On a day when she was supposed to go in triumph to the U.N. to recall her 1995 speech on women’s rights—of blessed memory, naturally, and delivered at a U.N. Conference in Beijing—Hillary Clinton was reduced to trying to play one of the oldest tricks in the pre-feminist book, of doing something ignominious that us po’ women were forced to do in the evil, old, very bad days of patriarchy: play dumb.

You didn’t expect little ole me to know how to use two big ole email addresses, did you? Why I would have needed a big strong man to lug around that ugly machine for my second email address? You mean you can have two emails on one machine? Lordy me, the things you can learn when you get out of the houses.

The problem is that when Hillary plays dumb it is not at all appealing. You don’t think sweet little lady with the Betty Crocker cookie dough—you think more—oh, I don’t know—Eve Harrington in “All About Eve:" scheming, conniving, and dangerous.

“Hillary Acts Stupid When She Acts Dumb” is the headline on John Podhoretz’s delicious column this morning on yesterday’s twenty minute Hillary press conference.

Podhoretz writes:

The press corps covering the conference, and hundreds of reporters following it live on Twitter, seemed utterly agog at the falsity, the stonewalling and the flashes of anger that offered the only real indication she knows perfectly well how damaging all this might be for her.

Smart Hillary Clinton would know that people don’t delete their most personal e-mails: That’s the point of ­e-mail, that it’s a wondrous passively organized file cabinet of your personal communications.

It’s the junk you delete, not the ­e-mails about your daughter’s wedding. Those are the kinds of things most people actually want to keep.

But not Dumb Hillary Clinton, who said she’d done just that.

Smart Hillary Clinton seems to have invented Dumb Hillary Clinton to protect her from herself. But Smart Hillary isn’t doing herself any favors.

Mrs. Clinton is going to have to transform herself, to get rid of Dumb Hillary and find a new persona to cope with troubled times, because the person who made so horrendous an accounting of herself yesterday has no future other than ignominious defeat.

Washington Times columnist Charles Hurt had a different take on the press conference, asking “Are We Ready of Ten More Years of Wrath from the Eternal Woman Scorned?” Hurt compares Mrs. Clinton as she appeared yesterday to that scamp of a husband of hers:

At once a struggling fat person alternating between eating McDonald’s and jogging in too-short shorts. A trailer park dog in heat, yet a devoted dad and husband dancing on the beach. A global, silver-haired elder statesman — who jet sets around the world with a reputed pedophile pimp.

Bill Clinton has always been a one-man traveling variety show where everybody laughs a little, gets their pockets picked and — if you are the right dimensions — a private soiree.

Hillary, on the other hand, has but one note, one act, one trick. She is a legal automaton. A disemboweled scandal-disposal robot. She is Franken-Secretary, the unkillable Political Zombie!

Run!

For!

Your!

LIVES!

America, are you ready for 10 — TEN! — more years of political Hurt Locker?

Perhaps the most devastating critique was the headline, taken from the lead, to Karen Tumulty’s report on the Clinton presser in the Washington Post:

The circus is back in town.

Now that has got to hurt. Tumulty went on to note (I almost said deadpan):

Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet even announced that she is running for president, but the spectacle of the Clinton White House years is unfolding again, touched off by the controversy over her practice of using a private e-mail account, rather than an official one, while she was secretary of state.

Her defense, which was simply that it was more convenient to do it that way, is unlikely to satisfy her critics or stop the questions.

The first question at yesterday’s press conference came from a reporter from Turkey, a country known for its rising rate of violence against women. The Daily Caller described his question as a “laughable softball,” but that is understatement. The reporter praised Hillary for her earlier remarks about women “on behalf of the U.N. Correspondents Association” and then asked her if the whole controversy about her emails was sexist. The former secretary of state smiled slyly and said she would leave the answer to that question to others. Yes, this is the level of discourse we can expect if Mrs. Clinton becomes president and is faced with criticism.

Mrs. Clinton claims that there is a public record of all her emails as secretary of state because they were sent to other State Department employees and thus they have a record (presumably the others at State followed the procedure to preserve public records). But didn’t Mrs. Clinton ever email people who didn’t work at State? And what about the possibility that Mrs. Clinton emailed others to come up with words of comfort for the parents of the Americans murdered in Benghazi? Could she have considered such emails, if they were sent, private rather than official because, after all, she herself is a mother who would want to say just the right thing to grieving parents?

Perhaps she sent an email to somebody in the Algerian government, for example, expressing their mutual sorrow about the Haitian earthquake? Is there s record of that?

The press conference was devastating not just because Hillary’s dumb girl act didn’t fly—the Lady Macbeth beneath the skull can be seen with Mrs. Clinton—but because it was so obvious that, far from regarding herself as a public servant—our employee—who owes us a believable explanation for destroying her work product, which belongs to us, she is completely above it. The one factual matter that she addressed clearly was that of the private Clinton server remains off limits.