Paglia on Palin

Camille Paglia, the smartest fool in the nation, opposes Sarah Palin's politics but is excited by what she represents. In her most recent Salon essay she she talks about Palin and how her selection has affected the presidential race.

It's heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain -- that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won't die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces.

Oh, the sadomasochistic tedium of McCain's imprisonment in Hanoi being told over and over and over again at the Republican convention. Do McCain's credentials for the White House really consist only of that horrific ordeal? Americans owe every heroic, wounded veteran an incalculable debt of gratitude, but how do McCain's sufferings in a tiny, squalid cell 40 years ago logically translate into presidential aptitude in the 21st century? Cast him a statue or slap his name on a ship, and let's turn the damned page.

We need a new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision -- which is why I support Barack Obama and have contributed to his campaign. My baby-boom generation -- typified by the narcissistic Clintons -- peaked in the 1960s and is seriously past it. But McCain, born before Pearl Harbor, is even older than we are! Why would anyone believe that he holds the key to the future? And why would anyone swallow that preening passel of high-flown rhetoric about "country above all" coming from a seething, short-fused character whose rampant egotism, zigzagging principles, and currying of the gullible press were the distinguishing marks of his senatorial career?

Taking her points in order. McCain's suffering in the Hanoi Hilton matter because they show his character. John McCain put on his country's uniform and went to war. He was captured and refused early release - this demonstrates his honor Camille, a strange and alien concept to leftists.

McCain was tortured beyond the limits of human endurance, yet he was not shattered by the experience - this demonstrates his inner strength, something leftists have a hard time understanding because left-wing "values" represent the headlong flight from personal responsibility.

McCain emerged from his experience with a renewed and deepened sense of patriotism and love of his nation - something the left would have difficulty understanding because to them patriotism seems to be defined as a profound sense of dissatisfaction with one's nation, at least if that nation is the United States.

Next Paglia says, "We need a new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision. . .". Why? Why do we need "fresh ideas" when the BEST ideas about government ever in the entire history of the world were those of our founders? What, exactly and specifically, are Obama's "fresh ideas" anyway? All I hear from him is the same tired old liberal shibboleths the I've been hearing all my life. Obama wants to raise taxes and grow government and diminish personal liberty (to do anything other than murder your own offspring). He wants to throw money at useless rat-hole social programs which always make the groups they claim to be helping worse off for their efforts.

Obama wants to drastically reduce America's military power and emasculate our foreign policy in order to make us more like Old Europe, despite the fact that Europe is free today only because they were made free and kept free by the United States.

Obama wants to grovel and abase himself, on behalf of the United States, before each and every one of our enemies out of the belief that they would not hate us if we were just not so hateful.

In every way which counts an Obama administration would be a second term for Jimmy Carter - new and fresh indeed.

Then Paglia asks, "But McCain, born before Pearl Harbor, is even older than we are! Why would anyone believe that he holds the key to the future?" Because, Camille, when you find that you've taken a wrong turn down a dead-end road you have to turn around and go back. Once you have gone back to the place where you made the wrong turn then you can decide the best way to go forward. America has taken several wrong turns. The first was during the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. The next was during the New Deal and then the Great Society of LBJ. All of these errors represent creeping socialism and before we can truly move forward as a society we need to undo these mistakes. That is why the left has absolutely nothing to offer except further "progress" down a road to nowhere.

Paglia stands on somewhat firmer ground when she criticizes McCain's conduct as a Senator:

And why would anyone swallow that preening passel of high-flown rhetoric about "country above all" coming from a seething, short-fused character whose rampant egotism, zigzagging principles, and currying of the gullible press were the distinguishing marks of his senatorial career?

This is why I did not support McCain during the primaries and would not have voted for him absent his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate. McCain's constant playing to the liberal media was the most damnable thing about him. However he is getting a lesson in the character of the media right now as he fights off their attacks upon himself and Governor Palin. It is my hope that his "short fuse" will begin to burn against those MSM hacks who he had thought of as his friends.

Oh, and the media was not "gullible" when it came to McCain. They knew exactly what they were doing. McCain had an "R" next to his name but could be counted upon to trash the Republican party in terms which would be comfortable to the left. The media built up McCain because they are part of the left-wing establishment and their enemies are conservatives and Republicans. McCain helped them fight their enemies and so they pretended to like him.

Paglia then lists some of the mistakes which Obama has made. First and foremost is this:

"What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren's public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California?

Only an elitist atheist lesbian from the Northeast could look at Rick Warren's politically correct church with its weak and watered down theology and see a "snake pit of religious inquisition".

Then Paglia gives her impression of Sarah Palin:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before.

Margret Thatcher?

And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

Gloria Steinem said that the only thing Sarah Palin had in common with Hillary Clinton was a chromosome. Of all the accolades Mrs. Palin will receive in this campaign this is perhaps the best. And of all the insults which will be inflicted upon the Governor during the campaign Paglia's comparison of her to the pathetic whore Madonna is certainly the worst.

Paglia then deals with the left's unhinged reaction to Mrs. Palin:

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains.

In other words when the public sees the left as it really is they are repelled. No surprise here. The problem is that the MSM picked up many of the "grotesquely lurid" fantasies and half-truths.

And there is a backlash and it has damaged the Obama campaign.

Then Paglia adds this:

I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it.

Now that Reagan is safely dead the left's efforts to redefine him have gone into overdrive. The same thing is happening to Sarah Palin while she is still alive. I would suggest that Ms. Paglia contemplate the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Palin chose to allow their Downs Syndrome child live rather than hire a medical assassin to chop it into pieces and suck it into a jar. Perhaps Camille might then come to the conclusion that Mrs. Palin lives her "religious piety" rather than merely paying lip service to it.

By the way, Camille says not to make the "mistake" of assuming that Obama took anything his church taught seriously and not to make the "mistake" of thinking that Mrs. Palin takes her church seriously. Does Ms. Paglia think that all church goers are hypocrites?

The rest of Paglia's essay is as gaseous and dreary as most of her writing, except the part where she admits that abortion is murder but still supports it so we won't quote from it. You can read the rest if you feel the need to do penance for your sins.