said, I thought her analysis of Coretta Scott King's funeral was interesting and coherent.... (AND provocative... as you all have so vociferously demonstrated.) ;) But then I came to this jumbled mess of contradiction: Amid all the happy bombast [bill clinton] was the one who pointed at the casket and said, "There's a woman in there." He talked about Mrs. King in good strong plain terms. Yes, he caused a quarter-second of awkwardness when he said of the beautiful Coretta that even at age 75 she still had the goods, but in moments of exuberance we all forget our own history. ASIDE: Surely Ms. Noonan understands that clinton's mummy-redux moment wasn't an example of a momentary event-induced lapse but rather a demonstration in real time of this depicable misogynist's real opinion of women. The real news was how the Clintons used the funeral to unveil how they will run in 2008: Together, side by side, with beautiful hairdos. I haven't seen them like this--both standing at the podium--since 1992, when they were new. ASIDE: Superficial. And wrong. What is happening here is not the clintons 'side by side,' but rather, the clintons conflated.
Meanwhile, back in the Senate, the missus, the other half of the clinton construct, maintains her hawkish pose (though not without bird problems of another sort). Yet another example of the clinton conflation ploy, (see SCHEMA PINOCCHIO: how the clintons are handling the hillary dud factor), this variant allows "clinton, the construct" to hold two mutually exclusive positions simultaneously, thereby enabling the missus to avoid in '08 the trap that repeatedly ensnared the ever 'nuanced' Kerry in '04. Do you now understand how stupid the clintons think you are? A CALL TO IMPEACH CLINTON IN ABSENTIA In the years since, after the health-care failure and the Whitewater scandals, the West Wing attitude toward the president's wife was a quiet and respectful "Get that woman off the podium!" Not anymore. All is new again. Mrs. Clinton has clearly been working on her public speaking, and attempted to use her hands as her husband uses his, now in an emphasizing arc, now resting on her chest. But his are large, long and elegant, and hers are puffed and grasping. ASIDE: Everyone knows that hillary is a dud and that no amount of money or spin will change that plain fact.. Everyone, that is, except Noonan. (And as for the gesticulation training, check out my latest flash movies of missus clinton.) And I'm amazed that Noonan would romanticize clinton. Not even Esquire missed the hands and their connection to the phallic. His are grotesquely large, clawlike, threatening. They are not the elegant hands of, say, a surgeon or a pianist. They are the viselike hands of a rapist.  Yes, all of missus clinton's appendages are puffy and much too short even given her squat, low-center-of-gravity torso. But both clintons have grasping hands. They may be grasping for different things, but they are grasping.
ASIDE: Even here she doesn't quite get it. The clintons aren't merely analogizing. They are, as is their wont, setting up a false equivalence with heroic figures. And how much truth and how much facetiousness is in that last sentence, anyway?
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Having failed to snare the Nobel Peace Prize