Category Archives: Politics

Paglia’s Statist Prattle

Barack Obama, Democrats, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, The State

Camille Paglia is the scrappy Democrat adored by conservatives. On politics, she conceals heavy-duty statism behind the fig leaf of libertarianism. In the realm of art and culture, she substitutes symbolism for substantive assessment. Remember her clapped out claptrap about the significance of drag-queen iconography? What she knows about music is positively dangerous; she has conceptualized of Madonna—who is unable to sing or compose a warble worth hearing—as “an authentic, creative artist”? The Paglia prattle about the mismanaged sexuality of well-worn, ugly monsters like Britney Spears, here, was as worn and uninteresting as anything Gloria Steinem has ever mustered.

This month’s canned performance, “Obama’s healthcare horror,” can be followed from the conservative, Drudge newssite. (The “edgy” stuff about nude depictions is supposed to give this bit of banality a cutting-edge feel. Please! How original do you have to be to admit that Sharon Stone takes a good picture?)

Here’s a quick précis of the essay that instantiates Paglia’s hallmark statism and proclivity for the stylistic over the substantive:

• She voted for Obama so that he could repair the country’s IMAGE overseas. She’s pleased with that choice.
• She has complaints as far as his domestic policy, but they concern strategy rather than philosophy.
• A case in point: “healthcare reform,” which she thinks is the most important thing confronting dying America. It, of course, has been merely mishandled.
• The once beloved House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is no longer in Camille’s good books.
• Congress is “chaotic, rapacious, and solipsistic”; Obama is usually “sober and deliberative.”
• It is the State’s responsibility to see to it that an individual in “a major crisis,” or “earning at or below a median income,” has healthcare.
• More tired odes to the 1960s and the Democratic Party as a relic of that great era.
• Poor Camille is disillusioned. She never saw it coming: “I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic Party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.”
• Camille beats on breast because her “party is drifting toward a soulless collectivism.” Pray tell, Ms. Paglia, what would a soulful collectivism look like?
• Obamby failed to engender an “in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries.” Another one of Ms. Paglia’s contradictory spasms; big pharma/business bad; big Obama good.
• On the Gates Case; she has nothing new to say that has not already been said by Pat Buchanan and this column.
• “The basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm.” That was said by your host first.

(The same goes for Paglia’s eventual evaluation of the blogosphere; it came well after mine and only echoed what I had said in “The Importance of Boundaries.”)

THERE ARE A FEW paragraphs that are poignant. For instance: “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.”

Overall, you’re better off watching the pictures linked, instead.

Used Car Sales Tactics

Barack Obama, Healthcare, Politics, Socialism

SEX. GREED. FEAR. These are the time-honored sales tactics B. Hussein is using in pushing his healthscare Obamination. Who better to vouch for Obama’s used-car sales methods than a used-car salesman entertained on Neil Cavuto’s FoxNews program? B. Hussein got top marks from Cavuto’s car guy for hyping the sex appeal of the deal (cheap, good), for baffling Boobus with the numbers, and for playing on the fears we all harbor about our own mortality, and hammering home the urgency of the “deal.”. I could not find the segment on YouTube, but Don Imus invited Cavuto on his show to talk about it. Listen here.

In last week’s column, “And Now for Something Completely Different,” I mentioned the Mayo Clinic, which, as one of our readers pointed out, Obama had confused with the Mao Clinic:

Obama—who, to paraphrase poetry critic William Logan, never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying—promised that his medical system would be a well-oiled machine much like the Mayo Clinic is. There, “experts have figured out the most effective treatments and eliminated waste and unnecessary procedures,” preached the president.

Unlike Mephisto’s Medicare, the key to Mayo—and many such private not-for-profits—is not the all-knowing, demigod experts. Mayo clinic operates as smoothly as it does because it is a private clinic, where market forces and a mission combine to motivate dedicated entrepreneurs and professionals to minimize losses and maximize profits, so as to plow these back into an organization in which all are invested.

What’s the government’s mission? To keep Americans in the missionary position?

Well, what do you know: as the Washington Times reports, this superb clinic is panning Obamacare.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Barack Obama, Economy, EU, Healthcare, Iran, Neoconservatism, Politics, Regulation, Russia, Socialism

A girl has to have some fun: In my new WND.COM column, “And Now For Something Completely Different,” I invite you to laugh along about the EO (The European Onion), “A-Jad,” Geithner (the gift that keeps giving), and Obama who “never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying”:

“Although Obama has appointed more czars in six months than Russia’s Romanov Dynasty had occasion to anoint over three centuries, he is still missing a Vegetable Czar. If he acts quickly, Barack might be able to recruit a cheap VC with experience from The European Onion (formerly the EU).

The EO has been regulating fresh produce for quite some time. Duly, the Brussels Sprouts that run the Continent had barred “curly cucumbers, crooked carrots and mottled mushrooms – any odd-looking fruit and vegetables” — from Europe’s markets and supermarkets

But things are about to change. As the BBC News reported in a burst of good cheer, “July 1 marks the return to our shelves of the curved cucumber and the knobbly carrot.” Indeed, Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has finally disavowed the rules that were introduced to ensure common standards among EU vegetables, “but are regarded by critics as examples of Euro-madness.”

Said the Patron Saint of ‘wonky’ vegetables…”

The complete column is “And Now For Something Completely Different.”

Miss the weekly column on WND.COM? Catch it on Taki’s Magazine every Saturday.

Updated: Palin Gives Up Governorship (‘Only Dead Fish Go With The Flow’)

Media, Military, Political Philosophy, Politics, Sarah Palin

I’m glad I waited a few hours pursuant to the announcements on cable that Sarah Palin had resigned, before posting this. For that is how long it has taken to get the truth from the horse’s mouth. To listen to David Shyster of MSNBC, with his version of news, you’d think Palin was leaving politics. This was the crawl caption plastered below Shuster’s facetious face:

Palin Leaving politics for good.

A bit of wishful thinking.

The same odious character was quick to conduct the ubiquitous interviews with Palin’s Alaskan GOP rivals. You see, beamed Shyster, a lot of sensible Republicans believe Palin lacks gravitas (something Barney Frank oozes).

Why my prudent wait? For the first few hours following the announcement, the cable culprits failed to screen Palin’s brief press conference announcing her resignation. When they finally did, the short resignation speech was truncated, and only the incoherent parts excerpted, as Anderson Cooper pulled ugly faces, and his colleague Candy Crowley feigned horror.

Why?

Our faux journalists and their producers are quite capable of screening and re-screening clips they like at a rate that would drive the placid Dalai Lama to a homicidal rage.

Granted, Palin, as I have said before, doesn’t know when to stop rambling. That much is true. But her announcement was, for the better part, perfectly coherent and even inspired in places (hell, anyone who favorably mentions the Tenth Amendment and States’ Rights inspires me, if only fleetingly).

Here it is. Decide for yourselves.

Update (July 4): To those on whom distinctions, made in plain English, are lost, this post, of course, is a critique of the coverage of the Palin resignation, not an endorsement of the woman’s political plank, an impossibility for this classical liberal.

For more on Palin—her empty homilies to our dead-as-a-doornail Constitution, her profoundly feminist, mod approach to her daughter’s foray into siring a (poor) bastard baby, her promises to erect unconstitutional government departments to serve the retarded, her whooping it up for equally unconstitutional, immoral wars, her selling her soul by soaking up McMussolini’s creed; on-and-on—all in the Sarah Palin archive, on your right.

Did she display promise? Of course. You’d have to be an idiot, or an envy-riddled female, or both, not to recognize her Reaganesque charisma (although he served as governor for 9 years, no quitting). But she has shown no learning curve.

Take this bit from her resignation speech:

“…this most recent trip to Kosovo and Landstuhl, to visit our wounded soldiers overseas, those who sacrifice themselves in war for our freedom and security… we can ALL learn from our selfless Troops… they’re bold, they don’t give up, they take a stand and know that life is short so they choose to not waste time. They choose to be productive and to serve something greater than self… and to build up their families, their states, our country. These Troops and their important missions – those are truly the worthy causes in this world and should be the public priority with time and resources and not this local / superficial wasteful political bloodsport.”

[SNIP]

I mean, what on earth are we still doing in Kosovo, and how does that relate to “freedom” here at home, the proper purview of a constitutional government?! This Bush-era neocon nonsense I do not miss. As for the “military” being so much better than the rest of us, to quote, “I confess to growing as sick-and-tired of the odes to the military in militarized America, as I have of the constant fretting over the toll stratospheric state debt will take on ‘our children.’ (What about all us stiffed working stiffs?) About the country’s under-educated, over-indulged, hyper-sexed, super-confident kids I don’t care. (I’m confident the homeschooled among them will survive on this road to serfdom.) The military is certainly no more deserving than the rest of us…”