Paglia's man-crush on Obama continues

For hundreds of years before the revolution which overthrew the czar in favor of a democratically elected government (it was this democratic government that the communists overthrew a short while later) the Russian people had a curious attitude toward their government.

They knew that it was corrupt, inefficient and brutally repressive however it was never the fault of the Czar. It was always the Czar's advisers who were to blame. The people would always say that if only the Czar knew what was going on he would put a stop to it and that when the Czar found out how he was being misled by those closest to him there would be a new day in Russia.

I was reminded of that when reading Camille Paglia's latest column in Salon. I won't fisk thew entire thing, that would be far too tedious, but here are some highlights:

Buyer's remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at -- representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that he was elected to do.

Its hard to know how to respond to this. As far as I know the most significant things to come out of this summit were Obama's promise to shove amnesty down an unwilling American electorate's throat right after he got finished ramming Marxist socialized medicine down the same place. That and the fact that when asked about Canada's terminally broken socialized health care system Obama praised how well it works for Canada while ignoring the long waiting periods and the fact that the American side of the border is lined with doctor's offices, hospitals and clinics built to serve the large number of Canadian citizens who come south of the border for their health care (where are they going to go when the American system becomes as fraked up as Canada's?). If Obama is so dense that he can't step back and realize that there is something seriously meaningful about the fact that the traffic of those seeking quality medical services along the US/Canadian border is all one way with Canadians coming to the US and no Americans going to Canada then how can anyone trust him to reform America's health care system (or our economy or foreign relations or anything else)?

Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll?

See, it's not the Czar. It's the Czar's advisors. When the Czar finds out what is going on there will be a new day dawning for Rus. . . I mean America!

Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

"Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill. . . ?" Ms. Paglia I know you don't want to hear this but Barack Obama is a Marxist who harbors a deep hatred for the United States of America. He intends to remake America in the same way that Castro remade Cuba except that he hopes to use the legislature and the courts rather than a violent revolution. He believes that the poor are only poor because what is rightfully theirs has been stolen from them by the greedy few at the top and his mission is to redistribute the wealth of the evil rich to the virtuous poor.

Obama's desire to socialize medicine in the US, along with his already accomplished takeover of the largest American auto manufacturer and several large lending institutions is not about providing Americans with better goods and services. It is about bringing as much of the American economy under the control of the federal government as possible.

Why else is Obama refusing to allow those banks which took bailout money but are once again profitable to pay the money back? Having gotten the federal government's claws (that is his claws) into those banks he will not now, nor will he ever, willingly give up control.

That is the heart and soul of Barack Obama. He is a totalitarian Marxist who wishes the central government to control every meaningful aspect of the life of every citizen. To Obama it doesn't matter that there would be long lines for medical services - lines so long that people would die while waiting for treatment. It doesn't matter that research and development of new drugs and medical technology would slow to a glacial pace or stop altogether [Try this - from the time of the communist revolution in Russia to the day the Berlin Wall fell how many major breakthroughs of medical science came out of the USSR? I can think of one - laser eye surgery. Now how many came out of the United States? Game. Set. Match].

It doesn't even matter to Obama that there really would be "death panels" set up to decide who got life saving treatment based upon their value to The State.

In fact from Obama's perspective all of those things are the reason to do socialized medicine. Giving the government the power to dispense or withhold life-saving treatment invests it with enormous power. The kind of power that is almost impossible to ever take away. Think of FDR saying "let's see them try to repeal that" after Social Security was enacted into law.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

At this point we have to wonder why Paglia is still a Democrat.

What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values.

Endless? Seriously, endless? I'm not going to bother listing the more famous Republican scandals and then listing an even longer list of Democrat scandals. The point is this. Republicans realize that the human race is fallen and that we will all fail to perfectly live up to our highest ideals. That's what it means to be sinners in need of salvation.

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats reelected Bill Clinton in spite of knowing what a degenerate he was while Republicans hold their leaders accountable (or do you still think that Governor Sanford has a shot at the GOP nomination in 2012).

The point of having morals and values is not that you always live up to them (if you can do that then they are set too low). It is that they give you a goal to aim at and a reason to try to be better than you currently are.

Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.

At this point I wonder if she is deliberately misstating the conservative position or if she really doesn't know.

In case this is genuine ignorance rather than an attempt to create a straw man I'll explain. Health savings accounts are only one part of a genuine free market solution to our current problems. The other parts are tort reform and insurance deregulation.

Tort reform could lower health care costs by more than 25% as doctors would do far less "defensive testing" and would pay far lower malpractice insurance premiums.

Insurance deregulation would allow insurance companies to do what they are now forbidden by law from doing. Write policies which cover only catastrophic events like major illness and accident. Policies like this can be very inexpensive, especially for the young which make up a large percentage of the uninsured.

These three items along with some very narrowly targeted programs aimed at those with pre-existing conditions and the very poorest of the poor would take care of the vast majority of the problems that have been identified with our current system.

I should point out that those programs for the currently uninsurable should depend heavily upon giving the private sector incentives to offer free or discounted treatment. For example drug companies who provide free or reduced cost medicine could get tax breaks and extensions on the amount of time that their drugs receive patent protection. Hospitals and clinics could get significant tax breaks for offering free care to those in legitimate need and doctors could get the same tax breaks along with relief from student loan obligations.

You see these problems can be solved without giving the federal government control of a huge sector of the American economy and the literal power of life and death over the citizenry.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

Where have you been, Ms. Paglia? It has been a long damn time since the Democrat party has stood for any of those things. What the Democrat party has been about, at least since the Great Society, has been amassing as much power in Washington as humanly possible.

This attitude that Paglia shows here, that the Democrat party is still the party of the "common man" is the single greatest threat to the survival of this nation as a free and prosperous land.

Whatever the Democrat party may have been in the past what it is today is the party of socialism and an all powerful central government run by an elite which considers themselves to be separate from and superior to the average American.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

Ms. Paglia you teach at a major university and you are a student of popular culture. If you want to know why liberals think what they think about big government OPEN YOUR DAMN EYES AND LOOK AROUND YOU AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT LOOK IN THE DAMN MIRROR!

Look at what you have written in this essay that I'm quoting from and contemplate the fact that you can still remain a brain-dead O-bot zombie!

And as for the snitch site where we can inform on our neighbors who are critical of the little tin messiah and his policies we once again hear that it isn't the Czar who is to blame but his evil advisers. Except that Obama knows about this and approves of it.

He approves of the snitch-site because the idea of seeding the land with a network of informers like the KGB or Gestapo did in the USSR or Nazi Germany is an idea which flows naturally out of Obama's evil totalitarian heart.

I used to have some respect for Camile Paglia's intelligence but after the way she has turned herself into an intellectual whore for Obama I can't feel anything for her but contempt.


This blog post can be reported to Obama's new Okhrana by emailing flag@whitehouse.gov

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.

Camille Paglia has a man-crush on Obama, Part II

Camille Paglia is an elitist and a leftist. As such she hates George W Bush and loves B. Hussein Obama. In a recent column she complained about the treatment which Obama has been getting on conservative talk radio. In doing so she revealed the true source of much of the antipathy which left-liberals feel toward Mr. Bush and telegraphed what the left's "party line" is going to be concerning Obama.

For disaffected Republicans as well as many Democrats like me, McCain is an irascible grandstander of slippery ideology who has made a career out of flattering and courting the media. It remains debatable whether McCain's traumatic experiences as a prisoner of war have enhanced or distorted his admittedly wide-ranging knowledge of military and security matters. Crystal clear, however, is McCain's startling awkwardness as a public speaker. With stilted, stodgy intonations that seem to descend from the late-19th century era of one-room schoolhouses, McCain laboriously reading a speech is a painful spectacle. After the mumbling, disjointed George W. Bush, doesn't the U.S. deserve a more sophisticated leader on the international stage?

First of all she is correct about John McCain's character. He has spent his career talking like a conservative to the voters in red-state Arizona and then going back to Washington and talking, and voting, like a liberal to impress the inside-the-beltway press corps. This reveals a dishonest and dishonorable man of weak character and little political courage.

It is obvious from his position on Guantanamo Bay and on the subject of aggressive interrogation methods like waterbording that his experience as a POW in Vietnam have deeply scarred him. Those experiences also help explain his volcanic temper. The torture he endured as a prisoner of the NVA was enough to shatter the mind of any man and McCain survived only by clinging to his anger, his burning fury, at his North Vietnamese captors. When anger has saved your life and kept you in a condition resembling sanity it becomes your best friend and the favorite tool in your toolbox. It becomes so much a part of you that you no longer are aware of it. It is simply there like your liver or your kidneys.

If Paglia had stopped there she would have nailed the case against McCain however she goes on to devote just as much ink to her real beef with McCain. He is a poor public speaker. This is also a big part of why she, and the rest of the left - the rest is Florida 2000, despises George W Bush.

Paglia's last sentence in the above paragraph reveals the real reason why so much of the left fell so deeply in love with Obama. He is a beautiful speaker. However he is only good when he is able to read words written for him by someone else. When you listen to Obama speaking for himself in a forum where he is unable to use a teleprompter or to depend upon well rehearsed talking points he sounds like far more of a dolt than George W Bush ever has.

Listen to Obama being Obama in this video clip:



Note that Obama first tries to explain his fumbling by saying that he can't hear himself and then says that he's glad that the audience is fired up. The problem is that the crowd is silent. They are obviously having as much difficulty understanding Obama as the rest of us. Obama then tries to cover himself by saying that he has had very little sleep.

I guess that he was also sleep deprived when he claimed that the United States had 57 states and when he couldn't remember the name of the town he was in. Or when he claimed 10,000 people were killed in a tornado in Kansas (12 was the actual death toll). [link here]

Is Obama suffering from some kind of sleep disorder or is he simply a man who possesses a mediocre intellect and cannot think on his feet?

Ms. Paglia asks whether America deserves a "more sophisticated" leader than George W Bush. Since her criteria for sophistication seems to be how well a person articulates his words I would ask her how she will feel when president Obama turns in a verbal performance like you saw above in summit meetings with the heads of the European nations or when sitting across the table from Raul Castro or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (two of the sort of leaders which Obama has promised to meet with).

How will America's international reputation, which has supposedly been so badly damaged by the doltish Bush, be repaired by a president who speaks like a drunken high school dropout when denied the use of a prepared speech and under the slightest bit of stress.

Paglia then gets to her specific objections to talk radio's treatment of Obama:

Meanwhile, conservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He's a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He's "not that bright"; he can't talk without a teleprompter. He knows nothing and has done less. His wife is a raging mass of anti-white racism. It's gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.

Let's take these in order.

Obama is a Marxist. Obama's view of economics and the social order is at least in part Marxist. Marx believed that capitalism was based upon the exploitation of the worker and Obama, along with the rest of the Democrat party, clearly believes that without a large and robust network of government controls the free market capitalist system will quickly become exploitative of both the worker and the consumer. The only thing Obama needs to become a full-blown Marxist is to call for a worldwide revolution of the workers.

Obama is a radical leftist. Can Paglia possibly deny this?!? Obama's voting record in the US Senate was one of the most left-wing of any member. He out left-winged the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders (who scored 8 on the ACU rating while Obama scored 7).

Ms. Paglia, what exactly does Obama disagree with the radical left about?

Obama is a hater of America. The US in engaged in a war with people who meet every aspect of the dictionary definition of evil and Obama wants us to lose. That alone qualifies him to be admitted into the ranks of the America-haters. But add to that the fact that he is four-square against allowing American oil companies from developing our domestic oil resources - a stand which will keep us dependent on other nations, including Middle Eastern terror-supporting states, for a commodity which is absolutely vital to the continued functioning of our economy and a picture emerges of a man who actually has the worst interests of the United States in his heart.

I'm sure that Obama would say that he loves this country and he probably even believes that. However what Obama loves is not the United States as it actually is. What he loves is a vision, which exists only in his head and the heads of other radical leftists, of what America could be if only he and those like him were given total control of the country and were allowed to remake it into their own image.

The truth is that the fantasy America of the radical left's imaginings would look like Stalin's Soviet Union except with gay marriage and windmills. However that is a fact which Obama and Paglia and other leftists cannot allow themselves to face because it would destroy their self image as anointed saviors.

He's not that bright, can't talk without a teleprompter, knows nothing and has done less. All true. Obama's statements on the economy reveal a man with no knowledge of economics other than what bits he can remember from a required college course taught by a Marxist professor. His pronouncements on foreign policy were ridiculed even by other Democrats during the debates. We have already dealt with his speaking ability without words written for him by someone else.

And as for what he's done. . .

Well, what has he done? He has shown a great deal of poor judgment in who he associates with and he voted "present" a lot in the Illinois state legislature rather than have the courage to take any kind of stand. He was a "community organizer" for a while but on the South Side of Chicago all that means is that he was an effective racial demagogue.

Are these now the list of qualifications to be the President of the United States?

Michelle Obama is a racist. Well she said that the America of 2008 was a downright mean country which she never felt proud of until people got enthusiastic about supporting a black man for president. Maybe I just need to have my definition of racism updated cause that sure seems racist.

As an Obama supporter, I of course see things quite differently. Whatever his tactical assertions in the primary trenches, Obama seems to have an open and flexible mind. He is a conciliator and synthesizer, ready to give due respect to opposing views -- a grace desperately needed in paralyzed Washington. When the camera comes close -- as it did last week when CNN's terrific Candy Crowley tenaciously grilled him about Hillary Clinton's prospects for the vice-presidency -- his deliberative thought process is plainly visible. What a deft performance under high-stakes pressure: Obama was firm, authoritative and methodical without ever losing his warmth and geniality. The guy is smart as a whip. And his administration will be as good as its appointments. As for Michelle Obama, she is formidable, representing a bold, stylish feminism more authentically contemporary than the old, bellyaching, blame-the-males style of Hillary's omnipresent cheerleader, Gloria Steinem.

In every one of Paglia's essays there is a point where she veers off into complete delusion. This is that point. You will note that Paglia gives no examples of Obama's "open and flexible mind" or of any instance where he has given due respect to opposing views. In fact I can't even imagine anything which Obama has done, at least since he burst upon the national stage, which comes even close to that description. Perhaps she is referring to Obama's remarks about how the bitter hillbillies of Pennsylvania cling to their guns and bibles because the government hasn't put them on welfare yet?

Obama is so incapable of "crossing the isle" to work with Republicans that he couldn't even put together a deal with John McCain to cosponsor some piece of left-wing legislation! Think about that - John McCain had never met a leftist Senator who he couldn't make a deal with to advance the left's agenda until he met Barack Obama!

Oh, I know what Paglia is talking about. When Obama is touting a Marxist idea for how to screw up the country and he encounters another Marxist with a slightly different Marxist idea for how to screw up the country he is able to "give due respect to opposing views" and come up with a compromise Marxist way to screw up the country.

How Solomon-like!

And Paglia's evidence that Obama really can express himself under pressure and really is smart? He was tossed some softballs by CNN's vapid air-head Candy Crowley, and because Obama's camp knew the questions were coming and had plenty of time to write out his responses and let him practice them, he was able to answer without stumbling and fumbling and forgetting which state he was in.

Ah, the quick incisive mind of a latter-day Aristotle.

I'm not even going to address the formidable Michelle Obama's "bold, stylish feminism" both because I might vomit all over my keyboard and because if I were to reach that deeply into Paglia's delusion I might not be able to find my way back.

I take no pleasure in this. Barack Obama is currently leading in the polls (a Wall Street Journal/NBC has Obama ahead 47% to 41%) but it is very difficult for me to believe that a man with such radical views and such limited experience and intellect and such poor judgment will ultimately prevail.

This will be a tragedy for the nation because the damage that John McCain will do to the Republican party will be so great that it will be at least 16 years and more probably 20-24 years before the Republicans will be able to retake the legislature or the White House and during that time the damage that the left will have done to the country will be irreparable.

The choice is stark and deeply unpleasant to contemplate. Either Obama is elected and does horrible damage to the nation, but damage which we can probably recover from. Or John McCain is elected and does horrible damage to the country which it will probably not be able to recover from.

The lesser evil is probably Obama, but in this case "lesser" is a only a relative term.

Paglia has a man-crush on Obama

Camille Paglia has another one of her gaseous essays up on Salon.com which is noteworthy only for these two nuggets:

Bulletin to all nations: help! Tornadoes, typhoons and earthquakes batter the globe, while the U.S. is teetering into recession and paralyzed by a stupid war it can neither win nor quit. But somehow we are locked at the hip to Hillary Clinton, who won't stop her manic tarantella until her party whirls into ruins, like the run-amuck carousel in Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train."

1. "Bulletin to all nations"? Although the US is far from the only nation to respond to natural disasters wherever they occur on the globe it is always the US who gets there first and offers the most. Even the aid given by the UN is funded mostly by the US contribution to that world body.

2. The recession does not seem to be materializing. Unemployment is down, the stock market is up and the credit situation seems to be stabilizing. There has not been even one quarter of negative economic growth (while two back to back quarters of negative growth are needed before a recession can be called). It would seem that we have turned the economic corner.

3. Like it or not the war in Iraq is being won.

And then there's this:

As I recently told Mark Simone on his New York WABC radio show, the Rev. Wright controversy actually solidified my support of Obama (though Wright himself, on the basis of his performance at the National Press Club, seems to have become a buffoon). I was steadily impressed by Obama's idealism and deliberativeness; his refusal to spout the rote demagogic formulas that pour so freely from Hillary's lips; and his patient forbearance in debates, where (like an aikido master) he warily sidestepped Hillary's blatant provocations, meant to goad him into errors. He has a judicious, reflective, authentically presidential temperament.

"[H]is refusal to spout the rote demagogic formulas". All Obama "spouts" are vague rhetorical will-o-the-wisps about "hope" and "change" without any substance whatsoever to back them up. When you take his TelePrompTer away from him so that he cannot read words written for him by someone else all he can do is toss out left-liberal bromides which have never worked anywhere they have been tried anywhere on the planet.

My one nagging question about Obama, given his Kenyan lineage and broad background in Indonesia and Hawaii as well as his Ivy League education, was how well he knew the history, passions and aspirations of African-American culture. But Obama's 20-year membership in Rev. Wright's Chicago megachurch completely reassured me on this score. First of all, sermons constitute only one small part of any congregation's rich religious and social life. Second, not for a moment do I believe -- as talk radio shows are tirelessly alleging -- that Obama's political views are secretly identical to Wright's. On the contrary, it was through listening to Wright, who was reciting a black liberationist theology that has been standard issue for a half-century, that Obama honed his desire to bridge the gap between racial and ethnic communities in the United States. This is one reason I believe Obama is the right person at the right time for the presidency. Where Hillary divides and sows bitterness, Obama wants to unite and heal. It is a project that all Americans of good will should wish to succeed.

Exactly what evidence Paglia has that Obama rejects Wright's message? The fact that now, after 20 years of quiet acceptance he now publicly rejects it? If Obama rejects Wright's world view then why did he borrow the title of his book from one of Wright's sermons, "The Audacity of Hope"? And why did he approvingly quote Wright's line about the "world in need being run by white people's greed"?

If Obama has always rejected Wright why did he call Wright his friend and mentor? Why does he relate that it was only after listening to Wrights venomous preaching that he decided to abandon his agnosticism and become a "Christian" (I use the quotes because the Black Liberation Theology spouted by Wright has as little to do with real Biblical Christianity as Christian Identity does)?

What exactly does Paglia see as Obama's plan to "unite and heal" the nation? I ask because Obama himself has articulated no such plan. When you strip away all of Obama's empty verbiage all you have left is a seeming desire to create a second term for Jimmy Carter. Perhaps Paglia has forgotten how well that first Carter term went.

Camille Paglia is the poster girl for the fact that one can have a high IQ and an excellent education and still be a fool.

Of course I am still hoping that Obama wins the election despite all of this. His record of voting "present" on any remotely controversial issue reveals a man who has no political courage. He has spent half of his short time in the Senate running for president and so does not have anywhere near the deep knowledge of how power works in Washington DC that Hillary Clinton or Johh McCain possess.

The way Obama speaks when not reading a prepared speech reveal a man of limited intelligence, as do his gaffs like thinking the US has 60 states. An inexperienced naive lightweight like this will have a great deal of difficulty moving his radical agenda through a House of Representatives which must stand for reelection every two years.

I know that many people think that a Democrat will have a cakewalk with the size of the majority that the Democrats are bound to have in the next congress but the importance of the fact that the House members must stand for reelection every two years cannot be over estimated. Remember how the Clintons couldn't get anyone to vote for their socialized medicine scheme? This despite the fact that Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature and almost all Democrats agreed in principle with Hillary's ideas.

There is no possibility of a good outcome this November. However the best way to limit the damage is to elect the most incompetent of the three evil sacks of garbage we have to choose from.

Memo to Ms. Paglia

Camille Paglia on Mrs. Bill Clinton:

Hillary's stonewalling evasions and mercurial, soulless self-positionings have been going on since her first run for the U.S. Senate from New York, a state she had never lived in and knew virtually nothing about. The liberal Northeastern media were criminally complicit in enabling her queenlike, content-free "listening tour," where she took no hard questions and where her staff and security people (including her government-supplied Secret Service detail) staged events stocked with vetted sympathizers, and where they ensured that no protesters would ever come within camera range.

That compulsive micromanagement, ultimately emanating from Hillary herself, has come back to haunt her in her dismaying inability to field complex unscripted questions in a public forum. The presidential sweepstakes are too harsh an arena for tenderfoot novices. Hillary's much-vaunted "experience" has evidently not extended to the dynamic give-and-take of authentic debate. The mild challenges she has faced would be pitiful indeed by British standards, which favor a caustic style of witty put-downs that draw applause and gales of laughter in the House of Commons. Women had better toughen up if they aspire to be commander in chief.

Whether John Edwards or Barack Obama (toward whom I'm currently leaning) has conclusively demonstrated his superiority for the top of the ticket remains to be seen. They may unfortunately split the anti-Hillary vote (a majority of registered Democrats) so that she slips through. If Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I will certainly vote for her. But I continue to find it hard to believe that my party truly craves that long nightmare of déjà vu -- with scandal after scandal disgorged and an endless train of abused women returning from Bill Clinton's sordid, anti-feminist past.

Ms. Paglia the only thing the Democrat Party or the Clinton campaign needs to hear is the sentence that I have highlighted and enlarged above. If Hillary is the nominee you will vote for her no matter what she has done or said or will do or will say.

If you tell your party that you will support them no matter how wretched and detestable their candidate is, no matter how little they deserve to hold the office for which they are running the message they get is that they need do nothing to reform the party or correct mistakes.

Ms. Paglia you have revealed yourself to be someone who is not to be taken seriously. Your attitude means that you can be swept to the sidelines and ignored. A reliable Democrat vote come hell or high water.

We should note for the record that feminist Paglia endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, you know the man who has left the trail of abused women in his "sordid and anti-feminist past, twice.