The Big Truth

He’s got to hide the truth.
She'll stop at nothing to find it.
But tonight, Everything's off the record.

-The Big Easy tagline

You can’t handle the truth!

-A Few Good Men

But Big Jule cannot win if he plays with honest dice!

-Guys and Dolls

Hillary or Nobody?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: March 26, 2008

Sometimes Maureen Dowd just throws subtlety to the wind and lets us know how she really feels. Let’s go down the list:

She likes watching old movies:

It’s one of my favorite movie formulas, driving the dynamics in such classics as “A Few Good Men,” “The Big Easy” and “Guys and Dolls”: Charming, glib guy spars and quarrels with no-nonsense, driven girl, until they team up in the last reel. He spices up her life, and she stiffens his spine.

This is a very telling episode of Movies With Maureen®. What do these movies have in common? Bad boys that with a secret to hide. Tough talking lugs like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Quaid, and Marlon Brando. It’s a bonus if they treat women wrong.

Hillary Clinton won’t settle for second banana. Again.

It’s hard to imagine that after spending her whole life playing second-fiddle to a superstar pol, Hillary wants to do it again. She’s been vice president.

Maureen has already explore the theory that Barack would be and unfit veep for Hillary. Now she says that there is no way Hillary would settle for a position she de facto already had.

The Clintons only think of themselves.

After all, the Clintons think of themselves as The Democratic Party. When Bill and Dick Morris triangulated during the first term, it was what was best for Bill, not the party. In 1996, when Bill turned the White House into Motel 1600 for fund-raisers, it was more about his re-election than the re-elections of his fellow Democrats in Congress; in 2000, the White House focused its energies more on Hillary’s Senate win than Al Gore’s presidential run.

The Billary Express has always been a duopoly and the focus has never been what is good for the party, but what is good for the Clintons.

If she can’t win the nomination, she will sabotage Obama to give herself a shot in 2012.

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat.

(Or, as one Democrat described it to ABC’s Jake Tapper: Hillary is going for “the Tonya Harding option” — if she can’t get the gold, kneecap her rival.)

And we all know how it turned out for Tonya. Nancy Kerrigan became America’s sweetheart until she bad mouthed Mickey Mouse.

That whole wait-until-next-time strategy sounds pretty Machiavellian. It requires the hope that an electorate that rejected you this time around will flock to you four years down the road.

There you have. The Four Horsemen of Maureen Dowd for the past six months. Just mix and match as required until the election. Then she can go on to stopping the next Clinton run.