Delusion works so well in blue boxes.

I think there are a lot of people in Iraq right now who are bitterly disappointed with the people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.

Or at least they would be, if there weren’t dead. As for the rest, can’t we just give her to the Republicans?

Every feminist who wants to smash the glass ceiling should realize she has a stake in Condi Rice’s success.

In the sense that we will have achieved equality when mediocre women can rise as high as mediocre men, there’s some truth to that.

Wow. I’d never particularly cared to read Paglia’s writings, but I’d always assumed she was at least intelligent. These excerpts are actively moronic.

Oh, and am I supposed to write “Frist!”, or some other nonsense like that?

We are witnessing the cognitive demise of another public intellectual. Good riddance to ye!

Wow. Anytime some ‘winger goes on a rant about ‘overeducated ivory-tower libs’, I want this column shoved down their throat.

We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian.

Um, I’m pretty sure Mary had already identified _herself_ as a lesbian, thankyewverymuch. The day someone needs John Kerry to point out their sexuality is the day the human race is truly doomed…

Meh.

Paglia’s just a less sincre Hitchens – an overeducated weirdo, a contrarian that achieves genital wetness through pissing off the easily pissed off.

Her obsession with the Greeks and homosexuality is hilarious because it offers nothing to the conversation about current issues. Why? BECAUSE NO-ONE KNOWS WHAT THE HELL SHE IS TALKING ABOUT. 99% of the population would never entertain thoughts about Alcibiades or old dust-farting Socrates and just glaze over at that kinda talk. It’s like the radical feminists arguing about how blowjobs enforce the semiotics of the patriarchy or the Korner Kids going on about Straussian economics in Battlestar FerChrissakes Galactica.

Purest wankery.

The Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn’t fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it’s job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy — not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.

Wow, timewarp time! Weren’t the Repugs and their apologists making this argument back in ’94? How many small businesses are left in America since Wal-Mart (a huge GOP contributor, of course) ascended to the status it has today?

She was disapointed in Nader AFTER she voted for him?
That’s “game, set, match, get the hell of my monitor” right there.

Every feminist who wants to smash the glass ceiling should realize she has a stake in Condi Rice’s success.
And what the hell does that even mean? “Don’t rock the boat or Condi’ll get fired”? “Shut up and be happy with what you’ve got”? “I’m a jabbering loon with no idea what I’m talking about”?

I think we have a winner…

WHAT!?

What the hell is she talking about? Has she been locked in Broder’s closet for the last six years or something?

One more word out of her mouth and Housekeeping is going to water HER instead of the fern behind her. And it’ll be a perfectly understandable mistake.

“snide, elitist, and politically marginalized.” Yes, Camille, I know you are but what am I?

I can see her point. I feel the same way when I get frosted.

The Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn’t fly anymore, and they should drop it.

This is perhaps the most tone deaf sentence in political pundit history.

She must be preening to be head of some queer studies department, droping all the relevant buzz words.

“how blowjobs enforce the semiotics of the patriarchy ”

Man, I am SO going to get laid with that line.

Halliburton sez “the Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn’t fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it’s job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy — not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.”

And furthermore, we don’t need no demoncratic congress investigating what happened to all that gubbermint money we got to fix Iraq.

Re “shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals”: The only men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes in the pre-WWII 30s were the communists and other’s fighting for the Republic in Spain. Oh, and His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God, King of Kings of Ethiopia. I, for one, welcome Camille’s call for a Muscular Anarcho-Rastafari Movment. If the 1930s have taught us anything surely it is that only the fall of Babylon and the total destruction of State and Capital can give us the strength to defeat the Muslamonazis.

Jesus Christs tits in a mason jar. I… That is… She didn’t just….

Lemme start over. If that isn’t a stream of the worst kind of self-delusional, imaginary, Ivory fucking Towernonsense I’ve ever seen. Blaming the Democrats for Foley. Accusing Clinton of undermining the presiency. Accusing Kerry of using a “prefab line” in the debate (?????). Claiming that what Condi’s done is some kind of paean to feminism. Utterly discounting, dare I say poo-pooing the bias at Fox News. Invoking appeasment, refering at this late date to bush’s “decisiveness”, calling Liberal Secularism bourgeois (huh?) and materialistic (duh?). I continue to be shocked and awed by the incredibly poor quality of published pundits today. Is their just such a shortage of material that pretty much anybody with a pulse is considered worth publishing? Deliver me…

mikey

I just Wiki’d her, and I have to say she’s bright, and completely unattached from reality.
I’m assuming she’ll be running for office soon.

Actually, I respect some people who are completely unatteched from reality. It seems like a very nice way to be.

This kind of puckered-anus fretting and concern troll overanalysis, though, sounds like a bad parody of the kind of thing rightwing nincompoops are always accusing Gore of.

The Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn’t fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it’s job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy — not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.

I like this though. Clearly, portraying Republicans as grubbing fat cats is hitting anerve somewhere. Concern Trolls only come up with this stuff when it’s being effective. Ineffective tactics don’t get noticed.

Yeah. That’s kinda’ sad – someone who deserves less respect qua public intellectual than Snitchens.

Wait, she’s a Democrat? (where the hell is the interrobang key when you need it?)

Can we start kicking out the fake Democrat infiltrators yet? I feel like Groucho Marx: Obviously a political party that allows me in has no standards whatsoever.

All that’s been accomplished by [the Foley] scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of gay male tradition — the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18.

Wow. Just wow.

I don’t really have any commentary to go with that one. Um, Go Cards!

She’s the world’s most famous concern troll!

Or wait…do you have to understand the issues to be a concern troll?

Now we all know who Gary is…

If you think the column is bad, read the comments. The piece was linked from freeperville and drudge, so there are dozens of ‘finally a democrat that makes sense’ and ‘I disagree with most of her views but she’s right on’ or ‘I’m a die-hard conservative but this is the best column evar!!!1!!’ or ‘WOW! Finely a Democrat that sees the problem with the Party’

Is there a person alive who is both stupider and more pompous than Paglia? Someone who is not part of the Bush administration, I mean. Or Peggy Noonan.

Apparently she spins around the galaxy in her starship and comes back to earth every two or three years to talk to Salon about what she learned while she was away. How can people with such big vocabularies and such a lot of education be such complete batshit morons?

Kinda off-track, but, doesn’t she kinda look like Nancy Kulp(Miss Jane Hathaway) in that picture?

God, she’s managed to get even worse since the 90s.

Poor Camille. The 1990s are far gone. She helps not to miss them.

Paglia does realize that it’s not 1993 anymore, right? That in a world where the Vice President cheerfully embraces waterboarding anyone he wants to that no one is all that concerned about political correctness suffocating us all, right?

No? Oh my…

(re-reading quotes)…Oh yeah, that’s the biggest threat to our civil liberties – the “the attempt [by Democrats] to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web.” Warrantless wiretapping, expanded police powers, no-fly lists, NSA data mining, suspension of habeus corpus, extraordinary rendition, unchecked executive power, torture – it all pales next to some chickenhawk’s pervy IM chatlogs getting published.

And she’s a fine one to calling anyone else for being “snide, elitist, and politically marginalized.”

Paglia does realize that it’s not 1993 anymore, right? That in a world where the Vice President cheerfully embraces waterboarding

She’s still working on her treatise on the aesthetics of waterboarding, tracing the tradition in Western iconography back to its Athenian roots.

Elaine Showalter describes Camille Paglia in one chapter of Inventing Herself. We meet Paglia as a young English professor in the 1970s, maneuvering to have her head of department dismissed… then riding the wahmbulance all the way to the publisher when she lost her own job, a few years later. “I am just one of incalculable numbers of people of my generation whose fidelity to sixties principles led to their exclusion from the establishment.” All you need to know about Paglia, really.

Paglia is a fraud. Her “serious” books are garbage — but she figured out that she can write all sorts of asinine made-up shit and have it praised as “brave” and “rebellious” simply because the evil ivory tower elitists laugh at it.

Oh, Gods, Camille Paglia. I’M AN ITALIAN! AND A LESBIAN! I LOVE XENA, WARRIOR PRINCESS BECAUSE I CAN ENJOY IT ON SO MANY MORE LEVELS THAN YOU CAN BECAUSE YOU’RE STUPID! STUPID!

She used to pop up on Salon every once in a while, which was one of the major factors that led me to cancel my subscription.

Ms. Paglia has an attractive rack.

Anytime I have wade through Paglia’s pretentious rants, I feel the need to read this column by Molly Ivins, from the early ’90’s:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/ivins_on_paglia
(I hope I copied that correctly. If I did, you will find much amusement. And the stupid of the Paglia washed away.)

Buffalo Gal said:

In the sense that we will have achieved equality when mediocre women can rise as high as mediocre men, there’s some truth to that.

Well said, Buffalo Gal. I’m not sure I can add to that.

Mark S., I was managing to be neutral in the World Series until that vile Missouri anti-stem cell research ad came out with Jeff Suppan in it (and Jim Caviziel speaking Aramaic, who clearly thinks he is Jesus at this point, and Patricia Heaton… who the hell cares what she has to say?). I have a familiy member dealing with Parkinson’s right now, and it’s really hard for me to listen to a perfectly healthy professional athlete come out against research that he clearly doesn’t need (at the moment), and quite probably doesn’t understand. The rest of the Cards can do well, but I was actively cheering for him to get lit up last night. Bleh.

Bill S: your link’s fine.

I have it on dead-tree, m’self: it leads off Nothin’ but Good Times Ahead.

gah that is some serious dumb.

Every feminist who wants to smash the glass ceiling should realize she has a stake in Condi Rice’s success.

Um…Madeleine Albright?

Camille Pah!-lia is, and as far as I can tell always has been, an abomination. A “feminist” who thinks women are fine as long as they don’t complain about anything (including rape); a “scholar” who has never published an original thought worth reading; and now a “democrat” who does everything in her puny power to shore up the decades-old failed arguments of the basest right-wingers . . . is somebody still paying her to teach? I can only imagine what life must be like for her unfortunate students.

Oooooookay. She sounds like a Jew who wants to join the Nazis. Or a black man trying to get in the good graces of the Ku Klux Klan.

OK, I wasn’t done yet. Where’s the &%$#@ preview button? To sum up: I’d pay good money to watch Molly Ivins kick Camille’s sorry ass across the floor at any down-n-dirty bar in Texas, and WTF is she doing in that picture, conducting an orchestra of dragonflies?

Thanks, Bill S. Molly Ivins is a genius.

What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving
twit.

I’d like to know what happened to the preview button, myself. Until we get a better explanation, I’m going with somebody sold it to buy drugs.

Hm. Well, if they were good drugs, I mean really good drugs, then all is forgiven. What are a few typos compared to blessed escape?

Betcha Gary’s got the damn thing…

mikey

I am pretty sure — though I am far too lazy to go photoshop it myself — that if you look in the dictionary under “pointy-headed intellectual,” you find a picture of Camille Paglia.

You’re right, Dan. And, when you go check out her entries in Wikiquote, it auto-redirects to a research paper on the qualities of the feces of male cattle. It is, apparently, utterly impossible to tell the difference between them…

mikey

Poor Camille. The 1990s are far gone. She helps not to miss them.

Why doesn’t she stay in the 90’s and quit bothering us now?

Thanks a lot Salon.

OK, dear friends of Sadly, No! (and elsewhere), time to pony up for a sacrifice. Get your Valium (don’t be coy, I know you have some), decide how long you would like Camille Paglia to disappear for this time (I’m donating my entire prescription with a refill left on it), and we’ll bundle it all up and send it to her.

The only way to be rid of her is to send her on another extended soma holiday where she dreams away her days and nights with fantasies that she’s doing Madonna. Seriously. If we could get her this fantasy, she would never be heard from again.

Come on. You know it’s worth it. Do it for Molly Ivins. Do it for whichever unfortunate institution of higher education this demented fuckwit is infesting now. Do it for your country, dammit!

Hey, GW, send ME your excess valium. Especially the blue ones. I go thru mine kinda fast. If ya got extra, email me and I’ll give you my ups number…

mikey

Mmm . . . forbidden soma . . .

Man, Salon had to pay her for that shit.

Camille Paglia is the mistress of the Grand Assertion. Her 900 page tome, “Sexual Personae” was filled with them, such as: “If women ruled the world, we’d still be living in grass huts.” Not to mention her insane, utterly “blame the victim” / “boys don’t know any better and can’t help being testosterone filled animals” article poo-pooing date rape back in the early 90’s…which was the article I read by her that convinced me she was a complete pseudo-intellectual charlatan.

Someone previously up the thread said she was a contrarian. That’s a completely accurate assessment. But more, she’s an intellectual know-it-all, bursting with literary and cultural name dropping, which gives the false impression that she knows what the fuck she’s talking about. She’s quite a paradox. A high IQ, wedded to a cement-headed obtuseness that borders on completely dumb. Erudite stupidity.

It doesn’t matter one bit, though. It really doesn’t. That bloody Salon article is the longest thing I’ve ever seen posted there. Very few except the most patient, or in some cases, morbid, readers will make it all the way through. She takes softballs from the servile “interviewer” who seemed to hang on her every word like a boot-licking toady, and knocks ’em out of the park. And the toady is there to applaud and cheer her brilliance.

What a tin-plated phoney.

Ok, it’s time the Democrats started charging an application fee. If an imbecile like her can claim she’s a Democrat then the word just has lost all meaning.

Camille Paglia is a Democrat in the same sense I am an astronaut.

Wow, a Camille Paglia column that references ancient Greek sculpture/iconography/etc. When the only tool you have is a nail. . .

I clearly remember when Kerry made the Mary Cheney remark, I thought to myself “obviously the Democrats are setting up the Republicans so that, two years from now, they can make up a story about pedophilia and collude with the media to hype it up.”

Make that “when the only tool you have is a hammer”. It’s late, I just watched the Tigers play “I don’t want it, you take it” with St Louis.

Egocentric. Raving. Twit.

Thank you Molly – nailed her in three words.

Most of the time I am a mild mannered liberal. However, for some reason, it’s only when I read Paglia, I am seized with the desire to scream “Show us your tits!!!!” Someting about repressed bawdiness, I think.

Boston Legal should hire her to portray the sex therapist.

…the intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.

You got your fascist regime right there in your pants, Camille. Now if only a man of action would come along….

“When the only tool you have is a nail…”
I am going to steal that line.
At the moment, the only tool I have is a glass, and everything looks like a bottle.

NeiltheBlaze, I gave up on her even faster than that, when I saw a short paragraph in an issue of “TV Guide”, quoting her love of daytime soaps. I’d never read anything of hers at the time. She was praising a certain actress (I can’t remember which one), and prefaced it with, “I’m known for dismissing Meryl Streep…”
All I could think was, “Ooh, REALLY? Known for it? I’ll bet poor Meryl’s just weeping buckets over that.” She really DOES think she’s the cosmos.
The part of this article that had me wanting to bang my head on the desk was the comment on Mark Foley and “the ephebic beauty of teenage boys.” What the fuck? WHAT. THE. FUCK????
just when I thought Regina Griggs had the stupidest take on Foley possible,(read this to see why: http://pandagon.net/2006/10/26/ex-gays-invite-foley-to-pray-away-the-gay ) Paglia manages to outdo her. Nothing like good old fashioned pompous pseudointellectual posing.

I have no idea how I posted that in italics.

This is a good one:

“It was a perfectly civil and reasonable question from one of Fox’s most neutral commentators.â€?

No, you crackhead, Chris Wallace is not a neutral commentator. Honestly, the woman is a lunatic.

This one’s pretty good, too:

“A big problem is that in the minds of too many Americans, Iraqi culpability for the disaster of 9/11 is still pretty deeply rooted. It’s because of the vagueness with which most Americans perceive the map and peoples of the Middle East. It shows how bad education has been in geography and international history at both the high school and college levels.â€?

It’s not because the Bush Administration deliberately, repeatedly and deceptively linked Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein to help justify invading Iraq, of course. Noooooo.

Then there’s this little gem:

“Condi Rice looks lost lately. She’s overstretched and on a learning curve. Her training (by Madeleine Albright’s father) focused on the Cold War era when the world was polarized between two superpowers. It didn’t prepare her for the baffling and frustrating complexities of the highly sectarian and factionalized Middle East.â€?

That’s some learing curve. Gorbachev assumed power in 1985. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Rice became secretary of state in 2005. She had 20 years (or, arguably, 16) to get up to speed.

On the other hand, the Middle East has been sectarian and factionalized and a major focus of U.S. foreign policy since before Rice was born, so I’m not really inclined to cut her even that much slack.

And what she knows about domestic politics! Referring to the Clintons, she says:

“He’s undermining her — if we vote for her, are we going to be stuck with him?â€?

Bill Clinton is the most popular politician in America and one of the most popular presidents of all time. If he could run today, he’d be elected in a landslide. The American people would love to be stuck with Bill Clinton.

She wouldn’t. And the fact that she would say something so absurd proves beyond doubt that she is no Democrat and no liberal. She’s a wingnut libertarian and libertine.

She’s a libertinian! 🙂

Libertinian! Good one!

I see the problem. It’s just this little chromium switch here. You people are SO superstitious.*

That italics tag was almost as elusive as Paglia’s logic.
Almost.

Shorter Paglia: “Dammit, how can I maintain my shockingly-un-PC credentials now that ‘PC’ is whatever the Wingnut Wurlitzer spews out this week?”

Y’know, when I first read Sexual Personae, I assumed the author was a male-to-female transsexual angry because they still weren’t desired by heterosexual men or homosexual women. But in this photo, Paglia’s doesn’t have nearly as much of an adam’s apple as Ann Coulter…

Hmm, maybe those two will fall in love and run away together, to some enchanted island without mail or internet services, where the rest of us will never have to hear from them again. Now there’s a happy thought!

Also, she’s actually just factually wrong in a lot of those quotes. A lot. Her comments demonstrate not a poor interpretation of the facts but rather just profound ignorance. To me the most glaring:

“Liberal secularism has become bourgeois and materialistic.”
Um, NO.
“Liberal secularism” started out “bourgeois and materialistic,” and that that was the entire fucking point. “Liberal secularism” was a political reaction by a new middle class, one whose economic well-being depended on trade in goods and ideas, to the disruptive economic effects of religious reaction – e.g. suppression of new scientific ideas, institutionalized religious persecution leading to civil war, etc. Criticizing “Liberal secularism” for becoming “bourgeois and materialistic” is like criticizing plants for having become too green and photosynthetic.

This kind of glaring, obvious factual error runs through everything she says. She’s trying to make up for a lack of command of the basic material with an expansive vocabulary. It’s called bullshit.

(And that’s without getting into the completely fucking boneheaded stupid interpretation of politics she’s peddling.)

Camille is truly “batshit crazy.”

I finally figured out the picture – she’s playing a theremin.

Would the last person actually paying attention to what Paglia says please tell her to shut the fuck up?

Notice that you never see George Will and Camille Paglia in the same photo. Hmmmm…

Salon’s battin’ 1.000. First they gave David Horowitz a platform, and they continue to waste electrons on Paglia–and they wonder why people aren’t subscribing.

Late thought: turn Paglia loose on Ann Althouse. That would be an affair to remember!

“Salon’s battin’ 1.000. First they gave David Horowitz a platform, and they continue to waste electrons on Paglia–and they wonder why people aren’t subscribing.”

I once wrote David Talbot about that, and he actually responded. Lamely, but at least he wrote back. Don’t forgot Salon also wanted your money so they could give it to such intellectual luminaries as Norah Vincent, and Andrew Sullivan.

Does anyone even give attention to Paglia anymore? Paglia used to claim that she admired gay men and enjoyed gay male porn, but she’s also claimed that more men are becoming gay because women have given up on being “glamorous”. She also seems to take delight in violence agains gay men, and made some really disgusting remarks about Mathew Sheppard, famously beaten to death a few years ago.

I’ve been disappointed in Nader since he killed the Corvair.

“She also seems to take delight in violence against gay men, and made some really disgusting remarks about Matthew Sheppard, famously beaten to death a few years ago.”
She did? I’m so glad I missed that. I guess she’s an even bigger nitwit than I already thought she was.

Bill- She said that Sheppard had brought it on himself because he left with those guys, having been attracted to their brutishness and the idea of rough sex. She then generalized gay sexuality as eroticized violence and masochism. Someething that goes back to the ancient Greeks of course.

CP’s nothing more than Ayn Rand in biker gear. Her attitude toward sex is very much like that of the ancient Greeks, who held that it was good to be the fuckER and bad to be the fuckEE, no matter what gender you were. If you were known to have been fucked by a man, you had no civic rights. Period. But if you fucked men/boys or women/girls, that was OK. (Short version: “It’s not ‘gay’ if you’re the ‘guy’.”)

Phoenix, are you saying she wears a “strap-on”?
Why am I not surprised?

Shorter Paglia

Let’s just fuck, and stay out of the Republican’s way.

“Every feminist who wants to smash the glass ceiling should realize she has a stake in Condi Rice’s success.”

Yes, we too can sleep our way to the top–or let everyone believe that we did!

If Camille thinks women need to be “empowered” by people like Condoleezza Rice, her views on feminism are about as archaic and quaint as the Republicans’ views on the Geneva convention.

jas said,

“She’s the world’s most famous concern troll!

Or wait…do you have to understand the issues to be a concern troll?”

Camille is too self-absorbed to be a concern-troll. No doubt the result of spending too many hours enthralled at the sight of her own vagina in a hand-mirror.

“It’s a formula at the heart of Plato’s dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades.”

Sadly, no. Alcibiades was born 450 BC, and the Symposium recounts the incident in Symposium took place after the Battle of Delium in 424 BC–Al was 26 years old.

Didn’t she say that John Kerry would be a great presidential candidate because he has good hair? She’s glib and shallow, the epitome of what’s wrong with a lot of humanities scholarship today.

What can we say about CP.
She needs to get the ivory tower out of her ass and come back to earth.
I get the feeling she hates reality and at the tender age of ?50? she can no longer really come out of her “construct”
She a thinking nutcase. Sometimes dangerous. Sometimes harmless.

As a theorist, or personality, or whatever the fuck she was supposed to be, Paglia was always a barking dog. As far as politics, I can tell you I’m in art school in a major city right now, and she still comes off as twenty times more informed than a lot of the grad students in critical studies, I’m sorry to say. That doesn’t make her less of a twat. At all.

“Conservative radio hosts have been claiming that liberal criticism of Bush’s decisiveness in invading Iraq mirrors the shilly-shallying of 1930s intellectuals during Hitler’s rise. The intellectuals, with their cultivated internationalism, always counsel procrastination and leave it to the men of action to deal forcefully with fascist regimes.”

Dumb fucking –

The internationalists were the people SCREAMING to do something about Hitler before it was too late, you prissy, sanctimonious bitch. Who the fuck do you think was calling for isolation and procrastination? The same stupid right-wing shits you’re currently defending – the people who thought since Hitler was anti-communist and allowed Wall Street to do business in Germany, he couldn’t be all that bad. Which, come to think of it, isn’t all that different from how Newt Gingrich and his posse spent the entire 1990s saying “Okay, no more commies, no more American presence abroad.”

And how the fuck does a woman who criticizes government intervention and the nanny state get the idea that Ralph Nader would be a contribution to the system?