She voted for President Obama. Wants to see healthcare reform go through. But she has no patience for hypocrisy and stupidity. Camille Paglia is a liberal(?) I can respect.
(I put ? after “liberal” because what does that word mean exactly? And perhaps Prof Paglia does not think of herself as a “liberal”. It may not be appropriate in this context.)
Just a sample from an as always powerful essay:
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis.
Read the whole thing at Salon. Oh – and Nancy Pelosi is white. Think about it.
But since one of the concerns of this website is how people think and speak – in other words how they argue it would be remiss not to include this:
Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.
Notice she does not say who is right or wrong. Or whether she opposes or supports “healcare reform”. She simply points out the poor quality of statements and articles by Democrats: “gestures rather than arguments”.
Precisely.
