Camille on Target

Camille Paglia emits scathing but highly literate and well-informed commentary about both sides every month. This month, she notes that both establishments have been eviscerated:

Disemboweling is evidently the theme du jour. As the political wars rage in this amazingly acrimonious primary season, the skin has been ripped off the establishment in both parties, and their guts have been exposed. We're seeing the pulsing inner workings of partisan ideology as never before.

On the Republican side, conservatives marshaled by leading radio hosts have hotly rebelled against the onrushing nomination of Sen. John McCain, who has been vilified for years for his slippery positions and his schmoozing with liberals. On the Democratic side, rank-and-file party members have been shocked to discover that there is a ruling elite of 800 superdelegates, who have the power to crown the presidential nominee and who can be easily swayed or corrupted by lobbying.

As usual, Camille serves the choicest shots for the loathesome crones populating Hillary's peanut gallery on the degenerate distaff side, including childless not-so-golden-oldie Steinem.

The old-guard feminist establishment has also rushed out of cold storage to embrace Hillary Clinton via tremulous manifestoes of gal power that have startlingly exposed the sentimental slackness of thought that made Gloria Steinem and company wear out their welcome in the first place. Hillary's gonads must be sending out sci-fi rays that paralyze the paleo-feminist mind -- because her career, attached to her husband's flapping coattails, has sure been heavy on striking pious attitudes but ultra-light on concrete achievements.

Yes, those "35 years of public service" have also been ultra-light on their very existence, since she practiced as a lawyer for a Little Rock law firm for over fifteen years of those "thirty-five." Of course, as Camille notes later on:

...the three-faced Hillary, that queen of triangulation, would be a nice big gift to Republicans, who are itching to romp all over the Clintons' 20-volume encyclopedia of tawdry scandals.

Camille is fair to the talk-radio shows, who have a much larger audience than the lightweight crews on cable news and broadcast TV news and are thus despised by the mamma's boys and Katie:

The angst and fury boiling on talk radio, from both hosts and callers, have been truly operatic in drama and intensity. It's been a riveting spectator sport. But this eruption would come as no surprise to longtime listeners. What the mainstream press has failed to realize is that nationally syndicated hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, have always drawn a very firm distinction between their views and those of the party establishment in Washington. They have consistently maintained, and supported it in detail, that they are conservatives first and Republicans second. They have fiercely denounced the party when it has strayed from conservative principles. McCain, who has co-sponsored liberal legislation and courted and flattered Beltway journalists, has been a longtime target.

As Laura Ingraham, the most intelligent and best-looking of the radio hosts avers, the reason that listeners tune in is precisely because the talk-shows answer to no known establishment and are eclectically sincere in their observations on politics, culture, and public morality.

This disarray among Republicans, which may depress voter turnout or even spawn a protest splinter party, offers a fantastic opening to Democrats, if the party can only seize it. The galvanizing energy aroused by Barack Obama's thrilling coast-to-coast victories gives Democrats a clear shot at regaining the White House.

But Obama is not a member of any establishment, not even the Black Caucus, and Uncle Toms like the NAACP's Julian Bond, BET's Johnson, Andy Young, Ed Rendell, and other hacks rush to offer aid and comfort to Hillary in her Gethsemane of abandonment. But McCain doesn't get a free ride from Camille:

John McCain's courage under torture during the Vietnam War deserves everyone's gratitude and respect. But as a national candidate, the stumpy, uptight McCain is a lemon. Oy, that weaselly voice and those dated locutions and stilted intonations. Who needs a weird old coot with a short fuse in the White House? This isn't a smart game plan for the war on terror.

Yes, a Leadership candidate with Anger-management issues might not be the best way to go in foreign policy, but matched against Obama's apparent cluelessness with Iran & Pakistan, I myself will side with McCain's tantrum-prone hard-headedness.