Starting off with the biography of a fictional female version of Obama (i.e., lawyer, mother of two, inspirational voice for national unity), she asks, "Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?"

This made me think of another, strangely similar story: lawyer, mother of one, married down to a poor white-trash kid from Arkansas, and with nothing aside from experience as helpmate to his long trek out of obscurity, and barely more than one term of her own in the US Senate, she tries to run for President.

To think that such a woman could ever make it to the primaries, let alone set the pace as an early leader and make herself the "to-beat" candidate for her rivals! Ridiculous, isn't it?

(Not to mention a lawyer, mother — while a law student even! — and clerk who has the audacity to seek a Supreme Court position — or an Italian grandmother trying for Speaker of the House! Ha ha ha! What a laugh.)

But Steinem isn't content with showing us how the sexism of her more active years is so unchanged and so monolithic that there's no way that Hillary Clinton (or Ginsburg or Pelosi) could exist today. She also needs to tell us that race is definitely lower than sex in the hierarchy of oppression:

Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot ...

And nothing, surely, during that half-century or indeed the half-century that followed after could suggest that black men in America were anything but blissfully content about the ease and physical safety with which they could cast their votes and participate in public discourse. Nobody was disenfranchised, beaten, tortured, mutilated, hung, or burned. In fact their experience was a perfect foreshadowing of the uneventful integration of women into American political life in the 1920s.

In all seriousness, Gloria Steinem may be one of those people whose tremendous past work entitles her to a certain amount of nodding and smiling when, in old age, they start rambling — but this is beyond the pale.

If she had stuck to a more closely argued point about message — women in politics have to project toughness while their male counterparts "get" to project softness — maybe she could have retained that privilege.

Instead, it's almost as if Steinem is pissed because Obama cut in line. He gets to skip past all of Clinton's hard work and good-girl diligence — isn't that just like a boy? — and straight to the front of the pack. Steinem doesn't consider that he did so for exactly the same reason that Clinton has had to work so hard in the first place — he literally earned his place at the table through a single feat of oratory and a single round of fundraising which were by themselves beyond anything Clinton has ever been, or likely will ever be, able to achieve. At her best she's an adequate public speaker, and she sincerely doesn't like the new grassroots and never will. It's a testament to the fact that she really is a strong, disciplined campaigner — in addition to being a sharp policymaker — that she's doing as well as she is.

No pretending to be tough is necessary for Clinton, as hard as it may be for a second-waver like Steinem to accept. If anything, Obama has had to prove that he's as tough as she is before people started to take him seriously.

I can almost see Anthony Burgess writing it:

So that night me droogettes and me, we queued up the glorious Ninth, Ludwig Van, on endless glorious autorepeat. And then we were fit, my friends, for a bit of the old ultravoltage ...

What would be great is if you could have it be a taser and iPod simultaneously — so that while frying some creep you also condition him (or her, I suppose) to cringe whenever he hears whatever track you happened to have been listening to.

The real problem with carrying any weapon around is, of course, that you've now introduced a weapon into whatever altercation you find yourself in — and there's no guarantee that you'll be the one to use it. The only (relative) assurance there is who's bigger, faster, or more prepared — of which only the last is within the realm of possibility for most women.

Personally I would rather be unarmed than armed and untrained. People in the latter category — men as well as women — have a tendency to end up on the receiving end of their own weapons.

On the other hand, by the same token a taser might be just the thing for dealing with would-be "date rape," where your adversary is presumably alone and himself unarmed.

That right-wing/establishment-media edifice is an incomparably destructive alliance -- and their tactics incomparably toxic -- no matter who their current target happens to be.

Amen and hallelujah. Expect "revelations" about Barack Obama that involve drugs (especially cocaine), criminal connections, sexual promiscuity, and basically anything else that will elicit visceral racist stereotypes (laziness? the use of black vernacular? I don't even know — whatever it is, they'll try it).

That's not to say that Obama is crippled by these things, any more than anyone else (including Edwards — think of all the jokes about ambulance-chasing lawyers). Let's just not read too much into what the conservative machine says about itself.