Hillary Clinton makes 'history'

Meanwhile, actress Meryl Streep did an impromptu send-up of Donald Trump.

It's historic and, like all history, somehow it has already been consigned to the rear-view mirror: Hillary Clinton, wife of former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state, is now officially the Democratic candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She is the first woman ever to have attained that status. She is also likely to win the election itself, given the frothy, self-centered vitriol of her opponent, real estate salesman Donald Trump.

Clinton has all the magnetism and snap of celery stalks inadvertently left out on the kitchen cutting board for three days. She bores and annoys almost as many people as she excites. If only someone had remembered to put her in some political fridge. But she is a woman and a woman candidate for president and the likely next president of the United States. Women of a certain age and capacity to remember may rejoice, but younger women ... well, of course there would be a woman president.

Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont whose supporters and detractors alike seem incapable of looking up the word "socialist," is licking his wounds today in the wake of a shellacking in California's primary vote. Sanders has wowed the crowds. Now he has lost in his bid to be the Democratic candidate. How will he speak to his ardent fan base? It doesn't much matter. Hillary won.