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On October 18, 2002, I was beat. But it was Friday night, and being a New Yorker at the time, I felt contractually obligated not to go home at 7pm. I ventured across the Midtown street where my job was located to see what was playing at the Ziegfeld and saw a poster that had a plain and simple message.

Like many American moviegoers, I have a strange predilection for films that truly, deeply frighten me - so there was approximately zero chance I could resist. $10, gone.

While my aformentioned predilection often gets me through the turnstile at my local megaplex, it can't seem to restrain my hand from covering my eyes when I know someone's going to die, or my butt from leaving the seat at the first hint of a loud, contrived musical cue. I'm a frickin' fraidy-cat. It's a wonder I even saw any of The Ring.

You wouldn't think a plot in which an eight-year-old dead girl is the principal villain would be scary. But nothing is so frightening as that which proves to be unstoppable. That eight-year-old, Samara Morgan, was whose voice you heard on the phone (after having the misfortune to watch this), saying nothing more than:

"Seven days."

You didn't want to see Samara on the seventh day. (Spoiler alert!)

"She never sleeps", indeed. Dayum.

In 2008, another much more mature (and alive) woman has been reaching through televisions all over America, grabbing each of us by the throat and holding on until we say "uncle", "I submit", "It was the Dukes!" or perhaps, "OK, you won the popular vote!"

Hillary Clinton's reign of terror began last year and has continued unabated, like an undead zombie marching slowly forward still, refusing to submit to the blows of any weapon. Her ability to remain singularly focused on one thing - winning - is what has kept her political heart beating. But trapped under an avalanche of her own mistakes ("sleep-deprived", my ass) and votes for the other dude, Hillary may finally be sealed in the well, gazing only at this for the remainder of her damaged political career.

For months, she has spread division and angst in the service of her political ambition. It has been, at times, too much to bear - particularly for we, the African-American voters who were the Clintons' strongest stalwart through their various storms.

But in seven days, that era can go out, Samara-style.

On Tuesday, June 3, the Democratic Party holds its final primaries in Montana and South Dakota. After those primaries, Barack Obama and his campaign will likely let loose whatever supers it's saving up and he will claim the Democratic nomination. In seven days, it can all be over.

Seven days.

Despite the fact that Senator Obama is already running a general election campaign against John McCain and largely ignores her, Hillary marches on, doing her best to lay waste to Obama's chances in the fall.

But wait, you say! Haven't I heard the sounds of Democratic party unity ringing from the mountaintops?

Don't get it twisted, y'all. Take into account everything that Hillary and her hubby have done to undermine Obama, even after it became abundantly clear that he will be the Democratic nominee. Hell, in just the past weekend, she basically said, "Nice candidate there - hope nothing happens to him...", while the former President of the United States, a leader of his party, resorts to paranoid theories about how they want to push Hillary out of the race:

"I can't believe it. It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out. 'Oh, this is so terrible: The people they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up.'"

How can you read that and not see the desperation?

The election plainly lost, the current Clinton strategy is simple in its evil genius: sabotage, sabotage, sabotage. Make all of my supporters into victims! Trick them into believing than an election that was clearly won was, in fact, stolen from a woman! (Who cares if you're setting feminism back in the process?)

Seven days.

Seven days until Obama can claim victory and end any talk that he didn't allow each and every American the chance to have their "voice heard" in this primary.

But there is a dark side. It's the reason I brought up The Ring in the first place.

In the film, Samara's father utters the most important sentence of the film:

What is it with reporters? You take one person's tragedy and force the world to experience it... spread it like sickness.

In this case, the tragedy is Hillary Clinton's sociopathic quest for the Presidency. A woman completely incapable of admitting wrongdoing, particularly to those who might "steal" her crown, could just be warming up. Her scorched-earth campaign may claim to speak for America's (White) women, America's downtrodden (Whites), America's hard-working (White folk). But at the end of the day, Hillary wants us to feel her pain.

She has taken a long, hurtful road to this point, to be certain. I can't imagine experiencing the kind of violation she has dealt with in her marriage to the philandering Bill, nor the sexism that she's been subjected to largely for just being a take-charge woman who isn't afraid to tell people what she really wants. But what she really wants is the Presidency. And now she can't have it. In 2008, anyway.

So, frankly, I expect her to spread more and more misery for the next seven days, infecting the discussion about the nomination in a desperate attempt to turn a valued prize into a raisin in the sun.

This is more of a warning than a dire prediction. People need to know what the Clintons are indeed capable of. Beware the next seven days.

As in Samara's case, it could be just the beginning. She never sleeps.