Self-Defeating?

Every time Senator Clinton pontificates, I am of the opinion that she does more damage to her cause and that of her party, than otherwise. Check out her most recent rant at the New York Post:

MINNEAPOLIS — Sen. Hillary Clinton was introduced by a Senate colleague to the state Democratic Party here as "the next great president of the United States" — and did nothing to deny it as she skewered the GOP.

"We are headed to a brave, new world of extremism, and we need to make clear we're not going there," she told a sellout crowd of 2,000 who paid $100 a head to see her. "We stand against their radical, reactionary right-wing agenda."

Clinton sounded every bit the stumping presidential contender as she slammed the Republicans for driving up the national debt, wrecking overseas alliances and leading the nation on a domestic path "well outside the mainstream."

She lambasted Republican members of Congress as "extras in the movie 'I Robot' " who "mindlessly rubberstamp the agenda of this administration" and want to do "little more than fund the military and build some highways."

And she scolded President Bush for flaunting a "prideful unilateralism" in the war on terrorism and warned the commander-in-chief that the United States "cannot direct the rest of the world to follow our orders merely because we said so."

Even the print versions of her rants are shrill. I have difficulty reading her speeches, much less listening to them. I can't even imagine a state of the union screech, er, speech.