The finest Hillary-trashing pot high of the day has already been provided, again, by the glorious Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. It’s not just a hunger for a daily Hillary hate-on that articles like Noonan’s greatly satisfy, but an almost Biblical-level feeling of clarity, cleansing, righteousness. There’s no way to not feel good about this.
All last night I thought about the Clinton campaign’s communications director Howard Wolfson stating yesterday that, if necessary, Hillary is ready to burn the house down all spring and summer long in order to fulfill her clawing ambition. That first, the fair or decent thing second. But more and more people, thank God, seem to be understanding who she is.
“‘This is death by a thousand cuts,'” Noonan begins. “That’s what they keep saying about Hillary Clinton.
“Her whole life right now is a reverse Sally Field. She’s looking out at an audience of colleagues and saying, ‘You don’t like me, you really don’t like me!’
“Although of course she’s not saying it. Her response to what from the outside looks like catastrophe? A glassy-eyed insistence that all is well. ‘I’m tested, I’m ready, let’s make it happen!’ she yelled into a mic on a stage in Texas on the night of her latest defeat. This is meant to look like confidence. Whether or not you wish her well probably determines whether you see it as game face, stubbornness or evidence of mild derangement.
“In Virginia last Sunday, two days before the Little Tuesday voting, she suggested her problem is that she’s not a big phony. ‘People say to me all the time, ‘You’re so specific…why don’t you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?’
“I thought it an acknowledgement that loss might come,” Noonan writes. “But by Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Clinton was furiously stumping through Ohio using the same line of attack, but this time it wasn’t a marker. The race is about ‘speeches versus solutions.’ Her unnamed opponent stands for the first, she for the second. He is all ‘words,’ she is ‘action.’ ‘Words are cheap,’ she said.
“If they were so cheap, her inability to marshal them would not have cost her so dearly.”
Or as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews said yesterday, there’s never been a U.S. President commonly regarded as great who hasn’t been a great orator. What U.S. President who wasn’t a great orator and a profound uplifter of spirits is considered great by historians and the general public?
Noonan also underlines a relationship between Clinton’s way of doing things and that a certain departed U.S. president. She quotes “an old Richard Nixon hand” observing that “Nixon [didn’t] always think honesty is the best policy, but he [did] think it’s a policy.” Like Clinton, she implies, Nixon “saw it as a strategic gambit, to be used like any other.”

The trailer that went up yesterday for M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13), which looks and feels like a return to the eerie-scary-inexplicable jolt vibe of Signs. Perhaps this time we’ll be spared the religious hokum. (Thanks to HE reader Suki Jonze for the shout-out.)

At 4:31 this morning, AICN’s Drew McWeeny reported some digital tweakings in the U.S. version of the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull teaser that are not evident on the international version. He was alerted to this stunning realization by a message board rant that appeared last night on CHUD.

A frame-filling American flag CU appears in the domestic version but is absent overseas. Fewer Russian guns are aimed at Harrison Ford and Ray Winstone in the U.S. version. And something about Winstone’s khaki pants is said to be strikingly different in the int’l vs. domestic versions. (Extra wrinkles? A urine spot? An absence of a belt?) Were the guns CG’ed out because of some MPAA edict? Is the American flag supposed to provide some kind of subminal emotional comfort to Bush-McCain nation?
I have to be honest and admit that on a scale of 1 to 10, my interest in this matter is currently between 4 and a 4.5.

The red-band trailer for David Gordon Green and Judd Apatow‘s Pineapple Express (Columbia/Sony, 8.8.08). Seth Rogen, James Franco, Bill Hader, James Remar, Gary Cole, Amber Heard and Rosie Perez costar.

My 9:01 am comment that “my sensings are telling me that Hillary and her campaign team are going to scrap and claw and take everyone down to hell“? Boston Globe‘s “Political Intelligence” columnist Foon Rhee wrote earlier today that Clinton “will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary, said Clinton’s communications director Howard Wolfson.”

Diego Pillco, the admitted murderer of director-actress Adrienne Shelley, has passed along some particulars. Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau says the 11.1.06 tragedy resulted from Shelley catching Pillco “stealing her wallet,” which led to her reaching for the phone to call police “but [Pillco] grabbed it and a fight ensued. He covered the victim’s mouth and nose with his hand until she passed out. He then took a sheet, choked her to death, and made it look like a suicide.”
What a ghastly sequence of events. Awful, horrific…but I have to say something. If there was any question about the basic character of a perpetrator, I would never pick up a phone in order to call the cops with the perp standing a few feet away. I’d never do this because it forces the offender to make a decision — run for the hills or stop the phone call from being made. I’d like to think that most people aren’t violent or sociopathic or confrontational, but a certain percentage are. Pick up the phone and you’re basically gambling that the perpetrator won’t try to take the phone away or physically overpower you or worse.
I would never take that chance if I was a smaller-framed woman. I would get the bad guy to leave the apartment or I would leave myself and then I’d call the cops.
A terrible, terrible thing, this. Reading this story made me go back to it.

Just another tit-for-tat ad, but the speed of it is pretty incredible. It’s a response to very recent Clinton ad aired for the Wisconsin market, challenging Obama to debate her prior to the 2.19 primary there. 24 or 48 hours later, wham…the Obama team is right back at her.

“It’s an odd thing, but in recent years, just about every movie that attempts a sophisticated take on romance, has turned out to be strained and witless. All the successful recent comedies (The 40 Year Old Virgin, The Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up, to name three) have tended toward the raunchy end of the spectrum. It’s as if Hollywood’s wise guys have recognized that middle-class American life is just too complicated, perhaps even too inherently miserable, to get an intelligent handle on.

“You can’t quite treat [modern relationships] as a tragedy but you can turn to its first cousin — farce — and have some profitable fun with it. And who can blame them? Or us, for the benumbed state that something like Definitely, Maybe leaves us in.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 2.14 review in Time.

Late to the table but in complete agreement with Sasha Stone and Kris Tapley that this Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ad on behalf of Best Supporting Actor nominee Casey Afleck is perhaps the best of its kind seen all season. In no small part because it’s in keeping with the aura and tone of the film itself.

It would take four to six hours of calling the Sovet Republic of Warner Bros. to begin to get some kind of answer about who the creative hands were so let’s not, but sincere congrats to whomever the geniuses are.

“Seventy percent of the country is against the Iraq War now,” Young Turks co-host Cenk Uygyur has wrote today. “A great majority of American believe it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the first place. With a country that is this united against the war, are we really going to have two presidential candidates that voted for the Iraq War?
“If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic primary, both of the major party candidates will have been wrong on the war. Why? Why on God’s green earth would we do that?”