Hillary Clinton shows signs of anger and desperation and pops out of her shell with shrill and extreme rhetoric. She should be nervous, with both the feds and rivals breathing down her neck.

But she’s no more effective at scaring her attackers than any other turtle under siege. She should retreat back inside, where at least her handlers can pretend she’s presidential — and inevitable. Her bunker mentality leads to unforced errors, such as irately exclaiming to Congress regarding Benghazi, “What difference, at this point, does it make?” But the more rattled she is the more she’ll emerge.

A few weeks ago, she lashed out against Republicans again for grilling her on the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya. “They’ll try to tell you this is about Benghazi, but it’s not. … It’s not about Benghazi. … It’s not about emails or servers, either. … I won’t get down in the mud with them. I won’t play politics with national security.”

Oh, then why did she pretend that an anti-Islam video triggered the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi? Evidence has shown — as we realized all along — that she knew then it was a planned terrorist attack and not a spontaneous eruption over an obscure video.

She says she won’t get down in the mud with Republicans, yet the entire purpose of her little rant was to sling mud. After all, she learned from the master — her husband, Bill — that to deflect charges, you hit back harder.

Let’s remember that Hillary was a disciple of Saul Alinsky’s before Barack Obama was. She knows his “rules for radicals” by heart, but she can’t pull them off like Bill or Obama because she lacks the finesse and charm, which just makes her angrier.

Last week in Ohio, she took it up a notch and railed against Republicans for their “extreme views about women.” She said: “We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world. But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States. Yet they espouse out-of-date and out-of-touch policies. They are dead wrong for 21st-century America.”

So it’s extreme and sexist to oppose the killing of unborn female and male children and mainstream to support late-term and partial-birth abortions? It’s progressive to support federal funding of a craven abortion factory whose founder was a racist monster who advocated eugenics? To sever funding for this corrupt organization would not deny access to women’s health services, which are available elsewhere.

Ironically, there may be a slight upside for Clinton in all these scandals, as they divert attention from her other profound weaknesses. She’s almost cartoonish; she’ll say anything to curry favor with her base, change positions on a dime and grossly modify her accent to pander to her audience’s ethnicity or location.

Besides, many believe that unless she’s indicted, neither the scandals nor her Democratic challengers will defeat her. Perhaps they won’t destroy her directly, but they could do so indirectly if they continue to force her out of hiding, because the more visible she is the poorer her chances. She is no longer an impressive figure, assuming she ever was, and she is strikingly unlikable and untrustworthy — facts borne out by polling data.

That a card-carrying socialist such as Bernie Sanders is above single digits anywhere, let alone leading in New Hampshire and surging in Iowa, speaks volumes about Clinton. It’s no wonder she tried to hide from the media as long as she could. Maybe it wasn’t as much about arrogance as it was her handlers trying to conceal her.

Things will just get worse for Clinton, because she’ll have to surface more frequently. Even if she isn’t fending off charges, she won’t be able to explain why she should be president because she has no reasons, other than her raw personal ambition, her sense of entitlement and her desire to be the first female president.

She can’t even define her candidacy at a basic level. Does she want to build on Obama’s legacy, God forbid? So far, she’s conflicted about this. On the one hand, she promises to double down on some of his worst policies and practices, such as immigration and the cavalier issuance of lawless executive orders, and on the other, she wants to divorce herself from those policies, as almost 6 in 10 Americans want the next president to change most of them.

As the establishment’s pick, Clinton has plenty of money and organization, but she is a horrible candidate. I hope we see more and more of Clinton, because her chances of becoming president will decrease in proportion.

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