"Is She Out Of Her Mind?"

If there was any Democrat who I thought would be immune to the lure of the neoBolshevik fever swamps - at least in the sense of public identification with them - it would be Hillary Clinton. This is supposed to be the "smartest woman in the world," a supreme political tactician who watched her husband cloak himself in the illusion of centrism so effectively that he was able to run an ongoing, organized criminal enterprise from within the White House itself for nearly a decade without breaking a sweat or ever coming close to getting caught (Monica Lewinsky not withstanding). He was the ultimate Gingerbread Man, and you would think she would have been taking notes.

Amazingly, she appears to be ignoring those lessons, chief among them the imperative of getting elected first. After flirting with triangulation off and on last year, Mrs. Clinton has charted a course at maximum warp toward the looniest quadrant of the loony left, on the likely assumption that, in the new media era of blogs and talk radio, she can do so without the electorate remembering or even noticing.

Just last week the thick-legged New York senator hung indiscretely with extreme left-wing Chavista Harry Belefonte. Now, over the weekend, she not only publicly embraced Black Klansman Al Sharpton, but actually said this (h/t RCP):

When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation and you know what I'm talking about...

In once sentence Hillary manages to be incoherent and vituperative at the same time. Logic would seem to assert that Democrats are "slaves" because they're in the indefinite minority in both houses of Congress. Which is, of course, nobody's fault but their own for their inability to win elections. And that inability stems from repulsive rhetoric like the aforequoted.

But given that Mrs. Clinton was addressing a black audience at a Martin Luther King day event, it was obviously also intended to both stir up the same old racial animosities that, of course, Dr. King sought to ameliorate and reconcile, and exploit them by purporting to identify with the supposed "enslavement" of black Americans at the hands of GOP "plantation owners." As such it was the worst sort of pandering, an astonishingly patronizing and insulting load of twaddle that ought to have outraged every African-American listener for what it reveals about Hillary's low opinion of their collective intelligence.

It is also a double-extended middle finger to Republicans as well, as New York Representative Peter King was quick to point out:

House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King accused Senator Hillary Clinton on Monday of playing "cheap racial politics" when she said at a Martin Luther King Day tribute that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives was run like a "plantation."

"It's wrong to use the word 'plantation' in any political context because it's cheap racial politics," Representative King told WMAL Washington, D.C. radio host Steve Malzberg. "But to do it on Martin Luther King Day is really disgraceful."

King said the former first lady was clearly trying to paint the GOP as "slaveowners." "It's a cheap way to throw race in and to somehow call Republicans racist and then be able to duck it later on if people call her on it," he told Malzberg.

The New York Republican accused Mrs. Clinton of trivializing the King Day commemoration, saying, "there are certain things that go beyond the pale and you know they're wrong and it speaks for itself and this is one of those cases."

Evidently Mrs. Clinton didn't think it went beyond the pale. Or that she would get caught saying such a contemptible thing.

Then, as though this gaffe had triggered a karma storm, ol' Rev'rund Al jumped into the fray in characteristically double-footed fashion and mounted a full-throated defense of the Queen of Mean:

Radical firebrand Rev. Al Sharpton is defending Senator Hillary Clinton after she blasted GOP leaders on Capitol Hill for playing what she called "plantation" politics, with Sharpton saying he's happy to see that the former first lady is adopting his views.

"I absolutely defend her saying it because I said it all through the '04 elections," Sharpton told the New York Daily News on Tuesday.

The undisputed king of New York City racial politics praised Clinton for calling it like she sees it.

"Any time you have a situation where, because of seniority and cloakroom politics, the bosses make the decisions - that's tatamount to [a] plantation," he insisted. [emphasis added]

I know that it's a year until the 2008 election cycle begins, and two until the first primary contests. And it's true that that much time is an eternity in politics. But is this really the sort of sound byte that Hillary wants floating around to be harvested and stored away by the RNC? Al Sharpton crowing that she has "adopted his [racist] views"? Praising Belefonte for his virulent and poisonous anti-Americanism? How can even so supposedly skillful a pol as she triangulate against herself and still sell it in enough "red" states to "go where no woman has gone before" outside of the fiction of ABC television?

Rest assured she is a Clinton, and things like this, that would destroy any other Dem, don't usually affect them. But the caveat was and is that that imperviousness develops after the election is won, not before.

Maybe she'll tack back from the edge of the Sorosian/Mooreonic/Kos-hackian abyss, but even going that close at all is an indication either of the accelerating deterioration of her party's national viability, or her own burgeoning overratedness as a national candidate.

UPDATE 1/18: Michael Goodwin's prognosis: panic and confusion....

UPDATE 1/19: Looks like Barack Obama is playing the role of loyal veep already....

UPDATE III: When Laura Bush starts firing broadsides, you know you've stepped in the proverbial deep doo-doo.