Barbara Boxer, crass and classless

Certainly not the woman's touch from the insufferable Barbara Boxer. It must be the California charm.

January 12, 2007 -- Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, an appalling scold from California, wasted no time yesterday in dragging the debate over Iraq about as low as it can go - attacking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for being a childless woman.

Boxer was wholly in character for her party - New York's own two Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, were predictably opportunistic - but the Golden State lawmaker earned special attention for the tasteless jibes she aimed at Rice.

Rice appeared before the Senate in defense of President Bush's tactical change in Iraq, and quickly encountered Boxer.

"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price," Boxer said. "My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young."

Then, to Rice: "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family."

Breathtaking.

Simply breathtaking.

We scarcely know where to begin.

The junior senator from California apparently believes that an accomplished, seasoned diplomat, a renowned scholar and an adviser to two presidents like Condoleezza Rice is not fully qualified to make policy at the highest levels of the American government because she is a single, childless woman.

It's hard to imagine the firestorm that similar comments would have ignited, coming from a Republican to a Democrat, or from a man to a woman, in the United States Senate. (Surely the Associated Press would have put the observation a bit higher than the 18th paragraph of a routine dispatch from Washington.)

Yes, if it was a story about a Republican dressing down a female Democrat, we know that all hell would break loose, wouldn't it?