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Opinion: In writing off Hillary Clinton, no one tops George Will

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Columnist George Will channeled his inner William Faulkner in reflecting on the dire straits Hillary Clinton faces in her pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination.

Pundits galore wrote words aplenty today on the same topic, but no others did so in a sentence (yes, a la Faulkner, a single twisting sentence) as audicious as the one produced by the erudite Will. We commend it to your attention, forthwith:

After Tuesday’s split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat’s Last Theorem,** or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys’ ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party’s rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party’s rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama’s delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium’s Zip code.

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The rest of the piece can be read here.

-- Don Frederick

** A theorem stating that the equation an + bn = cn has no solution if a, b, and c are positive integers and if n is an integer greater than 2.

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