I don't know enough derogatory words to express the full depth of my disgust with Maureen Dowd, who each week manages singlehandedly to undermine the reputation of the New York Times as a serious newspaper. She has consistently ridiculed Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and now her target is Barack Obama. Often her cringe-worthy columns seem suitable only for the psychiatrist's office in a loony bin.

In her biography, she has expressed her conviction that intelligent men don't marry brilliant women like herself, and she reserves special venom for any man or woman who casts doubt on her belief (all Democratic presidential candidates and their spouses).

Not having Hillary to lambaste every week seems to be causing a total breakdown. In Sunday's New York Times, Dowd
has surpassed herself, using my and many women's favorite novel, Pride and Prejudice, as her weapon of ridicule:

I need to make a confession. I am not wholeheartedly a  Hillary supporter or an Obama supporter. I voted for Hillary in the New York primary, and I am working hard and voting for Obama in November.  Ending the slaughter in Iraq is my absolute priority.

I am a lifetime member of the War Resisters League, a sixties  radical who never recanted. I love the song "Universal Soldier" and Phil Ochs's "I Ain't Marching Anymore."  If we had a draft, there would not have been an Iraq War.

When I have attended African American churches, I am always horrified by the number of former congregants who have died in Iraq. The voluntary army has offered better opportunities to  African Americans than American society as a whole, so they too often fight our wars for us and die in much greater numbers.

Shouldn't progressives question a "voluntary" army? Why not fight genuine life-and-death battles against racism, instead of absurd battles against an ally like the New Yorker?  Of course, I am asking a rhetorical question to which we all know the answer. The anti-Vietnam Movement only got started when white middle-class college students could no longer get graduate-school deferments.

I would be glad to offer my draft counseling skills. I wonder how many people have personally known a conscientious objector?

This is probably against the rules, but I slightly rewrote this diary to tone down my intellectual arrogance, which was excessive and rightly criticized. Extremism in the defense of my favorite magazine, while understandable, is lamentable. I apologize to my critical commenters, but I took them seriously.

When people in Europe asked where I come from, I always say I am a New Yorker; I never say I am an American. I have read and loved the New Yorker every week since I was 15 (1960). I laughed at the cover, just as I laugh at most of their politically satirical covers and cartoons. This artist has done several excellent ones. Admittedly this is not one of his best.

What would be funny if it wasn't so offensively pathetic was the reaction of the Obama campaign and Obama supporters. Obama must read the New Yorker. He spent at least 7 years in New York City and Cambridge, which must have the highest proportion of New Yorker subscribers in the world. If Obama were truly the consummate pol the inside article claims he is, he would have laughed and thanked the artist for doing more to combat the absurd rumors about him than the campaign had managed in 18 months. Instead, the New Yorker cover is going to be today's major story, and the more outraged Obama supporters are, the sillier they seem.

I devoutly pray every child and teen in America requests a New Yorker subscription for their birthday. Then no child would be left behind. If political cartoons are not offensive, they are no good.  When I was in high school, a regular  essay question on the New York regents given to all high school students depicted  a politically satirical cartoon from some period of American history and ask the student to explain it. I loved those questions, but they were extremely challenging. They can use this one.

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, gave an interview to the Huffington Post. I urge you to read it.

My first specific political memory centered around the duck-and -cover, hide-under-our-desks, exercises that were a regular feature of my early school life from age 5 on. I knew enough about nuclear war to be terrified. We lived one mile away from an air force base, and I used to go out to the backyard, look up at the planes, and try to determine if they were American or Russian. What I thought I could do about it, I don't remember. I even checked a book out of the library on aircraft identification. When I heard Joseph Stalin died when I was 7, I remember asking if that meant no one would drop atom bombs on us.

In 1954, when I was 9, I had a severe case of the measles and my Grandma Nolan came to help nurse me.  My eyes hurt so much I had to stay in a darkened room and couldn't read. Grandma was listening to the Joseph McCarthy army hearings. Hatred of McCarthy's voice might have shaped my entire political development. In 1956, just turning eleven, I fell madly in love with Jack Kennedy as he made an unsuccessful bid for the vice presidential nomination. A good catholic schoolgirl, I was initially attracted by his Catholicism; ten minutes later I was smitten by his intelligence, wit, and charm. I was luckier than his other women. Loving Jack Kennedy was good for me.. From 1956 to 1963, I read everything I could about Kennedy, politics,  and American History. I read the newspaper from cover to cover daily.  

When I was 15 I did volunteer work for his presidential campaign. In high school we had political debates to imitate the famous Kennedy/Nixon debates, and I represented Kennedy. What he believed in, I believed in. Gradually I moved to the left of his pragmatic liberalism. Kennedy was responsible for my decision to major in political science in college and graduate school. Kennedy's assassination, occurring in the fall of my freshman year in college, devastated me. I felt like there had been a death in my immediate family. I quickly transferred my political allegiance to Bobby Kennedy.

Clinton should disassociate herself from the PUMAs, defending her former supporters who are following her advice to work their hearts out for Obama. Clinton supporters who immediately started to work for Obama seem to be  targeted by  some PUMA  trolls on our blogger blogs as cowardly traitors. The anonymous attacks on me removed from the Clintonista for Obama blog were revolting and ageist, implying I was too close to the grave to have a right to political advocacy, that I desperately needed, but would never get, a man, that they laughed themselves sick at my profile.

Given that these personal attacks on me echoed the attacks made by the media and progressive blogs against older Hillary supporters, I have to wonder who those anonymous hit-and-run attackers truly were.  Are they truly Hillary supporters or an army of Karl Roves in disguise?  Is it completely unfair to associate them with genuine PUMAS? The whole mess is heartbreaking. I certainly understand where the PUMA people are coming from. I just have to reread all my letters to my daughters and sons-in-law for the last year. I was totally demoralized that they were all supporting Obama and repeating all the right-wing Hillary demonizing that had now been adopted by too many progressive blogs.

I had dedicated 30 years of my life to nonsexist childrearing of 4 daughters, and now I was discovering they probably weren't feminists and couldn't recognize sexism and misogyny. They had splendid educations and excellent jobs, so they hadn't experienced much discrimination. However, after a year of mothering, my oldest daughter realizes we don't live in a postfeminist era. Two more daughters are becoming mothers this year, so they will be similarly enlightened. There is nothing like discovering you might make $100,000 plus, but are still expected to pump breastmilk in a toilet to raise your consciousness.

I rewrote this post. Apparently the term "troll" originated in the 16th century to describe political debate and insult in London coffee houses. The term is thrown about too loosely. When I was active in bipolar listservs in the mid-1990s, a troll was a despicable person who joined the group pretending to be bipolar. He often set people against each other, preyed on the vulnerabilities of achingly vulnerable people, pretended to be in crisis, etc. We all knew what the word meant. Who knows what it means in political debate? In my first weeks on mybarackobama, I was accused of being a troll daily. Anyone capable of rational debate is not a troll. We all get intellectually lazy about explaining our principles and policies. It does us good to be challenged.

Parents learn to ignore obnoxious toddler or preschool behavior rather than to make a big fuss about it. Why don't you ignore the people that you consider trolls, don't bother rating their diaries and comments, don't comment on their diaries nor respond to their comments, don't impose timeouts. Concentrate on writing your own diaries

When my oldest daughter was 1 and 2, she pulled hair and dumped sand on people's heads. I finally realized that she wasn't inherently vicious; she just adored uproar. Her criminal behavior only occurred in the presence of parents absolutely guaranteed to go round the twist. She stopped eating sand when her pediatrician looked her in the eyes and told her how important it was to eat enough sand daily to stay healthy.

Real trolls love uproar. If you enjoy the insult game, you can't complain about your comrades in insult being trolls because you obviously relish uproar as well.

Here is what the devil child is doing now.
http://www.ipacademy.org/about-ipi/peopl e/vanessa-hawkins-wyeth

She no longer eats sand, although she has spent a suspiciously long time in African deserts unobserved by me. So there might be hope for trolls and the troll accusers.

From time to time I will explore the danger that gifted, creative children, often misfits in our regimented society, are being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, and threatened with a lifetime of dangerous medications and social stigma. Having that dire diagnosis imposed on you at age 6 severely compromises your ability to lead a normal life, marry, have children, go to college, have a career. How would you have reacted if you were told you had a broken brain at age 6?

Twenty years ago, psychiatry believed that bipolar disorder strikes in the late teens, that it was impossible to diagnose children or adolescents. Now psychiatrists occasionally diagnose bipolar disorder in four year olds, after too brief examination. Is diagnosing kids as bipolar an unthinking way to squelch kids who are divergent thinkers, who think too fast, talk too fast, get bored too easily in our increasing test-oriented schools?

Are other countries undergoing the same childhood bipolar epidemic or is this an American phenomena? When and how was the supposed of epidemic of childhood bipolar disorder suddenly discovered? How many of the early pioneers were funded by drug companies? Have any longitudinal studies been done, comparing the life trajectory of kids diagnosed and medicated and of kids whose parents refuse medication? Is there any evidence that kids diagnosed as bipolar grow up to be adults with bipolar disorder?

I was very active in the feminist movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although I described myself as a radical feminist, I always had serious misgivings. I explore them in this journal entry from October 1971. I have not edited it, because it gives a snapshot of a particular point in time. At the time I was a happily married woman working as an Editing Supervisor at Basic Books, which pubished social science and psychiatric books.

Are men necessarily the enemies? Adopting that logic, couldn't women be categorized as the enemies? Must there be an enemy? Must the movement have a scapegoat? There is a danger of generalizing for all women from a few women's (typical, atypical) experience with men. Perhaps most men are baffled rather than hostile. They have been socialized to believe the myths, so they do believe them. Why does the movement assume that their motives are vicious?

Perhaps the myths are harsher than the realities. Individual women are treated better and respected more than social mythology about women dictates. The movement shouldn't present what seems to be a fatal choice: true autonomy or loving, intimate relationships with men. If all men are despaired of, shouldn't most women be despaired of? Have women tried hard enough to explain themselves? Or would they rather renounce men than fight through to an accommodation?