Posted on 10/23/2009 11:12:50 PM PDT by neverdem
Yes, free the president from his flacks, fixers and goons -- his posse of smirky smart alecks and provincial rubes, who were shrewd enough to beat the slow, pompous Clintons in the mano-a-mano primaries but who seem like dazed lost lambs in the brave new world of federal legislation and global statesmanship.
Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama's first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)
Of course. We finally had a great opportunity. It was a chance to rethink everything that had failed as a result of the shoddy thinking in the Sixties and to try again with a new, reasoned approach. The Clinton administration should have been a think tank for the nation--he himself should have led the debate, reaffirming all Sixties ideals but correcting them where they had become excessive. It's a tragedy that he didn't. Instead of surrounding himself with progressive intellectuals, he surrounded himself with Eighties yuppies--like George Stephanopoulos, whom I loathe with a passion. I wish Clinton would fire everyone around him. I want a Saturday night massacre. I hate them all. But Clinton has totally lost the persona of leadership. It's pathetic. He's looking like a salesman.
Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? [...] It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings.
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
How has "liberty" become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? [...] I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past. [...]
[A]ffluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible.
Thanks for the link. That’s a great essay!
However, I believe these people represent the real Obama. Sorry, I don't believe Ms. Paglia's reading the liberal tea leaves right. It sounds reasonable when you read it but when you stop and think about she's the one getting fooled.
Good points. I just usually enjoy Paglia's essays when I stumble across them. When she's on the money, she doesn't suffer fools gladly.
Cheers!
Steyn.
Miss Paglia unlike most of the Left today loves Western Civilization an its achievements. If you remember she was going gaga when Pope John Paul II died because the world would get a close hand look at the glories of the Renaissance and the pomp of the Catholic Church.
If you are a used care salesman, you will be even more offended, because he seems to me that stereotypical type.
I’ll never understand why the Dims didn’t tap Feinstein in’84. Of all the females who are front and center, she seems to be most “real,” Not that I know much more about her than the public face she shows. Maybe something about the husband, or even that she is Jewish.
Maybe they figured Ferraro would bring Italians and Catholics back to the party.
The Democrats already had the Jews, so Feinstein might have driven off more voters than she brought in.
BTW, Jeane Kirkpatrick gave a rousing speech at the Republican convention about the out-of-the-mainstream "San Francico Democrats" in reference to the Democratic convention in that city.
The Democratic convention happened first and Ferraro was already on the ticket when Kirkpatrick spoke, but you know that if Feinstein were the VP nominee, that "San Francisco Democrat" line would have stuck and hurt the Dems.
The problem is “thoughtful conservatives” seem to be in short supply these days. The tabloid schtick of FoxNews doesn’t count.
However, I believe these people represent the real Obama. Sorry, I don't believe Ms. Paglia's reading the liberal tea leaves right. It sounds reasonable when you read it but when you stop and think about she's the one getting fooled.
Maybe "these people" working for Obama represent only one aspect of Obama!
That would be, the show-up-late, vote-present, make-me-editor-of-the-Harvard-law-review (but don't ask me to actually do the writing) Obama.
He wants to be #1 (by parroting comments cleared by Axelrod), and to delegate the actual work to others (which found its way to those who are only too happy to take over White House functions to push their own agendas).
That’s funny! I do know that she admires what she calls “principled conservatives”. She said she admired Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger(sp?), and defended the latter when she was being attacked a few years back about her radio show! I can’t remember what it was about for sure.
I do know Dr. Laura was under fire from liberals who were trying to destroy her and her show. Camille was defending her, and was angry that people on the left were tearing her down!
I don’t agree. I find Camille irritating but very interesting. She actually sees all the stuff that is wrong with the democrats, with the Obama administration and yet, and yet, the liberal alien growing inside her has been there too long. She can’t just cough it up.
I’m watching to see if she ever will be able to. She’s smart but there’s a little switch in her brain that turns off when she’s tempted to go all the way and be what she basically is ... a conservative with a lot of liberal ideas.
The nomination of Ferraro led to the start of something: Cardinal O’Connor hit her because she was pro-choice, and this incident revealed something that was going on in the Church: a divide between the likes of Cardinal Berdardin and the likes of O’Connor. The feud is still going on today, as evidenced in the fuss over the Notre Dame Speech this year. One reason why Ferraro made so little difference was that conservative Catholics, who normally voted Catholic perceived that the Protestant Reagan had more in common with them than the liberal Catholic Ferraro. So the ploy of running a Catholic did not work at all. So today we have that little weasel Patrick Kennedy ranting against the Church for daring to oppose the noble caesar’s health bill just because it provides funding for abortions.
She has a sexual impediment.
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