'Myopic Apparatchiks and Feather-Preening Bourgeois Liberals'
Camille Paglia opens fire on health care, mows down Dems, drugs, Ivy Leaguers
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.AUTHOR: Camille Paglia
AKA: Monthly columnist for Salon, Obama supporter, "dissident feminist," college professor
THESIS: Obama and the Democrats failed on health care
OTHER TOPICS COVERED: Ivy League brainwashing, songs from the '60s, Afghanistan
LENGTH: 1900 words
SONGS CITED: "Chimes of Freedom" by Bob Dylan, "Freedom! Freedom!" by Richie Havens, "A Different Drum" by Linda Ronstadt, Bob Welch's song "Hypnotized," which appears on Fleetwood Mac's 1973 album "Mystery to Me"
ONLY THINGS WORTH WATCHING ON TV: Cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football
THE LAST WORD:
If the left is an incoherent shambles in the U.S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left. (I addressed the drugs cataclysm in "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" in the Winter 2003 issue of Arion.)
Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.
Which brings us to Afghanistan: Let's get the hell out!
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.