HILLARY IN '08--PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!!! :

Hooray for Hillarywood! (MAUREEN DOWD, July 31, 2002, NY Times)

Tinseltown may not recover from its Clinton exhaustion until it's time for another Clinton run. Senator Clinton is on the move. She made a boffo keynote speech Monday at the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in New York, bashing the president's economic record compared with her husband's. The Clintons have asked the government to pay millions in legal fees incurred by the Whitewater investigation; Hillary sees the reimbursement as a vindication.

She recently got into a rumble with her party's Mr. Clean, the campaign finance reformer Russ Feingold. In Hillary's world, the soft money that Mr. Feingold wants to see banned forever is what elects and re-elects the Clintons. Like Terry McAuliffe, the party chairman and Clinton bagman, Hillary pays lip service to cleaning up the money-in-politics sewer, but knows her presidential ambitions would be sustained by the big checks Mr. Feingold wants to outlaw from Hollywood and Wall Street.

Democratic strategists think Bill has smiled on John Edwards's candidacy because he and Hillary want Mr. Edwards to lose to W. in 2004, thus diminishing him and clearing the way for a Hillary run in 2008.

Hollywood prefers actresses under 40, but doesn't mind women over 40 running studios, Senate offices or the country. In the new futuristic Eddie Murphy movie set in the year 2087, Mrs. Clinton was a beloved president long ago. In space, $10,000 bills have her face on them and are known not as dollars, but as Hillaries.

In the strange netherworld that is Mo Dowd's mind, it's a good thing to be asking the taxpayers to foot your legal bills, to be associated with Hollyweird and Terry McAuliffe, and to behave like a stormtrooper when you disagree with a Jewish Senator, and Eddie Murphy movies predict the future. Of course, in the Universe according to Mo, the fact that Hillary is female excuses all sins--corruption, anti-Semitism, etc., be damned. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 31, 2002 10:03 AM