ACT ONE:

Don’t miss Peggy Noonan in fine form in Friday’s WSJ, noting that in our democracy, power has always been tempered with persuasion, more or less… until now.

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly… What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack… All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter.

She relates speculation, by Democrats, that this amounts to “Hillary’s Revenge”, implying by that more than mere irony. (Question: How is Hillary like Montezuma?)

By raising, in the campaign, an issue she knew with visceral particularity to be a third rail (so the theory goes) Hill may have been working the equivalent of a martial arts move to pull her opponent off-balance, inviting Team Barry into a Chosin Reservoir cul de sac of withering crossfire. (I hesitate with comparisons between the president and brave U.S. Marines, however other aspects of the analogy are apt enough to consider; perhaps Waterloo would provide a better metaphor, though exile to Elba, St. Helena or their supernatural equivalents seems quite far off at the moment.)

To say that this whole sad debacle was a darkly far-sighted Machiavellian Team Clinton strategy filled with schadenfreude for those on the receiving end of health care would put it beyond anything ever dreamed by Sun Tzu… but not out of the realm of possibility. This wouldn’t be the first time the American people were played as pawns and dupes.

Noonan goes on to ask, “Is this what the president wants?”, Concluding, “It couldn’t be.” She graciously overlooks the possibility that Team Barry’s choreographer is supernaturally gifted at this kind of chess. Denial on the part of opponents is one of the most potent aspects of the “big lie” strategy he has been pursuing to date.

Yet even Noonan cannot help but sense that we’re looking at the antichrist in action, concluding cryptically, “Let’s hope the uncharted territory we’re in doesn’t turn dark.” Hot tip to Peggy: it may if we continue to forget the One who invented the game.

ACT TWO:

This investigative piece in the Daily Mail about Bill Clinton’s ‘rescue’ of two American hostages in Pyongyang is impossible to summarize. Here’s the ‘money’ item:

For Euna, who was born in South Korea but moved to California when she was a university student, it was her first overseas assignment. The trip was Laura’s second ‘dangerous’ foreign job for Current, a Left-wing cable television network based in San Francisco that rather grandly aspires to ‘democratise’ the news.

Fronted by Clinton’s former Vice-President Al Gore, now a bona fide green activist, the station is the brainchild of Joel Hyatt, a fabulously wealthy 59-year-old lawyer who made his fortune running a chain of store-front legal offices.

Read the rest and tell me if it isn’t at least possible that these two women were deliberately sent to the DMZ as live bait in an exercise the outcome of which, it could easily have been anticipated, would bring Bill and Al back into the spotlight as heroes while leaving the rest of us in a worse strategic position vis a vis one of the planet’s foremost repressive nuclear-armed nut-bags?

Hillary’s Revenge? Time will tell…