You know things are bad when a political scandal begins with a presidential candidate disputing the recollection of a B-list comedian.
In the last few days, Clinton's harrowing tale of corkscrew landings and ducking and running to escape sniper fire on a tarmac in Tuzla in 1996 have rapidly become the stuff of late night television fodder,
editorial cartoons, mocking commentary, and, perhaps most damaging of all, hilarious YouTube parodies.
Come now the twin children of Ridicule and Truth. Upon their brow is written Doom.
Want proof?
Unless you are a clay-eating idiot, the picture at the top of this post needs no introduction or explanation. "Ah," your brain said to itself immediately upon seeing it, "Dukakis. Tank. Doom."
This is a scientific fact: If I were to write the words "Quayle" and "Potatoe", a synaptic response in your brainwave pattern thingies immediately causes you to (1) giggle, and (2) think, "Oh, that poor, poor, doomed man..." That is how your brain works in moments like these.
Why does your brain react this way? Because the old saying is valid: It is only funny because it is true.
Everyone knew deep down that Dukakis was a bit of a wimp, a fact he now painfully yet freely admits. Everyone knew, to the quick of their marrow, that Quayle was a profoundly stupid mouthbreathing fool.
And those men learned the very hard way that once your slips and foibles cause you to be mocked and laughed at by a nation reacting to a fundamental truth they see, your political obituary has begun to be scribed.
Clinton is headed to this place there very rapidly, if she is not already there. There is no doubt that a campaign which once praised Saturday Night Live now has icewater in its bowels waiting to see what nightmarish Hell will be unleashed upon it this weekend.
They are wise to be afraid.
Because it is one thing when reporters and commentators weigh and examine a candidate in the light of a controversy by describing that controversy in veddy veddy serious tones, as with Obama and the Wright controversy. And it is one thing when a candidate responds to that very serious controversy seriously by providing the nation with "a rare political moment when a politician spoke to [us] as though [we] were an adult."
But it is an altogether a different thing when not only the controversy, but the candidate's response, is met with abject mockery.
Clinton found herself in this predicament very quickly, but she only made matters worse. By repeating the lie ("That is what happened"), and explaining it away when found to be a lie by lying further still ("I was sleep deprived"), she raised the volume of the laughter directed at her, and damaged herself even further.
How damaging is it? When a scandal can be reduced to a widely repeated phrase that invites mockery--"I did not inhale" or "Read my lips" or "Where's the beef?"--the ridicule is cemented into the consciousness of a nation.
Hillary Clinton and her lies have become the subject of mockery in the media, in workplaces, and in living rooms: Hillary Clinton tells whoppers, and this proves it in an entertainingly stupid way. How dumb she looks. Let us mock her.
This is the sort of damning and perhaps fatal mockery that can be shorthanded into a single, catchy little phrase, one that may be more damaging than all the pastor Wrights or trumped-up Rezkos or anything that has come before. Because it strikes a tuning fork of truth to the ear
"Sniper fire."
See? There goes your brain again.
