Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column entitled, The Empire Strikes Back, presents Hillary Clinton as the ultimate victim who can turn any attack on her into a positive.   Here is an excerpt:

“Nobody plays the victim like Hillary.

She can wield that label like a wrecking ball.

If her husband humiliates her with a girlfriend in the Oval Office, Hillary turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to launch a political career. If her Republican opponent gets in her space in an overbearing way during a debate, she turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to win a Senate seat. If conservatives hold a Salem witch trial under the guise of a House select committee hearing, she turns around and uses the sympathy engendered to slip into the H.O.V. lane of a superhighway to the presidency.

Hillary Clinton is never more alluring than when a bunch of pasty-faced, nasty-tongued white men bully her.

And she was plenty alluring during her marathon session on Thursday with Republican Lilliputians, who were completely oblivious to the fact that Hillary is always at her most potent when some Neanderthal is trying to put her in her place…

It was a revealing display of hard-core conservatives in their parallel universe, where all their biases are validated by conservative media. They crawled out of the ooze into the sea of cameras, blinking and obtuse. Ohio’s Jim Jordan, bellowing. South Carolina’s Gowdy, sweating. Alabama’s Martha Roby, not getting the joke. And Indiana’s Susan Brooks, allowing that “most of us really don’t know much about Libya.”

Hillary acted bemused, barely masking her contempt at their condescension. She was no doubt amazed at what an amateur job they were doing at character assassination.”

Dowd goes on to summarize and comment on the back and forth questions and answers that made up the 11-hour House Select Committee interrogation last week.  In the final analysis, Hillary won!  Onto the Democratic nomination and presidential election!

Tony