Camille Paglia can be a real scream when she wants to be. The subtitle for her latest analysis of this year's presidential sweepstakes is sets the tone.
The media covers for Hillary on her email scandal while Trump gallops through the non-stop artillery barrage.
You get the drift, I think. The media simultaneous props up candidate Hillary while trying to blast Trump out of the water. To no avail. Camille makes some penetrating assessments. One that struck me was her speculation on why Bernie Sanders promises to stay in the race all the way to the Democratic National Convention in July, even if Hillary wins enough delegates to clinch the nomination before then. Camille expects there is more trouble in store for Hillary over her email and Clinton Foundation scandals, so it makes no sense for Bernie to drop out.
...Bernie Sanders (my candidate) has gone into overdrive—not to damage Hillary, as her acolytes spitefully claim, but to fight off the tactical insertion of Biden at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. Sanders could rightly claim, on the basis of his long and strenuous primary campaign, that if anyone deserves the nomination vacated by a tarnished Hillary, it is he. If Sanders does defer to Biden, it will only be via enormous concessions, beginning with the unceremonious removal of devious DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
That's the best explanation I've heard, so far. But then we get to the fun part. Although Camille would never vote for Trump, she thinks he's very funny — laugh out loud funny. She claims to actually fear a Trump presidency, but still she holds a certain admiration for his campaign style. Comparing The Donald to Hillary Camille says,
Trump’s boisterous, uncensored id makes a riveting contrast to Hillary’s plodding, joyless superego. Listening to her leaden attempts to tell rehearsed jokes is collective torture. Hillary is not now, nor has she ever been, a member of the Comedy Party.
Hillary? The superego? Now that's funny! (OK, the rest is funny, too.) According to Freud, the superego is the ethical side of the personality, the side that imposes moral standards on the ego. Imagine anybody thinking that Hillary has moral standards. Not even Camille, cut up that she is, thinks that. In fact she won't vote the Democratic ticket if Hillary is the candidate.
Trump is a stormily dynamic change-maker who will surely win this election unless the Democrats get their house in order and nominate a figure of honor and integrity. Bernie Sanders, who represents the wave of the future, is my first choice, but Joe Biden, with his international experience, would be a solid second. If the kamikaze party wants to nominate an ethically challenged incompetent like Hillary Clinton, then I’ll be voting Green for the second time. Go, Jill Stein!
Again! There she goes with the riotous humor! Democrats? Nominating a figure of honor and integrity? I told you she was a scream. But it does make you wonder how she deals with the cognitive dissonance. Camille harps on Hillary's personal dishonesty, yet supports Sanders, who promotes socialism in all of its institutional dishonesty, or Biden, a lifelong politician whose only qualification for the highest office is his consummate skill in switching positions as personal ambition requires. Camille even says she believes Elizabeth Warren really is part Cherokee. Far out.
But there's more. For some reason or other Camille compares Trump's run for the presidency to Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial bid in California. As if this is some indication of Trump's fitness for office. She quotes an earlier self, vintage 2003.
Last weekend, while plowing through my old files for an upcoming book project for Pantheon, I found a written interview I gave in October 2003 to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, which had asked me about allegations of misogyny against the newly elected governor of California. Here is an excerpt from my statement:
“I am still amazed at the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to governor—a man who has never held political office and who participated in only one serious debate. It is a disturbing sign in any nation when politics have become so inefficient and corrupt that the people turn to an outsider as ‘strong man’ for leadership. This is how fascism is born. Because it is Schwarzenegger’s machismo—represented on a superhuman scale in his films—that California voters want to attack the entrenched special interests in Sacramento, his behavior toward women was irrelevant. Or rather, his behavior actually reinforced his virile image as a forceful personality who pushes through barriers.”
How eerily history seems to be repeating itself!
What history is she talking about? Fascism was born in California under Schwarzenegger? Seems to me whatever fascism there is in California was imported. Especially if we're talking about the fascist brownshirts who attacked Trump supporters in San Jose. If that's the history that's eerily repeating itself, it's actually Bernie Sanders and his leftist allies who brought fascism to California. Tammy Bruce weighs in:
Make no mistake — these supposed anti-Trump riots are not organic nor are they natural; they are the result of leftist organizing using paid stooges. Fox News reported in March a Craigslist ad posted by Bernie Sanders supporters offering $15 an hour to protest at a Trump rally in Wisconsin. They would also provide shuttle bus transport, parking if you needed it and ready-made signs.
[...]
In March, Kelly Riddell of this newspaper reported the leftist agitating group MoveOn.org, which has endorsed Bernie Sanders and is funded by Hillary supporter George Soros, sent out a fundraising email after liberal agitators managed to shut down a Trump rally in Chicago. In their email to supporters MoveOn.org highlighted the support they provided those agitators:
“We’ve been ramping up our efforts for months… to the support we provided students in Chicago last night by printing signs and a banner and recruiting MoveOn.org members to join their peaceful protest,” the MoveOn.org email continued, “We need to double-down in the face of direct attacks on our community,” reported Ms. Riddell.
The problem, of course, was the so-called protest in Chicago, like the one in San Jose, was anything but peaceful.
Fascism is nothing more than socialism with a crony-capitalist twist. Over half a century ago in an abrupt about face, leftists turned on fascism, declaring it to be a right-wing evil. That was when the National Socialist Hitler and the Fascisti Mussolini gave fascism a bad name. Up until World War II, leftist were all aglow over fascism, considering it the wave of the future. You might expect a brilliant academic like Camille Paglia would know this. But even with her intellect and penetrating analysis, Paglia continues to have a blind spot for the nature of socialism, facism, and the Democratic party.
Here's the problem. A vote for any Democrat this year is a ratification of Obama's executive branch overreach. It is a blessing on the lawless hijacking of federal agencies for Democratic party activism. The press will look the other way, ignore the abuse, for as long as a Democrat sits in the Oval Office. America as we know it is gone. And Trump? Even if he wanted to abuse his presidential powers, neither the Republican congress nor the press will be on his side.
Comments