She Who Goes Bump In the Night

Last week we opined that Hillary Clinton won't quit the presidential contest no matter what happens in Texas and Ohio.

We commented, "It's never over for the Clintons until they get want they want," observing that this point seems to be not only widely understood, but expressed, independently and by different members of the punditry, with a consistent metaphor we find amusing.

Commentator Andrew Sullivan says:

Whatever happens in this campaign, if it finally puts the Clintons in our rear-view mirror, it will have been worth a great deal.  We're not quite there yet, and the moment you feel any sympathy for a Clinton, they will use it to their own ends.

In our recent post we suggested that many conservatives view Mrs. Clinton as the Hannibal Lecter of politics.   Sullivan gets close to the idea with his parting comment about how any slack you cut the Clintons, however little, they'll use to their own purposes.  It recalls that scene in The Silence of the Lambs, when the doctor in charge of the psychiatric prison rattles off to the Jodie Foster character the rules for interacting with Hannibal the Cannibal:

Do not touch the glass.  Do not approach the glass.  Pass him nothing but soft paper -- no pencils or pens.  No staples or paper clips in his paper.  Use the sliding food carrier, no exceptions.  If he attempts to pass you anything, do not accept it.

I'm going to show you why we insist on such precautions.

On the afternoon of July 8, 1981, he complained of chest pains and was taken to the dispensary.  His mouthpiece and restraints were removed for an EKG.  When the nurse leaned over him, he did this to her (holding up a photo).  The doctors managed to re-set her jaw, more or less, and save one of her eyes.  His pulse never got above eighty-five, even when he ate her tongue.

(You can see the video here.)

A few weeks ago Peggy Noonan had this to say, in the Wall Street Journal:

Deep down journalists think she's a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched.  Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river.  When he floated to the surface they found he'd tried to claw his way from under the ice.  That is how reporters see Hillary.

Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review put it this way:

The first rule of politics is, "Never count out the Clintons."  Their political conglomerate, Clinton Inc., is like Glenn Close in that bathtub scene in the movie "Fatal Attraction":  It always comes back to life a second or third time.

What is it with Hillary and the monster imagery?   And not just run-of-the-mill movie monsters like Alien, or Harry Potter's giant snake, or the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the thing in Cloverfield (who are never really that scary because you know you're only looking at a triumph of the makeup department, or of computer animation), but the truly scariest monsters of them all:   real human beings acting with relentless, remorseless sociopathic depravity.

People recognize something in Hillary Clinton that reminds them, independently, of the same chilling concept.

It's like the movie Halloween and its sequels.   Every time the teenaged babysitter thinks she's dispatched the hockey-masked maniac with a knitting needle in the thorax -- up he pops again.   He's never caught or killed, and there's always the next movie.   It never ends.

Look! -- now we've gone and done it ourselves!

But it's all beside the point, which is that Clinton's not quitting after tomorrow.

When she explains why, notwithstanding what Bill said about Texas and Ohio, we bet her pulse never gets above eighty-five.