GI Jill Or Barbarella Forty Years Later?

I'm beginning to believe that the biggest handicaps to analyzing politics these days are literacy, comprehension, and retention.

USA Today runs a front page article today that is unabashedly aimed at putting over Hillary Clinton as a kind of X-chromosome Dwight Eisenhower, a born-again hawk with an inate martial affection who can step into the role of Commander-in-Squaw (um, Chief) and keep the GWOT rolling without missing a beat, and "keep bin Laden pussy-whipped" besides.

No, I'm not kidding.

On what is she counting to burnish these supposed national security credentials?

She is the first New York senator to sit on the Armed Services Committee, and recently introduced legislation to boost the Army by 80,000 soldiers over the next four years.

She was nominated by the Pentagon – "with which her husband often had contentious relations, particularly on gays in the military – to serve on a blue-ribbon panel studying how to foster better cooperation among the military services."

True, that's a thicker defense resume than John Kerry had a year ago. Which is a little like dieting until you get your weight below that of Roseann Barr.

Besides, if you'll dredge this out of the recesses of your memories, John Kerry served in Vietnam. The closest Hillary Clinton ever got to the military or combat, aside from spitting on returning 'nam veterans, was....

Well, let's let her tell it:

USA Today's report on Senator Hillary Clinton's newfound appeal as a possible commander in chief omitted a key part of her resume that proves she's long been a hawk on military and defense issues: her attempt to join the Marines 30 years ago.

Or at least that's what she claimed.

I'll pause for a moment to let that sink in, and for the multiple fits of hysterical laughter to subside.

Feel better? I know I did. Though I did have to change my shorts a couple of times.

Seated beside her husband, the former first lady recounted her military experience during a 1994 TV interview.

"Gee, now it was probably 19 years ago - in 1975," Mrs. Clinton recalled. "I decided that I was very interested in having some experience in serving in some capacity in the military."

"Because we all love the military so much," Mr. Clinton interjected helpfully.

I'm sorry, I've gotta pause again. If this keeps up I may have to stop at Sears or Wal*Mart on the way home.

[Breathe in/breathe out; breathe in/breathe out] Okay, let's try to get through this without losing composure again.

Hillary resumed: "So I walked into our local recruiting office, and I think it was just my bad luck that the person who happened to be there on duty could not have been older than 21. He was in perfect physical shape."

Translation: he was hotter than beekcake tartare. Must have been a pre-lesbo phase.

She remembered telling the recruiter, "I wanted to explore - I didn't know whether I thought active duty would be a good idea, reserve, you know, maybe National Guard, something along those lines."

Can you imagine being that GI when this bespectacled beatnikette blew into his presence? Must have taken all his personal and professional discipline not to roll his eyes uncontrollably, or turn a fire hose on her.

Fortunately he was perceptive enough to see the hook:

"This young man looked at me and he said, 'How old are you?'" she recalled.

"I said, 'Well, 27' ... I had these really thick glasses on.

"He said, 'How bad's your eyesight?'

"I said, 'It's pretty bad.'

"And he said, 'How bad?'

"So I told him.

"He said, 'That's pretty bad.'

"And he finally said to me, he said: 'You're too old. You can't see. And you're a woman.' And then he went on ... this man, young man, was a Marine.

"He said, 'But maybe the dogs [Army] would take you.'"

...BAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA{*gasp*}{slapslapslap} oh, God, there go my slacks too....

Anybody who knows anything about Hillary Clinton can just picture the profane, volcanic rage that erupted all over that "young man" after that comment. Assuming, of course, that this anecdote isn't trademark pure, undiluted Clintonoid fiction, in which case I would say that Senator Thunder Thighs missed her calling as a satiricist.

Either way, you have to love how she skips antiseptically over that part:

"This is not a very encouraging conversation," Mrs. Clinton recalled thinking. "So maybe I'll look for another way to serve my country."

Now defined as inflicting her crypto-fascist rule upon it, aided in small part by purging of this interview from the Lexus-Nexus archives. Bet there'll be a lot of that over the next few years.

In the meantime, we turn once more to "unauthorized" Hillariographer Ed Klein for some parting perspective:

"Hillary is a poll-driven politician and her sudden emergence as a pro-military figure is purely expediency and positioning herself for the 2008 presidential election," Klein told NewsMax on Tuesday.

"Because she has no principles, but is driven entirely by her ambition, she cannot be counted on to be a steadfast leader of the war on terrorism," he contends.

And the part of her mindset that isn't poll-driven is hard-left ideologue.

Will this most audacious of all snow jobs actually work, and make Hillary Clinton the 44th president of the United States?

On the question's answer does the fate of the nation itself teeter.

And no, I'm still not kidding.