The ravening narcissism that can never, ever be satisfied – The sense of Humanity only as a vague adoring audience “Out There” in an imaginary – endless auditorium – The tantrums – The rages – The petulant behavior of a spoiled brat – The bewilderment that the world could possibly go on without her. Billy Wilder understood it all.
Nearly 70 years ago Wilder one of the greatest movie directors and scriptwriters who has ever lived made the definitive biography of Hillary Clinton, future First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and Twice (so far and counting) Presidential candidate of the United States when she was only three years old : For Hillary Clinton is Norma Desmond.
And her address is not in upstate New York but in a rotting, eerie old Hollywood mansion with a swimming pool and a dead body floating in it – Street address: “Sunset Boulevard.”
This wonderful genius insight is not mine: I owe it to a lifelong friend and brilliant California lawyer Jeffrey Calkins.
Jeff’s insight cuts to the heart of the strange, miasmic madness which has poisoned US politics ever since The World Turned Upside Down on Election Night 2016. It explains the intensity of the hatred for Donald Trump, who has delivered unparalleled economic growth and Wall Street share surges over the past three years while managing to least avoid starting any new wars to a degree that no other president has managed before him for more at least 40 years.
But Trump’s Original Sin Can Never Be Expunged: He was meant to go down to Humiliating Landslide Defeat in the Coronation of the Great Queen Spider Empress Herself. Instead, he carried 30 out of 50 states.
Nor was this the first time Hillary Clinton squandered a Sure Thing: In 2016, she wasted $1.25 billion in her Presidential Campaign that was universally agreed was Impossible for her to lose. Eight years earlier, she blew away $250 million and never even got as far as the Democratic presidential nomination. Barack Obama, a young first term senator with four years as a national figure to her 26 (since the 1992 campaign elected her husband and made her First Lady) had beaten her stone cold four months before the 2008 Democratic convention.
Hillary is still clearly convinced that she can and will be the Democrats’ candidate to defeat Trump next year. Yet every time she opens her mouth in public, she exposes herself as an ugly and ridiculous ass: Her accusation that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – who voluntarily served in war zones in the armed forces of the United States – was an agent of the Russian government was as obviously ridiculous as it was repulsive.
This, remember is a woman who on the night of her election humiliation at the hands of Trump came up on the spur of the moment with the Big Lie that Russia had masterminded her election defeat – An accusation which three years of frenzied research by the US Deep State and Democratic Party establishment has failed to find a single iota of evidence to support
Not only was the lie ludicrous: It was also inept. A person who could concoct such a fiction to alibi her own amazing incompetence was risking a collapse of superpower relations that could set off World War III. Such a person should never be allowed within a 1,000 miles of serious political power.
Yet here we are, four years on and Hillary Clinton once again has the mad delusion that the American people – or at least a few dozen of them – really want her to run for president yet again.
This ecstatic delusion eerily echoes Norma Desmond, the raving, mad, long forgotten, silent movie star superlatively played by the great Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”
We should note here incidentally that in real life Swanson was everything that Hillary Clinton pretends to be but is not.
Ms. Swanson was her own woman first and last. Far from rising to national fame, wealth and political power simply as the supportive wife of an unfaithful, recklessly promiscuous philandering dog, she was filled with talent, beauty, brains, wit and courage. She dispatched several husbands herself and broke up with one lover, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of THOSE Kennedy’s) when he was unfaithful to her (with other women as well as his wife).
Far from being the monstrous and mad Norma Desmond, in her own life, Ms. Swanson was stunningly beautiful, a pioneer of health food living, the author of an acclaimed, brilliant 500-page autobiography, the mother of several children and she lived a full, happy and amazingly constructive existence well into her 80s.
In other words she wasn’t Hillary Clinton either.
But shrieking Norma Desmond mouthing the immortal screenplay of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett was.
Today Hillary, like Norma Desmond, has no conception that her time has long since come – and gone.
Like Norma, Hillary still imagines that she is “Big” and it is only the rest of her country that got “Small.”
Like Norma, she imagines millions and millions of worshipful believers waiting for her Great Return.
Like Norma, Hillary dances in the limelight in what she imagines are girlish, feminine, alluring and graceful ballets of exquisite perfection when they are only the fantasies of a mad, raddled old hag.
It does not matter: Hillary Knows the Truth:
“You see, this is my life… it always will be…. There’s nothing else, just us, and the cameras… and those wonderful people out in the dark … Alright, Mr. De Mille I’m ready for my close up.”
