Mrs Clinton was terrible too, in her own unique way. Terriblest was that fixed, phony smile, when the whole world knows what a sour, ill-tempered, arrogant, lying, calculating, avaricious shrew she is.

Mrs Clinton in performance always puts me in mind of the phrase "Uncanny Valley." This is a term of art in robotics and movie animation. If your robot or your anime character is obviously not human, like Buzz Lightyear, everyone's comfortable with it. As you work to make it more and more human-like, though, your character eventually enter a zone where it creeps us out. That's the Uncanny Valley — almost human, but just not quite there.

That's where Mrs Clinton's stage persona dwells: in the Uncanny Valley. I wasn't the least bit surprised to learn that there's a theory buzzing around the Twittersphere that the candidate is, in fact, an android. Some Twitterers, watching the debate, claim to have spotted a wire trailing down her back underneath her jacket. "See!" they're saying, "that's her power source!" I wouldn't rule it out.