I must admit the primordial male in me is having a little trouble coping with all the gushing over ‘the first female Speaker of the House.’ It seems to me we are having another pop-culture moment – a media feeding frenzy not as intense as like Tom Cruise’s wedding or Angelina Jolie’s baby – but intense enough to make us feel like we should all fall over in a swoon because Mrs. Pelosi is a woman. It is as if there has been a great secular triumph of the glorious sisterhood over the dark side of the force.

All this high-flown rhetoric about the eyes of two hundred years of history being riveted on the first female Speaker was leaving me certain I must be a troglodyte, until I asked a woman how she felt about Nancy Pelosi. She shrugged and said, Well, she’s Bella Abzug without the hat.

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