Posted on 09/08/2009 9:55:24 PM PDT by Senator Goldwater
lets read the rest of the article too:
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.
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Which brings us to Afghanistan: Let’s get the hell out! While I vociferously opposed the incursion into Iraq, I was always strongly in favor of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan to smithereens in our search for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida training camps. But committing our land forces to a long, open-ended mission to reshape the political future of that country has been a fool’s errand from the start. Every invader has been frustrated and eventually defeated by that maze-like mountain terrain, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In a larger sense, outsiders will never be able to fix the fate of the roiling peoples of the Near East and Greater Middle East, who have been disputing territorial borderlines and slaughtering each other for 5,000 years. There is too much lingering ethnic and sectarian acrimony for a tranquil solution to be possible for generations to come. The presence of Western military forces merely inflames and prolongs the process and creates new militias of patriotic young radicals who hate us and want to take the war into our own cities. The technological West is too infatuated with easy fixes. But tribally based peoples think in terms of centuries and millennia. They know how to wait us out. Our presence in Afghanistan is not worth the price of any more American lives or treasure.
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now we can comment about the whole pile....not just the part that trashes Rats
You do make some valid points of how one’s religious upbringing is hard to escape, but, in the end, she needs to make a confession of faith in Jesus Christ. Also, she is one of the most tolerant liberals I’ve ever read, who sees the need for Christianity and other religions in people’s lives and defends their right to it.
We agree and I disagree with her sometimes but feel she is honest and sees thru liberals, knowing them as she does. It makes her opinion weighty.
On a side note- when Mimi's grandfather died a while back she found solace in hearing that Grandpa was with Ronald Reagan in Heaven.
I think Camille Paglia will go there too- she will find atheism to be cold comfort in her death-bed.
Nothing so concentrates the mind... and all that.
AV
Excellent observation. And being Catholic, it does get in your blood. Which, for me, was not a bad thing at all.
I suspect Mzz Paglia might default to her beginnings when her end is near. I certainly hope so, for her sake.
I suspect you are right. She is a brilliant woman whose intellectual heft and honestly, to say nothing of her deep appreciation for the arts, history and the finer things in life, suggests her upbringing isn't so latent. Perhaps she adopts an atheist posture to justify her homosexuality, but I could be taking way out of school here.
Just a fan's perspective. Her column is one of the best that's out there.
Large parts of this article need to be made into billboards, put on TV and spread around the web. I was absolutely astonished that a self-proclaimed Democrat could have such clear insight - and express it so well. Hard to pick my favorite, but the bit about higher education really hit hard - pickled indeed.
I don’t agree with everything she says, but a Democratic commentator with clear insight and incisive delivery is a wonder to behold.
Apparently she reads the same papers I do.
She’s one of a very few of a dying breed. And honest, thinking liberal. There aren’t many left.
I disagree with her on a lot of issues, but I really respect her, and really wish I had been able to attend her classes in college.
Mark
Paglia's intellect and respect for the truth are telling her to abandon Obama, but her heart won't allow it...yet.
Time will tell if she can take the final step and acknowledge the dishonesty and intellectual paucity of Barack Obama.
If she is indeed an “honest democrat,” then that makes two of ‘em. Caddell is the other.
My stumbling block with libertarians is abortion, since I am a Catholic. But I hear ya, pal. Do I ever...
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