Camille Hates The Sin, Loves The Sinner
Paglia swears she doesn't have buyer's remorse about Obama, but isn't exactly a fan of Obamacare, writing on Salon:
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.
I'm a big fan of hers but she does have serious blind spots.
Originally she was a big John Edwards supporter. How someone as smart as her could fall for that snake charmer is beyond me. But then again, she still loves the Messiah too.
And for someone who likes to hold people accountable for their mistakes, she switched from Edwards to Obama like she was switching brands of laundry detergent. Barely a passing mention in the article I read after the scandal finally hit the MSM.
sean at August 13, 2009 5:14 AM
For the same reason that "The Game" works.
The bulk of women like to be flattered, and like having attention paid to them by attractive, suave men.
Because the bulk of women feel before they think. It's just the way they're wired. And it takes a special kind of woman to get past that.
brian at August 13, 2009 7:34 AM
She was an Edwards supporter?!
Amy Alkon at August 13, 2009 7:49 AM
She was.
I pulled this up from one of her articles during the primaries:
Figures showing John Edwards trailing in the polls merely reflect his lack of publicity in the period leading up to the first big nationally televised debates, when most voters start to pay attention. Many Democrats like me who are leaning toward Edwards have to be dissatisfied with his marginalization by the mainstream media as well as with his recessiveness during the mastodon-on-mastodon tango between Hillary and Obama. At first I thought Edwards was shrewd to hold fire and pace himself to come on strong later, but this delay is starting to look like uncertainty.
Hence my unhappy surprise when Edwards, who has an attractively comprehensive social policy and strong oratorical skills, was the first to pull out of the scheduled August debate moderated by Fox News.
*****
I can't find her piece where she switched to Obama after the Edwards scandal hit. I remember barely 1 sentence mentioning that she used to support Edwards.
Sean at August 13, 2009 8:12 AM
I found it really odd that she criticized the quality of the people around Obama (" juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.")but doesn't criticize Obama himself. It's as though she thinks these nasty people just arranged themselves around Obama and he did nothing about them.
And it that's what she thinks, isn't that like saying he's incredibly stupid and naive?
Other than that, I have to agree with a lot of her assessment about the healthcare reform mess.
Lynne at August 13, 2009 9:40 AM
Paglia correctly criticizes the Obama administration as if Obama is not connected to it. If only Obama had not delegated this or that (including healthcare!) and trusted many someone-elses to handle other things, then all would be well.
Consider the "stimulus" package. He gets the $787 billion, and oops! it just gets away from him, into the hands of a congress that doesn't play nice. From stimulus to pork in 8 weeks.
Is Obama angry? Does he criticize his congress for being a bit piggish? No, the stimulus is going as planned, he says. Is it pork spending? Well yes, he says, but that is the whole idea, to spend and spend. Then, we'll all be rich.
In Obama's world you can shoot an arrow in any direction, and it magically hits the target, just because you want it to. Shooting arrows with the right attitude is enough.
It seems he is a bit eager to pass legislation, probably just the exitement and all. Like a kid at the lever of power, he can't get over the feeling of pulling it and pulling it. From up there, we all look like ants, and he can improve our nest, or watch us scurry around. Resistance is futile.
Old Russia had a peasant people who looked at their Czar with some religious trust. Call it mass Stockholm Syndrome. The Czar could crush them without a thought, and the peasants had to have hope that the Czar was good. If only the Czar could be made aware of the terrible things his administration was doing, then he would fix things.
It seems that half of the U.S. has this peasant outlook. This all can't be Obama's fault, he is good. His ministers are only taking advantage of him, and when he finds out, all will be well.
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What can we do now? We must demand policy papers from our politicians, where they fully investigate and justify their proposals. We can't live with "let's try this and see".
Reading the bill(s) is torture, an attempt to decode something that is obviously in code. So, I say, where are the official, government policy papers that clearly lay out the plans, principles, and justifications for the legislation? It is the responsibility of the government to officially explain its policy.
It is not our job to read tea leaves and pick apart 1000 page bills written in Old English to figure out what the bills are really saying. The whole idea of "legislative language" is to obscure what is going on. Whatever I extract or infer, I am drawing my own conclusions, and the government can say that I am misguided.
If Obama is wise and good, then have him show his ability and insight by presenting the policy papers that guide his legislation. He has to have them. It would be unthinkable that Obama would attempt to legislate major changes in society without a written, organized analysis of proposed results, proposed evolution, methods, justifications, comparative studies, past successes, funding sources, the works.
Regardless of your party or philosophy, you should demand this display of thought and investigation. Demand it ahead of any legislation. The rule of construction is "Measure twice and cut once".
Obama wouldn't try to legislate from some scribbles on a cocktail napkin, would he? He wouldn't say "give me anything, we'll rearrange it later to do what I want", would he?
Join me in the demand to "Show me the policy paper!". If Obama refuses or says that it doesn't exist, then mock him with "Show me the cocktail napkin!"
A Few Words About Policy
Andrew_M_Garland at August 13, 2009 10:28 AM
Her best line:
| 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.
These people want to live your life for you, because they think they're better at it than you are. Nicer... Smarter. It's nothing personal... They feel that way about everybody.
Crid [CridComment @ gmail] at August 13, 2009 10:44 AM
> I remember barely 1 sentence
> mentioning that she used to
> support Edwards.
What would you need? How much text would it take? I don't understand comments like this, Sean. Not just on blogs, and not just about the support of politicians. What do you want?
New information arrived, so someone's opinion changed. Isn't that what you want to have happen, especially for people you dislike?
Paglia is not herself a politician, OK? She's promised nothing to the teacher's unions or the dock workers or the insurance companies. She can change her mind without obligation to share the gritty details of her judgment.
We're on a dynamic planet! I"m fifty years old: It wasn't until I was in grade school that plate tectonics became broadly accepted as fact. Should I have resented the geologists for their new beliefs when I was in second grade? Should they have continued to use the lectures they'd used when I was in kindergarten?
To challenge someone's integrity, you've got cite something more than a change of opinion. Principled thinkers change their opinions –and even their principles– all the time. It's only teenagers who feel compelled to shout "Gotcha!"
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What's more amazing to me is that people have such personal trust in Obama anyway. As Lynne notes, this trust is divorced from his actual conduct. Paglia's not a pimply teenager who has a crush on Jack Kennedy... I can't explain her fascination.
Were an eighth through with this presidential term of administration: There have been no surprises for me.
Crid [CridComment @ gmail] at August 13, 2009 11:24 AM
I love, Paglia...but I too don't get what this blaming everyone else but Obama thing is about. I love reading her columns but I really thought she was going to be more critical of Obama this time.
I'll be enjoying the usual monthly slow-walk in anticipation of her next column.
Feebie at August 13, 2009 12:12 PM
"What would you need? How much text would it take?"
Something like this would do it:
As a Democrat who was supporting him until Obama showed his mettle during the primary debates, I was shocked by how badly John Edwards has behaved during the lurid flap over his private life. I'm not surprised and really don't care that Edwards had an extramarital affair, but what a craven, sniveling little worm he has turned out to be -- fleeing into hotel bathrooms, pretending to know nothing about payoffs under his nose, offering a paternity test while the mother bizarrely refuses it, and canonizing his long-suffering wife while doing her dirt. Elizabeth Edwards too has been ethically compromised because of her aggressively sanctimonious defense of her husband's reputation over the past year. Both of them well deserve their exile from the Democratic convention.
sean at August 13, 2009 12:23 PM
It's remarkable how closely you've matcher her tone!
I have five megabytes of Paglia text on this hard drive... Text files, OK? ASCII, not PDFs or Docs. And that doesn't include her books! I have no reason to think she didn't write something very much like your sample. For all I know, you've copied that from somewhere just to fuck with us. She's been roundly mocked for precisely the tone you ascribe, writing as if we all cared which side of her toast she chose to butter this morning.
If you care about Paglia, you're too old to be playing a teenager's 'Gotcha!' game over apparent hypocrisy. The problem is that teenagers are new to real life, where things move in real time. In order for their unacclimated brains to find ego support in the threatening world that swirls around them, they have to insist that everything come to a complete stop while they ploddingly search for inconsistencies. This makes them into good-for-nuthin' hooligans.
Crid [CridComment @ gmail] at August 13, 2009 2:05 PM
Single-payor, no lawsuits, and yes, euthanasia. It will be cheaper. We cannot keep a lot of old crones alive forever. It is too expensive.
Only national health insurance can do these things.
Bring it on. Countries with NHI spend less, as a percent of GDP, on health care than does the US. So it can be cheaper.
Yes,sometimes you will have to wait for care. waa-waa. Yes, rich people should pay. waa-waa.
Really, the righties are getting cramps on this one. I have never seen so many pinch-faced weenies, except maybe in a French whorehouse.
i-holier-than-thou at August 13, 2009 8:23 PM
"I have five megabytes of Paglia text on this hard drive... Text files, OK? ASCII, not PDFs or Docs. And that doesn't include her books!"
Crid.
You sound like a little kid who just had his favorite blanket stolen.
Is Camille your Binky????
Can I call her by her first name or is that too upsetting for you?
Is there anyone else we need to be aware of that you are obsessed with? Maybe someone that has 5.5 mb's or even 6 mb's of ASCII files on your hard disk? Or is it just Camille that makes your disk hard?
And don't you think she's worthy of having her ASCII files converted to PDF's??? Or is it really you that are not worthy??? Hmmmmm... lots for you + your shrink to discuss.
Good Luck.
Sean at August 13, 2009 8:38 PM
> a little kid who just had his
> favorite blanket stolen.
Naw, a middle-aged guy who's just seen an admired intellectual senselessly mocked. Who's in deeper need for hero-worship, the one who takes it as it comes, or the one who demands that the grown-ups answer their every piddling impulse?
As always, Amy's hard drive has space for you to do better. Let's set aside a few sectors of the hard disk right now! And then you can fill it up by being direct and on-point and sensible and proportionate. Annnnnnd... Go!:
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Crid [CridComment @ gmail] at August 13, 2009 9:31 PM
"Naw, a middle-aged guy who's just seen an admired intellectual senselessly mocked."
Admired??? That's an interesting way to describe it. Did you "admire" your Mommy when you were little too? Did she not give you enough attention?? Did she spank you when you wet the bed? Geeze, you're a therapist's dream.
And "SENSELESSLY MOCKED?!????!!!!!". HOW THE FUCK DARE I?????????? WHO COULD IMAGINE SUCH A THING IN A BLOG COMMENT!!!!!!
If only Crid the all-knowing, all-mighty judge of what is right and proper could talk some sense into me. Then my mocking would make sense!!!!!
Crid, seriously.
Get the fuck over yourself.
sean at August 14, 2009 7:05 AM
NEVVVAHH!!!
Besides, you're being silly.
Crid [CridComment @ gmail] at August 14, 2009 11:13 AM
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