Hillary on the Sunday talking heads shows

Okay, I have to admit: I need treatment myself. Only someone with a serious, serious problem could force himself to watch (via TiVo), back to back, Hillary Clinton appear on Sunday morning talking-head shows from Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC on one day, but I've just finished doing exactly that. (I don't regularly watch or TiVo CNN's show, but I gather that she was on it, too.)

Stupidest soft-ball masquerading as a question, from a gushing, stumbling, dare we say fawning George Stephanopoulos:

You know, Senator, we're just about out of time. I just want to ask you one, final question. You've seen the presidency from a perspective unlike any first-time candidate ever in American history, up close, unlike any first-time candidacy ever in presidential history. So you know a lot about being president. But what is something that you don't know, that only a president can know?

Answer (completely unscripted and off the cuff, I'm certain) in exactly ninety* tightly packed seconds (with no pause for breath mid-answer):

Well, George, as you have just said, I've seen the presidency in a very, you know, front-row seat on history way, and I know how hard this job is. And you know, you can read books about it, you can think hard about it, and of course, people running for president do. But it is hard to be prepared for the pressure-cooker that the American presidency is today. We have only one person in our country who represents both our state and our government. Most countries divide those responsibilities. So you're the symbolic head of state and you are running the government. And every single day that goes by, the pressures increase, with the 24/7 media environment, with all of the, you know, advances in communication. You have to be grounded. You have to know what you believe. You have to be guided by what you think are the right principles for your country. But there is still no predicting what is going to happen on your watch. And, you know, I know how hard it is, and I think, following President Bush, with some of the problems we have, will make it especially hard. But I'm also confident and optimistic that our country can rise to this challenge. I wouldn't be running if I didn't think that I was the person at this point in our history who could summon that extraordinary resilience and commitment from America again. And I think that we will be able to start both repairing the damage, but more importantly, starting to act like Americans, solving our problems, restoring our leadership in the world. And that's what I look forward to.

The really great jazz musicians can perform a technique called circular breathing, in which they breathe in through their nostrils while continuing, temporarily, to force a simultaneous steady stream of air through their instruments using their cheek and mouth and throat muscles, so as to never stop for a breath during a long solo. Today is the first time I've seen a politician do that.

"Hitting All the Sunday Talk Shows, Clinton Says a Lot but Reveals Little," says the WaPo. Well, yes, but ... you can't help but be impressed with her stamina. Unless ...

Unless she's been cloned. Or ... re-manufactured into multiple android duplicates. Because that would explain a lot, wouldn't it? How did Bill manage to keep Hill standing by her man through all that? Unplug the last one, adjust the memory circuits of the next one, and plug 'er in.

I'm thinking in terms of some sort of DARPA/Disney black ops project run amok. Either that, or something undead.

By far the most scary things were the two mechanical "belly laughs" she delivered in response to questions from Fox News' Chris Wallace. They made my skin crawl. Seriously, if you could digitize those laughs and put them into a small plug-in appliance that would rhythmically pulse them through your house's electrical system, you could drive out all the insects and small vermin, and the FTC wouldn't challenge your advertisements — they'd give you a testimonial endorsement. (I suspect the FDA would find your product to be carcinogenic, though.) As I listened to those laughs — the exact same length, pitch, and timbre both times, and I suspect you could overlay their wave forms in a sound editor and prove that they were both from the same pre-recorded source — I could just imagine the focus group technicians looking at the dials and gauges, one saying to the other, "Have her deliver just one more 'hah!' as part of that, and let's see if the residual marginal antipathy-plasticity factor goes down another half percent, okay?"

The GOP doesn't just need a candidate, friends and neighbors. It needs ... a Slayer.

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UPDATE (Mon Oct 1 @ 5:10pm): I'm only mildly surprised that the "Hillary's laugh" meme has turned out to have some legs. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft cites several pundits who've commented negatively about it, and she thinks their comments are sexist. Although some of the language they've used may have sexist overtones, I don't think that Hillary's XX-chromosomes are really the basis of the most of the commentary. The laughs struck lots of people as odd — not for anything having to do with her sex, but partly because of their seeming inappropriateness to the context, and largely because of timing, the latter of which (as I've discussed already in comments below) is almost certainly due to the satellite link lag between her Chappaqua studio and the host sites for the talking heads shows in Manhattan or D.C. Jon Stewart's riff on The Daily Show gets it right: It's not about her being female, it's more about her being "some sort of synthetic being that cries mercury." And — as I've also tried to make clear in my comments below — it's a fairly trivial issue even to the limited extent that it's a legitimate comment on her personality (or the ruthless suppression thereof), in the nature of a backhanded compliment for being such a disciplined candidate. I no more think Hillary's laugh is a good reason to vote against her than that I thought John Kerry's hairstyle or Boston accent was a good reason to vote against him. I have ample good reasons to vote against either of them based purely on issues of policy and on genuinely important aspects of personal character.