Camille Paglia’s Schizophrenic Thought Salad on Salon
11 November 2009 10:42 am by Taylor Marsh
I’d cackle at this column on Salon.com if it weren’t so seriously pathetic. Ms. Paglia begins…
Pelosi’s victory for women
Sure, her healthcare bill is a mess, but her gritty maneuvering shows her mettle….Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend. In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her. Even a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap.
It was a stunningly impressive recovery for someone who seemed to be coming apart at the seams last summer, when a sputtering, rattled Pelosi struggled to deal with the nationwide insurgency of town hall protesters — reputable, concerned citizens whom she outrageously tried to tar as Nazis. Whether or not her bill survives in the Senate is immaterial: Pelosi’s hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved. …
Then Ms. Paglia continues to ramble on and on about how the House health care bill is not only bad but a “horror!” But Speaker Pelosi’s “hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians”, even if it sells women out on civil rights, which Ms. Paglia now reduces to a “shibboleth,” is something for which we should sing her praises?
Camille Paglia is positively schizophrenic in this column.
And excuse me if I balk, but it does us no good if leaders are gritty, tough –insert your favorite masculine adjective here– if in the end what he or she produces is a disaster for women, especially the poor, while also restricting existing freedoms under the law and making health care harder to navigate for us.
Here’s an idea. Maybe Ms. Paglia and Salon.com could enlist a coathanger company to place ads on her web pages, suggesting an alternative for the manifestations of the Stupak amendment and what the House health care bill means for women. Even the poor can afford a coathanger.
But since Paglia doesn’t bother to discuss the ramifications of the Stupak amendment, not even mentioning it beyond women’s civil rights being reduced to a “shibboleth,” it’s obvious she thinks it’s not worth her time.
Never mind that Mrs. Pelosi’s gritty, tough, arm-twisting went limp when it came to her partners in smoothing out the rough edges of the bill, the Catholic Church. The instant she allowed the representatives to the Catholic Bishops in the room, while negotiating with the progressive caucus, Pelosi did something that George W. Bush and the Republican Congress never tried. By recreating a scene out of medieval London to make sure the Catholic Church didn’t have a hissy at the bill Pelosi finally crafted, the first female Speaker of the House crossed the line of all lines.
“She did do one incredible political thing the other night. She had the Conference of Catholic Bishops in one room, the pro-choice lawmakers in the other room. … On the Hill. She has two conference rooms. The Bishops showed up. Two conferences, she did shuttle diplomacy between them.” – Jonathan Allen, Politico (source: “Hardball”)
I’ve not been able to confirm what Allen reported last night on “Hardball,” with Chris Matthews, after the commercial break, correcting what Allen had said, saying it was the representatives of the Bishops that were on Capitol Hill. This is a nugget I’ve been running down since the weekend. Did Speaker Pelosi help facilitate the Catholic Bishops signing off on the health care bill, with their mark on the Stupak amendment? It would sure explain her remark on C-SPAN; that she was proud to have made sure the Stupak amendment got to the floor.
Why there isn’t a bigger outcry over the Catholic Bishops role in helping Speaker Pelosi, with only Rep. Woolsey having the courage to weigh in so far, including from Camille Paglia, I’ll never understand.
Paglia then makes matters worse, veering to the right, as she simultaneously demolishes every point she’s made about Mrs. Pelosi being a “gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her”, by rendering a negative review of the Stupak ladened bill Pelosi concocted:
As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare.
Pelosi’s amazing because of her gritty twisting arms and mimicking any “fabled male speakers before her,” even though the final legislation she got passed is a “horror!”?
There is not one coherent, philosophical brain wave that stays alive from beginning to the end in Ms. Paglia’s incoherent thought salad.
Ms. Paglia was an original creator of Salon.com. Now she’s just an embarrassment. Why Salon.com continues to publish her ramblings, minus an ode to sentimental nostalgia, is beyond me.
