Shattering Hillary's Glass Menagerie

There are now large numbers of Republicans and Democrats alike who want Hillary Clinton to go for broke. I notice Sonny relates to us the latest ingenious hail Mary plan coming out of Camp Clinton. Never have so few fought so desperately for so little. At Slate, Timothy Noah hefts the hammer of reality and brings it down on the fever dreams of a nation high on kool-aid:

What would it take for Clinton to start a stampede? A massive, catastrophic drop in the polls for Obama. But the only way for that to happen is for Clinton to tear into Obama so viciously, Lee Atwater-style, that she destroys her own reputation, causing her to lose the general election and very likely her Senate seat, too. Not going to happen. Clinton is determined, but she isn’t insane.

That exhausts the possibilities. Not one of them is plausible. So, please, let’s stop pretending there’s much suspense about who the nominee will be. As an arithmecrat, I will not consider anyone the winner until a candidate achieves 2,025 delegates. But neither am I obliged to believe Hillary Clinton has a decent shot. She doesn’t.

It’s so tiresomely conventional to label Obama the Candidate of Dreams and Delight and Hillary the Candidate of Drudgery and Dudgeon. It’s Hillary’s campaign that’s been running on hallucinations — the political journalism equivalent of nitrous oxide. The woman thing! The ’90s thing! The high drama! The low farce! One orgasmlet of hype after the next, and none with any staying power. Nobody cares if Hillary has a ‘decent shot’ or not, because the interest in seeing this freakshow continue is entirely indecent. The point isn’t that Hillary can’t win, it’s that Hillary won’t die — because as much as seeing Hillary actually implode on the campaign trail affords a pervy allure, the only more arresting development is to see this grotesque political gargoyle successfully eat or disembowel everything in its path.

Are you not entertained?