Free Republic

Kate Mulvey, 51, says she wakes in the night terrified no man will want her. Claudia Connell, 48, is glad she didn't end up with the wrong man. Melissa Kite, 43, is convinced being unmarried by choice is a growing trend. Can a spinster ever be truly happy or fulfilled without a man or children in her life? This is being furiously debated after the publication of Kate Bolick’s controversial new book, which argues that modern singletons are actually content with their lot. But is the author of Spinster: Making A Life Of One’s Own deluded — or on to...

Even though Kate Bolick makes a solid case for older women on their own, the tropes and mindsets of the past are hard to overturn. “You are born, you grow up, and you become a wife.” “But what if it wasn’t this way?” asks Kate Bolick, the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. What if women did not have to worry about getting married, or agonize about when and if it will happen—two questions, Bolick claims, that will hound a young girl into her adult life, regardless of where she was raised, or her religious association. “Men...

I OFTEN wonder what Paddy would think......?

When does a woman go from being single to unmarried? As my friend Carol Lee, a Politico reporter, observes: “It seems like a cruel distinction and terrifying crossover.” Single carries a connotation of eligibility and possibility, while unmarried has that dreaded over-the-hill, out-of-luck, you-are-finished, no-chance implication. An aroma of mothballs and perpetual aunt. Men, generally more favored by nature as they age, can be single at all ages. But often, for women, once you’re 40 or 50, or simply beyond childbearing age, you’re no longer single. You’re unmarried — meaning it isn’t your choice to be alone. There are post-50...

I’m not sure the man who popped off and tweeted that Sonia Sotomayor was a “Latina woman racist” is the best Henry Higgins for the Eliza Doolittle of Alaska. But Newt Gingrich was a professor. And he does know something about pulling yourself up by dragging down others and imploding when you take center stage — both Palin specialties. Besides, he agrees with Sarah — who fretted that her parents and son Trig might be in danger from Obama “death panels” — that we should be very wary about trusting government with end-of-life decisions. So Newt took it upon himself...

Nothing like getting an apology 20 years after the fact. Better late than never, I suppose. But have you ever gotten a heartfelt apology from someone when you were way, way over it? Imagine if your old boyfriend wanted you back, or a snobby classmate apologized at your 20th high school reunion. In this case I'm talking about something far more serious. I'm talking about an event that traumatized an entire generation of single women. I'm talking about the Newsweek article "The Marriage Crunch," published in June 1984. In a line that seemed wildly insensitive even then, the magazine predicted...

Get a load of *this*! Maureen Shroud, is going to be on Larrty King this weekend, and her topic du jour, is: 'Why women make better leades than men." *This* oughta be good for a few chuckles at the warped old frustrated 'harpy in training'. :oD

Maureen Dowd may be living in some kind of undocumented, undiagnosed Persistant Vegetative State. (as a columnist) She smiles, she blinks and sasses Republicans but these may be nothing more than reflexive actions.Her loved ones, how I pity them should indeed consider removing her analytical apparatus. It's on the fritz. Her latest moribound Op-Ed 'Delay, Deny and Demagogue' is worthy of its own piece of emergency legislation. Of it one can only say 'Enough.'Ms. Dowd's invocation of the film 'Weekend at Bernies' (when describing the Schiavo case) is all too typical of her crudity.Her performance during a recent appearance on...

Guest columnist King County voters in good hands By Corky Mattingly Special to The Times I've been particularly troubled by one recurring comment regarding the gubernatorial recount in King County. It pertains to county Elections Director Dean Logan's professionalism and integrity. There also have been suggestions that Logan's decisions are based on partisan politics and are without justification or regard to Washington state law. As president of the Washington State Association of County Auditors, I assure you nothing could be further from the truth. All 39 counties conducted the recount process according to the rules currently in place, which are...

A few years ago at a White House Correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women." I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers. Women in staff support are the new sirens because, as a guy I know put it,...

EXTERIOR BRIDGE OVER POTOMAC RIVER - NIGHT CLOSE SHOT - Rummy is standing by the railing, staring morosely into the water. The snow is falling hard. Feeling a tap on his shoulder, he wheels around and wrestles an old man with wings into a headlock. OLD MAN: Ouch! Tut, tut. When will you learn that force doesn't solve everything? RUMMY: Who the dickens are you? OLD MAN: Clarence, Angel First Class. I've been sent down to help you. RUMMY, squinting: You're off your nut, you old fruitcake. You can't help me. I was a matinee idol in this town, a...

On the first day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree. Not knowing Osama's address, Rummy hastened to 'Potamia - and a mess, exhorting his pal Cheney, "Let's bomb Baghdad again, golly gee!" On the second day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me two dead-ender turtle doves (Colin and Kofi), flowers and chocolates from the ninny Chalabi, and a billion Arabs mad at me. On the third day of Christmas, my Rummy sent to me three French henpeckers and imaginary W.M.D. And 300 tons of lost explosives going BOOM! everywhere. Rummy tried...

If I hear "Frosty the Snowman" one more time, I'll rip his frozen face off. It's a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of "Ring, Christmas Bells" drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates. I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas. Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom...

WASHINGTON — I've been surprised, out on the road, how often I get asked about my family. They're beyond red - more like crimson. My sister flew to West Virginia in October to work a phone bank for W. People often wonder what our Thanksgiving is like.It's lovely - if you enjoy hearing about how brilliant Ann Coulter is, how misguided The New York Times's editorial page is, and how valiant the president is as he tries to stop America's slide into paganism. This year, my brothers were on the warpath about news reports that Maryland public schools did not...

November 14, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST Slapping the Other Cheek By MAUREEN DOWD You'd think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," "good will toward men," "blessed be the peacemakers" and "judge not lest you be judged." Yet somehow I'm not getting a peace, charity, tolerance and forgiveness vibe from the conservatives and evangelicals who claim to have put their prodigal son back in office. I'm getting more the feel of a vengeful mob - revved up by rectitude -...

August 22, 2004OP-ED COLUMNISTKerry: Slo-Mo on SwiftiesBy MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON — It's easy for the Bushes to stay gallant. They delegate the gutter.There are always third-party political assassins, ostensibly independent, to do the dynasty wet work.W.'s old pal and running partner, Lee Atwater, set up the Bush modus operandi: Lay in the weeds while craftily planting plausibly deniable surrogates to slice up your rival.The New Yorker editor David Remnick, writing in Esquire in 1986, limned the 1980 Congressional race in South Carolina's Second District "between Atwater's man, Republican Floyd Spence, and a Faulknerian figure named Tom Turnipseed At one press...

First lady Laura Bush is wildly popular with the American people, but not with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who called her a GOP "attack dog" this week for speaking out on stem cell research. "She's been dragged out to be a Republican attack dog on the most contentious issue, stem cell research, defending her husband's, you know, refusal to use more [stem cell] lines," Dowd told CBS "Early Show" host Hannah Storm while promoting her new book "Bushworld." "I think it's a huge mistake," warned the top Timeswoman. "Laura is this fantastic, nice, Marian-the-librarian-type who was curled up...

WASHINGTON One thing you've got to say for Dick Cheney: No one will ever again dismiss the vice presidency as a pitcher of warm spit. Mr. Major League Potty Mouth has shown that, with obsequiousness to the president and obtuseness to the facts, a vice president can run the world. Right into the ground.This week, it's not just Democrats who are questioning whether Vice is losing it. Now, even some in the White House are saying it's bizarre that he chose a class photo-op on the Senate floor to suggest that Senator Patrick Leahy do something that you won't even...

WASHINGTON Good golly, you knew Rummy wasn't going to pretend to stay contrite for long. Not with lawmakers bugging him about the Pearl Harbor of PR, as Republican Tom Cole called it.The flinty 71-year-old kept it together as John McCain pounced and Hillary prodded. But soon he was once more giving snippy one-word answers to his inquisitors, foisting them on his brass menagerie or biting their heads off himself.By Friday evening, when the delegate from Guam, Madeleine Bordallo, pressed him on whether "quality of life" was an issue in the Abu Ghraib torture cases, you could see Donald-Duck steam coming...

WASHINGTON I wasn't sure how to ask John Kerry, so I just blurted it out: "Is there anything we need to know about your relationship with your father?"I didn't think the country could take another vertiginous ride on the Oedipal tilt-a-whirl. It's hard not to see the Bush unilateral foreign policy — blowing off allies and the U.N. to rewrite the ending of a gulf war his father felt had ended appropriately — as the ultimate act of adolescent rebellion."I know what you're saying," Mr. Kerry murmured.The globe got whipsawed by a father-son relationship so twisty and rife with undercurrents...