"Obama or Hillary? In the Meantime There's Iraq"

Mona Gable:

So Hillary finally announced and did so in the most politically astute way possible. In a face-to-face with Americans on her cozy new website. No surprise there. The 14-year-old anticipated this development days ago after Obama used the Internet to announce his presidential bid.

As teenagers love to do she immediately put me on the spot.
"Which would you rather have? The first black president or the first woman president?" she asked in the car on the way to school. Oh, great! I thought. Just what we need. Another political junkie in the house obsessed with polling and fundraising numbers.

Still, that Catholic girls' school she goes to must be doing something right if she's this attuned to national politics. The 16-year-old couldn't care less. Except to make intentionally sexist comments to bug his sister and me to the effect that women aren't qualified to be president. Needless to say his Internet privileges have been revoked until he sees the light.

As for the question, I told my daughter that I didn't like either candidate and was leaning toward funny man Tom Tancredo. (Hey Tom! You think Miami's bad. You should see how Third World my neighborhood mall in LA is!) What I actually told her was that the idea of having either a black or a woman president is so thrilling and wildly unexpected given the right-wing hold on this country the last six years that I couldn't begin to pick one over the other. And that I'll have to see how Hillary and Obama and the other candidates contend with the issues, especially Bush and his insane escalation of the war in Iraq.

Perhaps you didn't notice because of the fuss over Hillary and Obama this week, but there were two other milestones: the deaths of 25 American soldiers in Iraq a single day, and the 500th amputee to check in to the amputee center at Walter Army Reed Army Medical Center. The army didn't release his name, but they did say he was a 24-year-old corporal. Both his legs were blown off by a roadside bomb.

I wonder who he'll be voting for in 2008?