Cokie Roberts – the award-winning journalist and author – died a few days ago of complications from breast cancer. I don’t wish that death upon anyone, and having had several breast cancer scares of my own, and having gone through the experience with my mother, I am more than upset that we still haven’t kicked this disease’s ass.

Journalist Linda Ellerbee is also upset. She’s upset that she and Cokie Roberts came up together in the business, were both the same age when Roberts passed, and both got breast cancer. Ellerbee has lost her friend to this disease, so I can understand her rage. What I don’t get is that apparently, once again it’s all the fault of the BADORANGEMAN.

You see, Ellerbee and Roberts began their careers together, and to hear Ellerbee describe it, women journalists in the 70s were back-benchers who didn’t always get the best stories. Although women generally didn’t rise to the highest of echelons in journalism back then, Roberts didn’t suffer from that setback, and was referred to as one of NPR’s “founding mothers.” But Ellerbee is intent on portraying Cokie Roberts as a fellow fighter who had to overcome those challenges, instead of a privileged child of two US Congressional representatives, who led a pretty charmed life doing what she loved.

Instead of honoring her friend, Ellerbee decided to focus on the struggle in her commentary on CNN. Struggle for what, might you ask? It certainly isn’t the struggle for equality for women in the journalism field. Instead, Ellerbee chose to portray Cokie Roberts as a crusader for abortion, which she squeals is every woman’s right, and breast cancer, which she claims has somehow been ignored by the government because it’s primarily a woman’s disease.

The Congressional discussions over the Hyde Amendment, which is what Ellerbee and Cokie Roberts were covering for NBC News and NPR respectively when they first met, prohibits tax dollars from funding abortions. It “will not prevent women from getting legal abortions,” Ellerbee acquiesces. “It will merely prevent poor women from getting them.”

Except not really. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only about one-fourth of women who would have Medicaid-funded abortions give birth when this funding is unavailable. So Ellerbee’s and Cokie Roberts’ alleged struggle to end the plight of poor women, which prevents them from killing their children, wasn’t really much of a fight.

Ellerbee then proceeds to imply that misogyny in the government is really the reason for a lack of funding for breast cancer research, and that the battle against breast cancer somehow took a step back since BADORANGEMAN infested the White House.

In the first decade of the 21st century Cokie got breast cancer, which would claim her life Tuesday. I had breast cancer in the last decade of the 20th century. We spoke about that too, wondered if the fact the government spent so little money on breast cancer studies and treatment might have something to do with the fact that breast cancer was primarily a woman’s disease.

[…]

And maybe that was our theme song over the years. We saw women make gains. We saw those gains taken back. One step forward, two steps back. Bow to the left. Bow to the right. Smile, ladies.

The implication here is that ORANGEMANBAD and has cut government funding for breast cancer research.

Except not really.

According to the National Cancer Institute budget fact book, breast cancer gets more funding than any other cancer, including AIDS, leukemia, prostate cancer and lung cancer, despite the fact that cancer mortality is higher among men than women.

Today fewer women are dying of breast cancer, and deaths attributed to the disease have been dropping nearly 2 percent every year over the past decade.

So Trump did not preside over any kind of reduction in breast cancer research. If anything, said research saw a roughly $25 million boost in funding in fiscal 2017 from the previous year.

But Ellerbee seems to have this pathological need to be a victim.

She seems to have an obsession with protesting and fighting and portraying herself as this courageous warrior in the war on… something.

Cokie Roberts died. She was a journalist and a role model to many aspiring female journalists. Yes, she was a liberal, and no, that’s not exactly uncommon in the field. But Cokie Roberts was kind, inquisitive, and intelligent, and, as Quin Hillyer writes in the Washington Examiner, “held tightly to old-school standards of professionalism and personal decency.”

But instead of paying homage to her supposed friend, Linda Ellerbee writes to elevate herself to the status of warrior and hero on the back of her dead pal.

She’s still fighting the same battle, Ellerbee claims. “I’M 75 YEARS OLD AND I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M STILL PROTESTING THIS SAME CRAP!” she screams, claiming that in 2019 women are somehow walking ten steps behind men and “being told to go out into the hall.” I guess Ellerbee has forgotten the achievements of women as diverse, intelligent, successful, and powerful as Oprah Winfrey, Ivanka Trump, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, IBM’s Ginny Rometty, Kellyanne Conway, and scores of others who have made it big.

She’s still protesting this same crap?

Maybe Linda Ellerbee needs a cookie and a Thorazine drip.

Featured image: Cokie Roberts at the LBJ Presidential Library, Wikimedia Commons in the public domain.