Bill's jig is up. Even the most obtuse of the fools who claimed that after the election the secretly liberal Bill Clinton would emerge now know better.

Why, then, do so many people still adore Hillary? Either she is, as Bill claims, the closest and most trusted advisor of a President whose record, as we find new reasons to point out each week, is despicable; or she's out of the loop but being used as window dressing, which is just as bad. Why is Hillary a hero?

The latest coronation was HRC's Grammy award last week. A Grammy??!! For the dramatic lip-synched reading of a transparently false, self-serving campaign book? Admittedly it was a bad year for the kind of pop music most middle-age white people listen to, but this was politics: liberal Hollywood lavishing affection on an icon. Imagine the reaction if Newt got a Nobel in literature for his sex-kitten fiction.

The rationale usually offered for HRC's pedestal is that she's a "strong, independent woman." Puhh-leeeze. Hillary Clinton is not Eleanor Roosevelt. She isn't even Margaret Thatcher or Ellen Craswell, other strong, independent women who at least won office under their own names. A much better analogy: Hillary Clinton is Imelda Marcos.

Imelda, you'll recall, was the smart, ambitious wife of the 20-year dictator of the Philippines. She's best known here for the 3,000 pairs of shoes left behind when the lovebirds fled to Hawai'i in 1986 just ahead of 65 million hangpeople. Those shoes represented, to them and to the world, the wealth and indulgence accumulated by the notoriously corrupt couple during two decades years of repression.

But Imelda Marcos was (and is) far more than a savvy shopper. Ferdinand, once elected, co-opted opponents, handed his country over to big business, strengthened the military and gutted civil rights to shut down dissent (and eventually all elections). Imelda--while using her access to power to influence policy and make quick fortunes--defused critics by being the palace Social Conscience. Her public function was to ooze sympathy for the very people her own husband's policies were making more destitute, and at the same time defend each of those policies. Sound familiar?

Today, we have an ambitious lawyer who performed lucrative favors for some of the biggest businesses in Arkansas and beyond. She wrote "It Takes A Village" while hubby blamed youth for every social ill imaginable and his welfare triumph doomed an estimated 2-3 million extra women and children to poverty. She posed for photos at schools, while federal budgets ignored education, favoring prisons and the drug wars that stock them. She championed a health care "reform" policy (written by and for the big five health insurance companies) that forestalled any real debate on universal access to health care. She smiled in Beijing while NAFTA and GATT condemned hundreds of millions of women globally to slave labor conditions.

The rise of more women to elected office (or Cabinet posts like Madeleine "killing 700,000 Iraqi children is worth the price" Albright) is welcome on principle, but doesn't automatically mean better policy. Instead, too often we get individual women proving they can enforce the economic subjugation of women as a class at least as ably as men can. In the old, pre-post-feminism days, this was called "patriarchy." And in a further concession to today's male supremacism, the most visible of these women gets her sole legitimacy (pun intended) through her husband. And her not-so-sensible shoes.

Hillary is Imelda: ambitious, intelligent, a good public speaker, who uses those gifts to enrich herself and make palatable a man whose policies are indefensibly destructive to women. Is this the role model we want for our daughters? Or our sons?