Hillary Clinton says that we should vote for political candidates based on their merit, not their gender.

But with the kind of word games for which the Clintons are famous, she immediately qualifies that statement. In her case, she says, her gender is part of her merit.

It’s as if Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a nation where people are judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character — and went on to dream that the color of their skin is part of the content of their character.

I’m reminded of a play back in 1996 which consisted of a series of monologues on women’s issues from the perspective of a vagina. It was called “The Vagina Monologues.”

The play is now painfully outdated and a little insulting. At some colleges, the PC police have banned it for being simultaneously under-inclusive and over-inclusive. The censors explain that in this new day of transgenderism, some people with a vagina aren’t women and some without are.

In any event, being out of date has never stopped pant-suited Hillary. In what might be dubbed “The Vagina Dialogues,” she has enlisted old women to pressure young women into electing an old woman to the presidency. Namely, her.

So out trots 81-year-old feminist and former Playboy Bunny Gloria Steinem to endorse Hillary. But Steinem blew it. In a weird time travel back to her bunny days, she blathered that the reason young women are voting for Hillary’s rival, Bernie Sanders, is because, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.”

That was apparently her way of saying that young women, whom she evidently thinks of as “girls,” are too hormone-crazed by those “boys” who are “with Bernie” to think for themselves. So they should instead just let Steinem do their thinking for them.

Maybe voting shouldn’t matter to those young women anyway because when the election is over they’ll be elsewhere. That’s the theory of Hillary’s next endorser. Madeleine Albright, the 78-year-old former secretary of state, who scolded young women that “there’s a special place in hell” for women who don’t vote for Hillary.

Oh well. I’m guessing that Lucifer will be pleased that at least this batch are women and not girls.

That special place might be overbooked before this one is over. In the New Hampshire primary, Bernie received 82 percent of the Democratic votes of women younger than 30. In other primaries, the story was similar if less dramatic.

Let’s face it. Bernie, at 74 years old, is not exactly a beefcake. So how does he make young women feel the Bern?

It’s something that Hillary doesn’t get. Neither does the hormone-crazed octogenarian or Lucifer’s reservations clerk.

Here’s how Bernie does it. It’s with his words. I personally disagree with Bernie’s words, but I give these young women credit. They’re voting for Bernie on the basis of the merit they perceive in him from the words he speaks.

To Hillary’s surprise and annoyance, these young women think that “merit” doesn’t mean “gender.” They think “merit” means “merit.”

In an age when colleges teach that “woman” doesn’t really mean “woman,” that’s refreshing. Maybe these young women learned something in those colleges despite what they were taught there.

Hillary has good reason to conflate merit with gender. It’s because she’s sorely lacking in merit, especially on women’s issues. She rode the name and coattails of her husband into high politics — the same husband who has been accused of sexual misconduct. Her response to those accusations was to cover up and enable his predation while character-assassinating his alleged victims.

Want a dialogue, Hillary? Maybe your dialogue should be with Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky, for starters.

As if that isn’t bad enough, now the FBI and the State Department — both headed by appointees of a Dem president — are investigating whether she spilled classified information by conducting all her State Department business on an unsecure home computer. The FBI also is investigating whether Hillary’s tax-exempt foundation was a front for receiving bribes.

Hillary and her old cronies tell young women to forget all that. Because vaginas.

Young women aren’t buying it. They know that the highest goal of the feminist movement is not to favor women over men. It is to ensure that everyone is evaluated on his or her merit. Feminism isn’t about matriarchy, but meritocracy.

Hillary’s manipulation of that movement and perversion of that goal to advance her own raw personal ambitions has backfired.

That’s good for women and good for America.

Published Mar. 19, 2016 in the Aspen Times at http://www.aspentimes.com/opinion/21188531-113/beaton-the-hillary-dialogues (under title “The Hillary Dialogs”)