The Burrow

Ruth Bader Ginsburg.... Notorious RBG.... Cornellian.... Supreme Court Justice.... and, according to the presumptive Republican nominee, a woman whose mind is shot . Hillary Rodham Clinton.... Democratic nominee (no one seems to feel the need to include presumptive).... Wellesley and Yale alumna....  Secretary of State, First Lady, Senator... and the woman whose Google search with her name and shrill  brings up 281,000 results. What is wrong with these females, anyhow?  Why can't they keep their opinions to themselves?  Did they never learn manners? I am so fed up with this line of argument.  I find myself screeching at my car radio.  I really thought we were past this. If shrill doesn't define Donald Trump, I don't know what does, but words like bluster and pompous are used to describe him.  Shrill is a girl word  in the way that Mr. 13 explained that " slut can't be for a boy, Mom, because it's a girl word."   Perhaps a female pr...

Every time I think about either one of them being in the Oval Office, I get a little nauseous.  But, like P. J. O'Rourke , I think that she is #WrongWithinNormalParameters  and so I'm #Settling4Hillary . She is evil, but so much less evil than he is, that I will hold my nose and vote for her, much as I voted for Ralph Nader and John Anderson :  because the process matters.  None of the John Anderson or Ralph Nader opponents terrified me, so I could afford to let my ballot convey my outrage. 2016 is different. Trump is an impossible choice for me; his divisiveness, his misogyny, his refusal to take responsibility for his own actions stop me before I even consider the fact that he's not proposed a single real plan. Building a great wall, standing shoulder to shoulder with the NRA (haven't heard him renewing his pledge to change their thinking on Can't Fly/Can't Buy), replacing ObamaCare with something better.   He won't say what he's going to do on for...

I got goose bumps when she came on stage after the voting ended.  Oh, so did I.   When I read Maryellen Bess's comment on today's post , I realized that no one else had said that to me all day. TBG opined that Barack Obama stole some of Hillary's thunder by getting there first , but the sight of a viable female candidate for the Presidency smiling on the screen had all the little hairs on my arms standing at attention Tuesday night.   I was struck by the moment.  I'm not a big Hillary fan, but that didn't matter.  Watching her smile and send love and receive love and noticing that the reporters were letting the moment speak for itself all combined to fill my heart.  It was history, and I was watching it.  I found myself placing the image in my permanent memory bank. She was so radiant. I took that image with me as I left the house, but no one was talking about it.  Not at the Happy Ladies' Club luncheon, not at my massage, not o...

I've tried to write this five different times.  I've had Madam President and Random Thoughts on a Tuesday  and Living History  and Seriously, Speaker Ryan?  as titles.  I've tried to stay away from the talking heads.  I've tried sitting in front of the talking heads. My head is spinning. I loved Shirley Chisholm's run for the Presidency.  I haven't been thrilled with Hillary Clinton's campaign.  But Ms Chisholm never got past the Convention in 1974 and Mrs. Clinton is about to take to the airwaves and talk about becoming the Democratic Candidate for President of the United States. Somewhere, Susan B. Anthony is smiling. My grandpa thought I would be President; I wonder what Hillary's grandfather thought about her possibilities. Being a realist, I never thought it was a possibility. I've often wondered if Hillary hitched her wagon to Bill's because she didn't think the country would accept her as The Most Powerful Person in the World. ...

Watching Donald Trump march toward the Presidency scares me beyond description.  His vituperative nature cannot be the face of America, at least not my America.  But every time I hear him call Hillary a crook, I remember why I've never been one of Mrs. Clinton's biggest fans . Those in the know report a disturbing lack of enthusiasm for her, without citing specifics about the why's.   There's none of the energy surrounding Sen. Sanders, whose resume is certainly less impressive than the former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State. I've been relying on those qualifications to secure her a seat in the Oval Office.  Watching Trump advance despite predictions to the contrary, I'm beginning to wonder if enthusiasm resulting in a less qualified Democrat might be preferable to voters staying home and a narcissist winning by default. Can I be feeling the Bern, just a little? Can I toss aside the fact that he is flat out wrong on guns, that Hillary is a woma...

When I was little, my Grandpa told me that I could be anything I wanted to be.   "This one," he told my parents, "this one will go far. Even to the White House." Patiently, I explained to him that there were three very good reasons I never could become President: I was poor, I was Jewish, I was a woman. Poor is still an issue, were I to run for public office.  The only way Michael Bloomberg can say that he'll join the candidates if Trump and Sanders are the winners is because Michael Bloomberg wants to die broke, and he has $33 Billion to burn through before that happens.  He's the 8th richest person in the USofA .  That might trump the fact that he is a Jew. I've enjoyed this election season immensely, for no reason other than the fact of Bernie Sanders's religion has not been the subject of a single editorial, op ed, news report, or protest... at least that I have seen.  He looks like all my Jewish great-uncles. His repartee is straight from...

It's official.  She's running. The campaign office is open, the bumper stickers are on sale, the promises and position papers and invitations to meet-and-greets and fundraisers will begin to flood the mailbox and the inbox and the airwaves. There will be a familiar female face on everything - and that certainly will be different. FlapJilly will never know that a woman cannot run for President, as I knew it when I was a child. When my grandpa told me that I would grow up to be President, I laughed at him.  "I'm poor, I'm Jewish, and I'm female," I said.  "Those are three permanent strikes against me." Not so much, any more, it seems.  At least as far as gender is concerned. Girls who grew up with all the accessibility Title IX provided have no frame of reference for the magnitude of this announcement.  They were never faced with the closed doors their mothers bumped into whenever a promotion or an opportunity arose. Little Cuter begged...

President Obama is doing a lot of thinking about Afghanistan this week. To prove it, NBC Nightly News just ran a picture of him sitting at the head of a long table, in his shirtsleeves, surrounded by Cabinet members and the Veep and lots of paper. There wasn't a laptop in sight. The President was the youngest person in the shot by a bunch of years. He's drinking a bottle of water; Hillary's a Coke girl. Not Diet Coke. Regular, full strength classic Coca-Cola. That's one of the few things I think she gets right. I really hope they recycle at the White House. Otherwise, they're setting a very bad example for our nation. In another conversation on Afghanistan this afternoon, Campbell Brown couldn't believe that the President was " considering separating the Taliban and al Quaeda. I mean, can you do that ?" Um.... yes, Campbell. One is a repressive, hateful-to-women political force with no ambitions beyond its own borders. The other is a terror...