She drives everybody wild. She makes men do dumb things. She makes women say stupid things. She’s the straw that stirs the drink.

It’s all about Hillary.

Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

She’s got a nobody opponent in her Senate race, and he can grab the front page just by saying she had plastic surgery. This from a guy who couldn’t catch flies with manure, but he fires cheap shots at her and suddenly he’s getting face time. He says he didn’t say it. He probably thinks he didn’t. Gremlins are her friend.

It’s all her fault, but we shouldn’t blame her. She can’t help it if she has bewitched the whole country, pols especially. Newt Gingrich has fallen hard for her. Maybe that’s why she’s wearing a cross – to ward off the evil spirits.

She claimed Karl Rove was “obsessing about me” after George Bush’s brain predicted she would win the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, then lose the general election because of “her personal philosophy and her brittleness.”

Hey, give the guy a break. Rove can’t stop himself. Neither can her Democratic rivals. Barack Obama is the latest one to go bonkers. A guy who served in the Illinois legislature and two years in the U.S. Senate now wants to be president. But it’s all about her – he smells the doubts on whether she can win, so he figures, why not me? There are lots of good reasons – experience, for one – but what sense is there in trying to talk sense to a man under this woman’s spell?

None. Just look at John Kerry. He almost became president two years ago by trying to stick to the middle of the road, but he’s so haunted by her front-runner status that he’s now a wild-eyed liberal. It’s all about her. She slides to the center, so he’s forced to move left, into the desperate arms of the wackadoo wing.

You know she’s enjoying watching him twist. Kerry was so frightened of Clinton’s star power in 2004 that he tried to prevent her from speaking at the party convention. After protests made him look like a cad, he relented and said she could spend five minutes introducing her husband. She spoke for 11 and stole the show.

Then there’s poor Al Gore, consigned to the political wilderness and Grade B moviemaking. He’s been grumbling that he’s the rightful heir to Dem leadership. After all, he was the vice president to the guy she was only married to. He doesn’t get it. She’s an alpha female. You’d think by now he’d know his place.

But no whole family has been driven to distraction like the Edwardses, with husband John and wife Elizabeth both cursed by Hillary’s spell. John Edwards has practically moved to Iowa, calculating that his only chance of getting the ’08 nomination is to beat her there. It must drive him nuts that she doesn’t even have to show up, sending Bubba to wow the pig farmers.

And Elizabeth Edwards proved Hillary can make women as crazy as men. “We both went to law school and married other lawyers, but after that we made other choices. I think my choices have made me happier. I think I’m more joyful than she is,” Elizabeth Edwards said. She apologized, but only after insisting she never said it, it was taken out of context, blah-blah-blah.

Damn demons again.

Face it. We are bewitched. It’s all about Hillary.