Nothing is more boring than listening to some old guy talk about his health problems. Okay, there's a co-worker trying to recount some dream involving volleyball. And there's absolutely anyone trying to explain the plot of their new screenplay. But old guy with health problems, it's right up there.
So, on Wednesday what I thought was a head cold suddenly exploded into raging fever, headache, body ache, hand pains, wrist pains, chest pain, hip pain, knee pain and the world's loudest ringing in my ears. Since then I consumed exactly zero food, gotten zero minutes of sleep and had zero minutes without a lot of unattractive rolling around, sweating and groaning.
The folks at the nearest urgent care pegged me as having a tick-borne illness. Which starts with Lyme and gets more awful from there.
All this is my way of saying that my hair hurts. I know that doesn't sound possible, but it does. Both of them. So this week is going to be super-abbreviatied and may disintegrate into native Kryptonian at any moment. Sorry.
Frank Bruni says that Hillary's best hope for veep is … Anybody. Anybody at all.
I doubt that Hillary Clinton really wants to run with Elizabeth Warren — I doubt that she fully trusts her — but if that’s her calculated decision: mazel tov. They sure were fiery together last week, two blue devils raring to bedevil Donald Trump.
Trusts her? Elizabeth Warren doesn't exactly fly off the handle unpredictably. And it bugs me that the first thing Bruni mentions is the color of their clothing. You can bet if it was Trump and Gingrich the color of their suits wouldn't warrant a mention.
Here’s what we journalists don’t like to tell you or even admit to ourselves as we furiously stir the speculation, breathlessly thicken the suspense and whet Americans’ appetites for the big reveal of who will round out the Democratic and Republican tickets: Its impact on the election is close to nonexistent.
Well, I'll certainly buy the idea that anyone willing to vote for Trump doesn't care about the veep candidates. Or logic. Or the continued existence of Planet Earth.
And I realize that it doesn't matter how merrily voters come to the polls. An unenthusiastic vote for Hillary counts just as much as one delivered with glee. However, the veep can probably leverage a few extra voters off the couch, and this isn't the year to turn down a single one.
Come on in. Let's do at least a couple more.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend on the changing view of women in positions of power.
What is a female candidate supposed to look like? Act like? Be? These are tough questions for Americans to answer, especially when we’re so quick to recycle outmoded gender perceptions when women try to talk to us about why and how they want to lead. As Hillary Clinton prepares to accept the Democratic nomination for president, Americans are long overdue for what George H. W. Bush once contemptuously called “the vision thing.” Only this time it’s about envisioning women as leaders. Why should one more woman have to contend with the conventional daily diet of criticism fed to me as a woman campaigning for political office?
Still thinking on the suit thing. What's been “professional” for men has been pretty locked down for more than a century. It makes it easy for men to hit the target, but doesn't that strike anyone as odd.
The first feature article on me after I was elected lieutenant governor of Maryland criticized me for not wearing rouge (in reality it was there, just faded); the second one castigated me for wearing flats. From then on I wore heels despite the backache they gave me.
Go read to rest of this, if only so you can get to the taxi driver with Hillary fantasies. And did I mention someone has scooped out my eyes and replaced then with red hot stones? I think we're about done.
Kathleen Parker wonders if Bill didn't get Hillary haters the perfect fuel for their narrative.
No sooner is Hillary Clinton poised to win the nomination of the Democratic Party — and, quite possibly, the presidency — than big ol’ goofy Bill trips all over himself to make this outcome more difficult.
He just can’t help himself, or so it seems. How else can one explain his private conversation with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the midst of the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal server for email that included classified information?
Parker thinks Bill has an unconscious desire to sabotage his wife. My take away from this incident is different—I'm worried about Bill. Lately it's seemed that he has a tendency to boil over fast, to find offense even where it's not meant, and to act first, think never. For a guy both as extremely smart and politically savvy as Bill Clinton, it's s notable change. Plus the guy just looks so thin. I know, vegan now, and maybe it's just that I feel so cruddy myself. But I'm worried about Bill.
Nancy Isenberg does some myth busting on the subject of class in America.
Trump is often credited with engaging the working class. He “won with the working class voters the GOP forgot,” blared one Breitbart column. Meanwhile, “Hillary is losing white working Joes,” proclaimed the Toronto Star. Even Sanders argued that Democrats had allowed Republicans “to capture the votes of the majority of working people in this country.” ...
Of course, that’s true only if you ignore Asians, Latinos and African Americans. “Factor them into the population of ‘working people,’ ” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “and Democrats win that group, handily."
... Americans are more optimistic about their chances of getting ahead than people in other places. But in reality, it’s harder to rise above your class in the United States than in just about any other developed country; economic mobility is much more possible in places like Japan, Germany and Australia. Socialist author Michael Harrington captured this devastating reality in his 1962 book “The Other America”: The poor were poor, he wrote, because “they made the mistake of being born to the wrong parents.”
This is a really nice article to bookmark for future reference. It's also a good one if you want disturbing quotes from the Founding Fathers, like Hamilton cheering for child labor and Jefferson tying class to “blood."
And … I'm done. If I work up the energy in the next couple of hours, I'll add more, but I invite you to nominate columns you’ve spotted this week. And remember: The deer tick is not your friend.