Hillary Clinton has a hide.
Suddenly she’s everywhere, jumping for joy about impeachment, labeling Donald Trump an “illegitimate president,” a “corrupt human tornado” and a mere “occupant of the Oval Office” while she mutters darkly about “funny things” that cost her the presidency, her rightful possession.
It’s not just the president she and her sore-loser party want to impeach, it’s the 63 million deplorables who voted for him. It’s not just Trump they are branding illegitimate, but anyone who voted for him.
They have been trying to cancel the last election since November 2016, and have driven themselves collectively mad in the attempt.
Forget that they are closer to the next election than the last and that their latest impeachment gambit will only make their task next November more difficult.
All that matters is Hillary’s vindication.
“Three years after the historic election of 2016, she is still grappling with defeat,” intoned Jane Pauley on “CBS Sunday Morning” by way of introducing the failed presidential candidate.
“How are you doing now?” Pauley asked Hillary, her voice oozing with compassion. “And what are the metrics by which you know how you’re doing on any given day?”
It was as if she were talking to a cancer patient.
But it was just Hillary, self-engrossed, artificially calm, eternally aggrieved, her mute daughter, Chelsea, sitting beside her like a human prop.
“Personally, I’m doing well and having my grandchildren … has been a gift beyond measure. I feel very blessed. I feel good. But I can’t deny that a big part of me cares deeply about what’s happening in the country and what I fear is the damage that’s being done to our future.”
This is the great Hillary psychodrama that has consumed the Democratic Party for almost three years. No one is willing to come out and declare that she screwed up all by herself, so they are forever doomed to repeat her mistakes. She is the real human tornado — an F5 of rage, indignation, spite and pain.
Crates of Chardonnay in Chappaqua didn’t calm her. Nor did “alternate nostril-breathing” yoga. She tried writing a cathartic book about the race, “What Happened,” but it just showcased her narcissism and refusal to admit fault.
Earlier this month, she was reduced to tweeting bizarre photos of herself at the Venice Biennale, a flesh-and-blood art exhibit, sitting at a replica Resolute Desk, reading aloud her infamous emails.
“Found my emails at the Venice Biennale,” she gaily tweeted. “Someone alert the House GOP.” Boom tish.
Fortuitously for her, last week, the impeachment saga gave her a new lease on life, and maybe a glimmer of hope that the great injustice of 2016 might at last be righted.
And now, she has an excuse to insert herself into the 2020 campaign as a last-resort candidate: a new book, co-written with her faithful sidekick, Chelsea, 39.
The subtext of “The Book of Gutsy Women” is that Hillary is the gutsiest of them all.
“Pick me, pick me,” she all but plaintively wails, as she embarks on a “listening tour” like the ones she used to launch other ill-fated campaigns.
The Clintons’ Gutsy Woman Tour officially kicks off in Brooklyn on Tuesday night.
But we had a sneak preview last week.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry Tuesday, Hillary popped up in People magazine to denounce Trump as “a reckless, corrupt human tornado who cares only about himself.”
On Wednesday, after Trump released the transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian president, she took to Twitter: “The president of the United States has betrayed our country.”
Thursday night, she surfaced at a National Abortion Rights Action League function: “This occupant of the Oval Office is a clear and present danger … If you are more outraged than ever that Brett Kavanaugh has a lifetime job, you have to make it a voting issue.”
On Friday, it was Georgetown University. Trump “has turned American diplomacy into a cheap extortion racket,” said Hillary, who would know. After all, when she was secretary of state, her Clinton Foundation raked in millions of dollars from foreign governments.
But politics is all projection these days.
The bottom line is Hillary isn’t going away. As much as DNC operatives on Sunday morning TV shows tried to close down any mention of her, there she was on CBS, dutiful Chelsea by her side.
“The objective is to field whoever is the strongest candidate to defeat Donald Trump,” Hillary said. Hint, hint.
Losing the 2016 election “was like applying for a job and getting 66 million letters of recommendation and losing to a corrupt human tornado,” she said.
“It doesn’t kill me because he knows he’s an illegitimate president.”
It really is demented for a 71-year-old adult to be so psychologically incapable of accepting defeat.
She has been on a near-three-year hissy fit. She cloaks her rage and neediness with the pretense that she is a stateswoman assisting the next generation of women when every woman knows she is a born Mean Girl.
No champion of women would reduce her adult daughter to dumb note-taker and adoring cipher. Forever cowering in her mother’s shadow, Chelsea is not allowed to be a gutsy woman.
There’s only ever been room for Hillary on the stage. And unless the Democrats finally find the guts to push her off, they may as well sit out the next election.
No, Rudy, you’re not ‘the hero’
With a friend like Rudy Giuliani, who needs enemies? Donald Trump’s TV lawyer has only made things worse for him over Ukraine. It’s sad.
Those of us who remember “America’s Mayor” from 9/11 can only feel maudlin at the freak show he has become. It’s hard to shake the image of Giuliani, covered in white dust, two blocks from Ground Zero, comforting police, calling for calm, the staunch leader who went to every funeral and held this city together.
Now he’s the lunatic on Fox News, yelling at a fellow panelist, “Shut up, moron. Shut up. Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about, idiot.”
Or the delusional egomaniac telling The Atlantic, “It is impossible that the whistleblower is a hero and I’m not. And I will be the hero! These morons — when this is over, I will be the hero.”
Time to step away from the microphone.
Risking their lives with every arrest
If Mayor Bill de Blasio needs a reminder of how dangerous arrests are for police, the death of NYPD Officer Brian Mulkeen early Sunday says it all.
Mulkeen, 33, was shot in the Bronx while trying to arrest a gang member. He was a good cop doing his job, despite the climate of disrespect for law enforcement.
Yet if you follow the logic of de Blasio and his Police Department when they sacked Officer Daniel Pantaleo over the Eric Garner tragedy, arrests are a breeze and police have no reason to fear for their lives. Reality says otherwise. RIP.