What Has America’s Most Irritating Pundit Been Up To?
Since she has some unreadable new book to promote, apparently Salon is happy to inform us at the usual interminable length. Kathleen gets many of the most egregious bits, although this being Paglia* pretty much every paragraph is so asinine it could sustain an essay making fun of it. One thing I’d like to add is the particularly hilarious context of her claims about the Stalinist nature of the PPACA:
My third reason for going Green is the creeping totalitarianism of Obamacare, which Jill Stein as a physician is rightly skeptical about. I began denouncing the Obamacare bill in my Salon column within two months after Obama’s inauguration.
Sadly, I’m sure Paglia really believes that Steins problems with the PPACA stem from it representing too much government intervention into health care. I mean, she joins Matt Stoller and the Republicans on the NYT op-ed page as the only people in the world deluded enough to think that President Mitt Romney would be a Rockefeller Republican.
*The most charitable explanation for Salon publishing this is that it’s an attempt to lure the Editors out of retirement. It had better work!
When did Paglia become a “pundit”? Wasn’t she just promoted from “crackpot” to “trivia question answer”? Pundit seems out of reach.
I’m not sure she was a ‘pundit’ so much as a bizarre internet age celebuprof advice columnist. In between doling out her bizarre midrash of current events, armchair psychosexual analysis of political figures written in the style of post-modern criticism of literary fiction, drooling fanboy email correspondents would literally request her advice on their personal lives, the Ann Landers for boomers of a certain age who know what sex and good music is, but long for some good old-fashioned slut shaming.
Dr Laura also provided slut shaming, but was boring and prissy and I’m sure Paglia could craft an elegant yet sadly snide takedown, forced to bear the weight of Paglia’s own seething and limitless professional envy.
Though Paglia’s been considerably quieter since she Found Pussy in the late 1990s.
I think I mean “eloquent” not “elegant”, and I blame the cups I’m halfway into. Elegant would imply some economy of prose (indicative of wit) which has never typified Paglia’s er… er… milieu, let’s say. Or oeuvre.
Paglia’s better at this wordslinging thing to me, but at least I’m halfway sane. So there’s that.
Paglia is a Susan Sontag-wannabe who is basically the token rightwing lesbian pseudo-feminist that misogynists and homophobes can feel comfortable with.
It’s nice that you didn’t link directly to it. By the time I had finished the Kathleen Geier post, the rational, self-preserving part of my mind had managed to snatch back control from the part that would like nothing more than to stare directly into an eclipse.
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
In this case the abyss is full of derp. Horrible horrible derp.
Oh, Jesus. And I thought Monday was gonna be easy.
Look, Tebow only went 1 for 1 on Sunday…its not like the 2nd coming.
Please keep talking about sports, Manju. With the level of scholarship you bring to bear on other subjects, you could be a sports talk host, or even a correspondent for the Breitbart so-called ‘news blogs’.
+10,000,000
I would read a sports blog written by Manju.
Honestly Manju if you start a blog and put your link in your login here, you are guaranteed at least one steady reader. I’m always up for some entertaining performance art.
(But if JenBob starts a blog I’m only reading if its a recipe blog. I like pancakes!)
Being a Colts man… I hate Tebow even more now.
I mean come on man, it’s Luck’s rookie year! Give the brother a break. I take comfort in the facts that the Patriots got destroyed by the Seahawks.
There are three things I root for now:
1) Colts win
2) Patriots Lose
3) Peyton Manning wins
Is Paglia dropping acid?
when did she stop?
What do you have against dropping acid?
Obviously the wrong kind.
Sulfuric acid is just not the same thing…
This post, and several others like it, will be evidence that she is still ‘controversial’ and, therefore, deserving of the attention.
Useful links for Paglia:
The always-timely 1991 profile of her by the still-lamented Molly Ivins, a link that’s at the bottom of the Kathleen Geier post you link to.
her recent appearance on the excellent site “Letters Of Note”.
I note that in both, Paglia is invited by people more thoughtful than herself(1) to F Off. We should encourage this meme to spread; it should become the standard method of greeting Paglia.
(1) I don’t actually know anything about Julie Burchill. In the exchange, she comes off as better than Paglia mostly only by comparison, a test few could fail. Still, she must be more thoughtful than Pagila, mustn’t she?
idk about that – Burchill was one of the soi-disant enfantes terrible of music journalism around the time of punk, for NME. In a later incarnation she spewed out several trashy/sexy novels, apparently entirely with MacPlot! and MacCharacter! given the lack of originality (which of course ensured a certain level of success).
JB is, like Germaine Greer, one of those folk who’s right most of the time, even [and sometimes especially] when she sounds nuts; but is also, sometimes, catastrophically wrong-headed. Probably not on this occasion if she’s telling CP to FO, though…
I once told a woman I coined the phrase, “Pardon my French.”
i actually coined the word “commenturbation” (ie, responding to yourself).
really, i did.
I invented the concept of mutual commenturbation (replying to someone’s post solely to get them to reply to yours).
I invented the internet!
I invented Al Gore!
heh. That was the best one.
I remember voting for that. Christ, if I had it all to do over again, I wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
.Just out of curiosity, how do you know this Scott?
That’s not a challenge btw, but a genuine question. I’m curious because it sounds like something that a DW-Nominate scholar might say (among other things, their algorithm demonstrates that Republicans have moved far to the right).
So, I’m genuinely curious. Is this something than some academic has tried to quantify or is it a more subjective call. It doesn’t have to be Nominate-specific. If someone conducted a study like say Larry Bartels did re the white working class, I’d be interested in seeing that paper.
I could imagine an alternate scenario: If a republican prez took office during a recession, the current repubs in the house and senate would indeed allow him to go all Keynes…since they know their tax cut BS is really BS.
But thats just speculation. Anyway, if their is a Bartels-like figure lurking behind this theory, please link me up. Thanks.
Psglia doesn’t know anything about your pet obsession, Manju, but thanks for not contributing to the conversation.
Good thing I’m asking Scott, then.
Which makes your question even more irrelevant to the topic at hand, Manju.
You’ll get it right in 20 years or so.
Asking Scott how he knows President Mitt Romney would not be a Rockefeller Republican is more irrelevant to the topic of whether or not Romney is a Rockefeller Republican than asking Camille?
ooooookaaaaay!
He knows that Romney wouldn’t govern as a Rockerfeller Republican because of his past record, and because his base would revolt if he didn’t adhere to conservative causes like overturning Roe V Wade.
Scott used his common sense, something your precious DW-Nomintate doesn’t take into account.
Keep missing the point, Manju, it makes you seem so scholarly.
Obama-like Health Care Reform and Gun Control in MA tells Scott that Romney wouldn’t govern as a Rockefeller Republican?
Oooookaaaaayyy!
A conservative, a moderate, and a liberal walk into a bar.
Tbe bartender says, “How are you, Governor Romney?”.
That’s how anyone knows that the chances of Romney governing like a Rockerfella Republican are slim to none, no matter what DW Nominate says about him.
I am really unconvinced of the usefulness of DW-NOminate.
You should be convinced that DW-Nominate is completely useless in evaluating presidents and in comparing Congresses across generations, because it obviously is.
I agree with this part and have made the point here before. With legislators they are mining massive amounts of data and putting them thru an algorithm that was not possible until the advent of the supercomputer.
With Presidents they are only using stated positions on Congressional roll calls. The data is limited, so the whole beauty of comprehensiveness is lost.
And the data itself is not as valuable. With legislators, they don’t care what a person says, only how they vote. So fuckers like Carl Hayden, who say they are pro-civil rights, get demasked as villains…as even their “yes” vote on the final bills get drowned out by their opposition in committee. I fucking love that.
But with Presidents, they give credit for merely talking the talk.
Having said that, they produce results for Presidents that probably most here will agree with. Obama is very moderate and George II radical. Their methodology here is no worse than the anecdotal arguments pundits usually make.
Its just not as good as the spectacular data-crunching they do for legislators.
But with Presidents, they give credit for merely talking the talk.
It’s worse than that. Presidents move left and right by not passing stuff. Carter comes off as more progressive than LBJ because he couldn’t accomplish anything.
Well, if the Presidential methodology follows the legislative one, LBJ’s greatest accomplishment doesn’t move him left or right at all…since civil rights does not follow any discernible ideological pattern (and thus gets tossed onto the 2nd dimension).
That leaves the War on Poverty, which moves LBJ to the left. But Vietnam moves him back to the right some.
That helps Carter catch LBJ.
Oh, Republicans in Congress will “go Keynes,” but they will do so with unpaid upper class tax cuts. So? President Mitt Romney could not be a Rockefeller Republican even if he wanted to, which he almost certainly doesn’t.
Lets say the Euro crises produces a “double-dip” about one year into President Romney’s term. The midterms are coming and Congressional Repubs gotta get to economy rolling, or else they are sayonara.
Upper class tax cuts may be stimulative but their multiplier is very low. Giving $$ to the poor, well the multiplier there is very high.
So scenario 1 will obliterate them in the polls. Their only shot at a quick recovery is some version of scenario 2.
I can imagine a scenario where most republicans, Romney in particular, know this…and figure out a way to get it done.
Of course its possible that they do not, or that even if they do their base won’t let them.
I’m going with the scenarios in the last paragraph, but figured I’d lay out the other possibilities.
So scenario 1 will obliterate them in the polls.
Meh. They can always start one of the half-dozen wars they’ve promised us.
Aaaargh, ur right. How could I forget the single greatest datapoint in favor of the Keynesian stimulus?
“Go Keynes” not just with unpaid upper class tax cuts, but with the only stimulus that Republicans actually believe is effective. And that’s starting a war.
So bombing Iran on the credit card will be the agenda for the day. With, of course, incentive to make sure that the war doesn’t end too close to 2016. Because the lesson of Poppy Bush and Junior is that you don’t get reelected if you run a war with clear goals that ends on a tight schedule, but if you have a war that runs for years on end and can claim to be a War President during your re-election campaign, you can win.
It’s not that great of theory. The oft-floated theory of Romney as a sorta apolitical rich guy technocrat, who panders to the mouthbreathers to get elected, seems to me to based mostly on his abortion pandering while trying to get elected in Massachucets. I don’t buy that theory, but there’s more evidence for it than there is for the idea that Romney isn’t a true believer in the church of tax cuts.
Wouldn’t that suggest that he was more of a conservative who pandered to the socially liberal groups in Massachusetts to get elected?
I don’t see how “he ran more liberal than he really is” to win in MA translates into “he’s running more conservative than he really is” to win the Presidency, except in the barest political calculus where you believe that he’s got no core beliefs at all and will do whatever to get elected. (In which case there’s no reason to think you can predict what he will do with anything, since it will be based entirely on the politics of what will get him re-elected and what Congress hands him, rather than on a predictable set of beliefs).
Perhaps we should call Ms Paglia’s effusions “the Pagina monologues”.
Wow, that sort of sounds like a contraction of “Angina on a Page”. Apropos, somehow.
Those dirts ain’t gonna mix themselves.
Let’s be honest, here. The Editors is a selfish rat-bastard. There is nothing he can do in his life — not save a drowning child, not run for office, not cure cancer — that would be as valuable contribution to the world as if he resumed his blog. If you knew how to cure cancer, you would do it, right? So why doesn’t he restart his blog? Because he’s a moral monster.
+1
I actually had a sad reading the post Scott linked too. Such genius.
Also, too: the Easterbrook chronicles:
http://thepoorman.net/2008/06/18/gregg-easterbrook-is-wait-for-it-an-idiot/
He was buried with his keyboard and his cheetos, like a true warrior.
Well, we will always have the doughypantload to remind us of the golden days.
And Ken.
God this post is depressing. Periodically I check the Poor Man Institute to see if anything happened after the Video Barbie post. there’s never anything there. Then I get sad all over again.
Fear not, many others have taken up the standard. And I think I can safely say that things are better today. Easterbrook’s idiocy is marginalized, McArdle is too…
There are still many battles to be fought, but there are also many now ready to fight them. No one with quite the same wit, though.
Her shtick is just so transparently cynical. I don’t understand how anyone can actually be fooled.
Maybe they’re not. Maybe the entirety of her support comes from conservatives, and she is entirely in the business of saying what they want her to say.
Grifters with the right sound bites will never go hungry in our enlightened age.
Case in point: Ann Coulter
Much as I’d like to think that’s true, I have one data point to the contrary. My mom, who’s as lefty as can be and frighteningly intelligent, briefly admired Paglia in the ’90s based on (I think) identifying somewhat with Paglia’s ornery crankiness, and on her own interpretation of what the point of Sexual Personae would be if it had had a point. That was 20 years ago, but I imagine a younger person these days with a contrarian streak, who wasn’t familiar with CP’s long history of bullshit, could find her interesting without being a wingnut.
In the New Republic article you link:
Where did this Brooks go!? He was so right, except having faith that Republican voters would ever notice that Republicans can’t govern.
Dude still believes in independent voters. What else do you need to know?
To be more precise, he believes in independent voters who pay attention to politics in July and react to things as a New York Times columnist might.
I wonder if he watches Finding Bigfoot or Ghost Hunters, to?
Let’s give valid credit where credit is due. At one time Camille Paglia was about the only female voice calling BS on some of the more egregious nonsense being spouted by second-wave feminists. We have grown used to subsequent generations of feminists point out the limits in first and second wavers, but at the time most of those who would do so were still in grade school.
My own favourite example was Gloria Steinem criticizing Paglia for what Steinem deemed excessive self-assuredness at the same time she was plugging her book on the importance of women gaining self-confidence. Gloria really came across as wanting women to lack self-confidence if they disagreed with her, but they could gain self-confidence if they saw the world the way she did. Watching Paglia kick that inflated hypocrisy to death was really worth the price of admission.
Yes, Paglia calling Steinem the “Stalin” of the feminist movement was one of her finest hours.
Not.