KEY POINTS:
What is it with Hillary Clinton and New Zealand?
First she tried to horn in on the legend of our greatest hero by claiming to be named after him.
This undignified grab for reflected glory, not unlike being photographed in a best friend's pose with a celebrity whose stalked animal expression gives the game away, was abandoned when it was pointed out that she was born five years before Sir Ed scaled Everest.
Now she's likened our Prime Minister to a cockroach. Whilst it's true that Helen Clark is nothing if not durable and possesses a scowl that could frizzle a heckler's nostril hair at 50 paces, that hardly justifies likening her to an insect whose name is a byword for squalor and an insult in every language except Eskimo.
Having lived in inner-city Sydney for 10 years, I'm all too familiar with Periplaneta australasiae.
I wouldn't claim the same acquaintance with the PM but did find myself placed next to her at a dinner last year and can report that she evinced few, if any, of the characteristics we associate with the reviled bug.
If I had to draw a comparison on the basis of that brief encounter, I'd liken her to a Broadway trouper wearily resigned to the fact that the show must go on.
Clinton's "joke" - that cockroaches and the PM are the only creatures which would survive a nuclear war - was originally told about Rolling Stone Keith Richards because of his ability to survive, indeed thrive on, a drugs and booze regime that consigned fellow rock 'n' roll hell-raisers such as Gram Parsons and Jim Morrison to early graves.
That link had some substance.
This week Richards revealed that he never wears underpants, never washes his clothes and doesn't give a toss about the fate of the planet, all of which indicate a mindset which, one feels, your cockroach could relate to. Furthermore, going by the footage of Richards in ravaged late middle age at the premiere of Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's new movie about the Stones, he now actually looks like the sort of unsightly mutant that might scavenge the dead land after a nuclear Armageddon.
The other jarring aspect of Clinton's one-liner was its description of Clark as the "former" New Zealand prime minister.
This howler undermines Clinton's much-trumpeted pretensions to foreign policy expertise, but it seems only dimwit white male politicians like Dan Quayle and George W. Bush are expected to be on top of the pesky detail of international affairs.
It does, however, raise the question of who does Clinton think is our current prime minister: John Key? Winston Peters? Peter Jackson? Sir Edmund Hillary?
If one had to nominate the nearest thing to a cockroach in contemporary New Zealand politics, I suspect many people would go for Winston Peters who's wriggled out of more tight spots than Indiana Jones and reinvented himself more often than Madonna.
Peters can be viewed as the lite version of his mentor Sir Robert Muldoon, but it's worth remembering that Muldoon was a lite version of himself until he became prime minister and gave full rein to the Mussolini within.
Given his populist tendencies and bullying posture towards the media, one can only wonder how Winston would handle the prime ministership if, through some hideous twist of fate or convergence of circumstances, it was to fall into his immaculately tailored lap.
There's a whiff of the pot calling the kettle black in all of this since Clinton herself has done a passable imitation of the indestructible cockroach by bouncing back from financial scandal, ridicule over her husband's philandering and his nepotistic attempt to foist her on the American public as a sort of unelected co-president, the so-called "two for the price of one" deal.
Now despite appearing dead in the water any number of times, her campaign for the Democratic nomination refuses to sink.
But even that pales in comparison with John McCain.
He has survived a plane crash, imprisonment and torture by the North Vietnamese, a cosy relationship with a convicted fraudster whose failed business ventures cost the taxpayers billions, cancer and virtual excommunication from his own party to emerge, white-haired, partially crippled, septuagenarian, as the Republican candidate.
While we wait to see if Barack Obama can crash this cockroach party, it's worth noting that the three-way battle reflects contemporary society in that, yet again, white males of a certain age are disenfranchised. There's the grey power candidate, the women's candidate and the ethnic minorities/youth candidate, but who speaks for the average Joe?
Hillary Roach Clinton, apparently.
We are indeed in the Age of Spin when an ivy league-educated, multi-millionaire feminist can sell herself as the voice of disaffected white working class men.
