By John Burtis
Friday, April 27, 2007
My heart goes out to Hillary Clinton lately, at least that little tiny piece of coal that my long suffering wife aptly describes as my ticker. And it appears that Hillary, the rich, white, suburban, and grasping presidential Democratic candidate, is slowly gliding from her previously astute vaudevillian antics into the riotous slap stick arena, where the "nyuks" and the phony accents have become a featured part of her uproarious routine.
You remember vaudeville. Pronounced voad-ville by the old timers, vaudeville featured rapid repartees in the George Burns and Gracie Allen mold, with a strong dash of Georgie Jessel, Jack Benny, Joe E. Lewis, and of course a leavening of Rudy Vallee, who, as a victim of rank hubris in his salad days, had the temerity to ask the LA City Council to change the name of his street to Rue de Vallee. Sadly, this final overt move was quashed due to growing negative public sentiment and it put the final silver nail in the aging pine coffin of the vaudevillian life style, where everything was bigger than life and demanded rapier like wits and intellect.
Following the slow but sure decline of vaudeville, we entered the slapstick age, which lies just above the Cretaceous boundary and just north of New York City. This particular comedic period spawned the Three Stooges, that irrepressible union of the Howard and Fine families, their patented physical humor, and their far less intellectual repartee.
Sadly, with slapstick having reached its inevitable plateau and beginning its decline, we are also stuck with the antics of that highly touted hauteur and gymnast, Rosie O'Donnell, who has managed to destroy any thought of Barbara Walters as being anything other than a tongue-tied vapid and aging shill for left wing slapstick lunacy. Luckily, Rosie has hit the skids and the painfully idiotic Al Franken has taken his special brand of showmanship from the gutters at Air America to a quest for the US Senate, where, if he succeeds in his electoral quest, he can join the towering intellects and uproarious good fellas like Chuckie Schumer, Teddy Kennedy, and John "Live Shot" Kerry, as they all pull their special brand of anti-American hijinx for the willing and oh, so sycophantic and clueless mainstream media.
And then, mirroring US politics in general, when the stage was growing dark and completely humorless comedic talent was finally being recognized as the pinnacle of both Hollywood and Washington, DC, achievement, Hillary Clinton began her quest for the Presidency of these here United States.
Hillary has come a long way from being the Groper-in-Chief's actualizer. She looks pretty in pink, she's an accomplished liberal author and her books appear on every fellow traveler's bookshelves, she has an accomplished eye for antiques and was deft enough to recognize Dolly Madison's rocking chair sitting among her more recent Thomasville purchases, she has never met a tax or a diminution of the Bill of Rights she didn't like, and she has the chameleon's genetic skill at camouflage in front of the public. And it's with the latter where she adroitly spins her fractured fairy tales, right in there between vaudeville and slapstick. And you can pretty well gauge her activities by these two diverse schools of humor.
Her vote authorizing the invasion of Iraq--vaudeville. Hillary's backpedaling on her earlier vote while using the most stultifying reasons why she now, in retrospect, after years of deliberative thought, feels the war is a waste--slapstick. Marrying, staying with, and habitually praising Bill Clinton for his towering genius--slapstick. Her vast and incomparable legislative record in the US Senate--vaudeville. And her discovery of the 8,200 missing pages of the subpoenaed Rose Law Firm's billing records in the silver drawer in her Chappaqua kitchen--slapstick bordering on kitsch.
And yet, of all her painful and grotesque antics, her habitual employment of a Southern drawl and street slang to communicate with Black audiences can be viewed only as rare slapstick humor.
As the wife of the first US Black president, you'd think she'd talk up to the captive audiences arrayed before her, those who can't flee her fiery brand of calumny because of the security at the doors.
But no, the Hill, as she's affectionately called by her most slavish staffers and by Harold Ickes, her most trusted adherent, only knows how to use a good, solid, but obviously faked up accent, just as she is compelled, for some unknown reason, to employ the same destructive street patois eschewed by so many of her listeners and for which so many innocents have been vilified for using in the past.
As the culture wars rage and Imus is fired for laying on the bigotry so many on the left find so loathsome, Hillary Clinton is applauded by the same liberal main stream press for having the courage to use her own unique brand of destructive social slapstick.
But to get the full effect of Hillary's overt racist pandering, you have to shift the Tivo button to slow motion and then observe her egregious delivery. And it is there, as she bobs her head, rolls her eyes, and grasps at the ghostly apparitions floating before her, that you can appreciate the full panoply of her near limitless political talent.
Russ Limbaugh says that he's 80% sure that Hillary will sit in the Oval Office while her "husband" floats around the world visiting the needy as a crank healer without portfolio.
I'm not so sure.
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