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QueenB
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 03:01 am |
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Too late for Obama to turn it around?
Plus: The left's visionaries lost their bearings on drugs -- but the GOP is led by losers
By Camille Paglia
Sep. 09, 2009 |
What a difference a month makes! When my last controversial column posted on Salon in the second week of August, most Democrats seemed frozen in suspended animation, not daring to criticize the Obama administration's bungling of healthcare reform lest it give aid and comfort to the GOP. Well, that ice dam sure broke with a roar. Dissident Democrats found their voices, and by late August even the liberal lemmings of the mainstream media, from CBS to CNN, had drastically altered their tone of reportage, from priggish disdain of the town hall insurgency to frank admission of serious problems in the healthcare bills as well as of Obama's declining national support.
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration's strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have -- from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama's plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats' main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP's facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.
This column has been calling for heads to roll at the White House from the get-go. Thankfully, they do seem to be falling faster -- as witness the middle-of-the-night bum's rush given to "green jobs" czar Van Jones last week -- but there's a long way to go. An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president's innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to "help" the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare?
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? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. 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. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.
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? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin's book "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto," which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party -- but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan's 1964 song "Chimes of Freedom," made famous by the Byrds? And here's Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with "Freedom! Freedom!" Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song "A Different Drum," with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: "All I'm saying is I'm not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me."
But affluent 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. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.
Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.
But dreaming in the 1960s and '70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time. Here's a gorgeous example: Bob Welch's song "Hypnotized." which appears on Fleetwood Mac's 1973 album "Mystery to Me." (The contemplative young man in this recent video is not Welch.) It's a peyote dream inspired by Carlos Castaneda's fictionalized books: "They say there's a place down in Mexico/ Where a man can fly over mountains and hills/ And he don't need an airplane or some kind of engine/ And he never will." This exhilarating shamanistic vision (wonderfully enhanced by Christine McVie's hymnlike backing vocal) captures the truth-seeking pilgrimages of my generation but also demonstrates the dangerous veering away from mundane social responsibilities. If the left is an incoherent shambles in the U.S., it's partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left. (I addressed the drugs cataclysm in "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" in the Winter 2003 issue of Arion.)
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.
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.
In response to persistent queries, I must repeat: No, I do not have a Facebook page, nor am I a "friend" on anyone else's Facebook. Nor do I Twitter. This Salon column is my sole Web presence. Whatever doppelgänger Camille Paglias are tripping the light fantastic out there (as in the haunted bus-station episode of "The Twilight Zone"), they aren't me!
Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.
-- By Camille Paglia
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Roy
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 04:02 am |
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Damn! 
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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QueenB
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 12:22 pm |
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More on Afghanistan from PB>
Obama at the Rubicon
by Patrick J. Buchanan
If the aphorism holds -- the guerrilla wins if he does not lose --
the Taliban are winning and America is losing the war in
Afghanistan.
Well into the eighth year of war, the Taliban are more numerous
than ever, inflicting more casualties than ever, operating in more
provinces than ever and controlling more territory than ever. And
their tactics are more sophisticated.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal calls the situation "serious." Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen calls it "serious" and
"deteriorating."
President Obama thus faces a decision that may decide the fate of
his presidency. For if the situation is grave and deteriorating, he
cannot do nothing. Inaction invites, if it does not assure, defeat.
Does he cut U.S. losses, write off Afghanistan as not worth any
more American blood and treasure, and execute a strategic retreat?
Or does he become the war president who sends McChrystal the scores
of thousands of U.S. troops necessary to stave off a defeat for all
the years needed to conscript and train an Afghan army that can and
will defend the Kabul regime and pacify the country?
Afghanistan is being called Obama's Vietnam.
It could become that, and bring down his presidency as Vietnam
brought down Lyndon Johnson's. But Afghanistan is not yet Vietnam
in terms either of troops committed or casualties taken.
The 68,000 Americans who will be in Afghanistan at year's end are
an eighth of the forces in Vietnam when Richard Nixon began to
bring them home. Vietnam cost the lives of 58,000 Americans. The
Afghan war has cost fewer than 1,000. U.S. casualties in
Afghanistan are as yet only a fifth of the U.S. losses in the
Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902.
If we compare Afghanistan to Vietnam, we are about in 1964, when
the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed and the bombing of the North
began, or December 1965, when the Marines came ashore at Danang.
Obama can still choose not to fight this war.
But should he so choose, he will be charged by Republicans and
neoconservatives with a loss of nerve, with having cut and run,
with having lost what he himself has repeatedly called a "war of
necessity," with having abandoned the noble cause for which many of
America's best and bravest have already paid the ultimate price.
And it needs be said: The consequences of a U.S. withdrawal today
would be far greater than if we had never gone in, or had gone in,
knocked over the Taliban, run al-Qaida out of the country, gotten
out and gone home.
Instead, we brought NATO in, put tens of thousands of troops in and
declared our determination to build an Afghan democracy that would
be a model for the Islamic world, where women's rights were
protected.
After inviting the world to observe how the superpower succeeds in
taking down a tyranny and creating a democracy, we will have
failed, and we will be perceived by the whole world to have failed.
While there was no vital U.S. interest in Afghanistan before we
went in, we have invested so much blood, money and prestige that
withdrawal now -- which would entail a Taliban takeover of Kabul and
the Pashtun south and east -- would be a strategic debacle
unprecedented since the fall of Saigon.
But what if Obama approves McChrystal's request and puts another
20,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops into the war?
Certainly, that would stave off any defeat. But what is the
assurance it would bring enduring victory closer? The Taliban have
matched us escalation for escalation and are now militarily
stronger than at any time since the Northern Alliance, with U.S.
air support, ran them out of Kabul.
About the political consequences of escalation, there is no doubt.
Obama would divide his party and country. His support would
steadily sink as the roll call of U.S. dead and wounded inexorably
rose. He would watch as the NATO allies moved toward the exit and
America was left alone to fight alongside the Afghans in a
seemingly endless war.
Consider. If there were no Americans in Afghanistan today, and the
Taliban were on the verge of victory, how many of us would demand
the dispatch of 68,000 troops to fight to prevent it? Few, if any,
one imagines.
What that answer suggests is that the principal reason for fighting
on is not that Afghanistan is vital, but that we cannot accept the
American defeat and humiliation that withdrawal would mean.
Thus Obama's dilemma: Accept a longer, bloodier war with little
hope of ultimate victory, a decision that could cost him his
presidency. Or order a U.S. withdrawal and accept defeat, a
decision that could cost him his presidency.
In such situations, presidents often decide not to decide.
Harry Truman could not decide in Korea. LBJ could not decide in
Vietnam. Both lost their presidencies. Ike and Nixon came in, cut
U.S. losses and got out. The country rewarded both with second
terms.
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*Phil*
Opinionated Interventionist
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 02:52 pm |
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For a Democrat Paglia totally rocks ( as always ).
This just came up on my radar. Obama will chair the UN Security Council and coincidentally the US Senate is pushing forward a bill to adopt the UN law that all children have the right to choose their own religion ( or none at all ) even if it goes against the wishes of their parents.
____________________
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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QueenB
Honored Fellow Grover
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 05:03 pm |
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Does that mean they do not have to obey any rules in their family? How detailed is it?
The UN dictating the US is as bad as Obama ..Is this going into mainstream news yet?
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*Phil*
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 05:47 pm |
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You can start here --> http://www.parentalrights.org/
And google more.
Children will have the right to report disputes to the government and the government will rule what is best based on the proposed law. To quote:
"You have the right to choose your own religion and beliefs."
This is another Barbara Boxer special. The bill is running pretty silent. The libtards are oh so caring for children that any law with the word "Children" in it just has to be universally, globally, double-plus goodness.
It doesn't take any imagination to predict the following scenario:
15 year old Sally doesn't want to go to Sunday Bible School anymore she want to worship Satan with some of her friends. The court would have to rule that not only can Sally worship Satan but her parents have to materially support this by providing transportation and live chickens, as long as the chickens are humanely killed in the sacrifices.
____________________
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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Roy
Quasi-Infallible Egocentric Tyrant
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 09:17 pm |
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Why Are You So Surprised, Camille?
A noteworthy response to Camille Paglia's great question as to how "liberty" became a word that the left never uses.
She begins to get it, but as this CEO and writer of Pajama Media muses, if she moved any farther to the right, she would be out of Salon.com.
Why are you so surprised, Camille? In an otherwise trenchant and amusing column, Camille Paglia evinces surprise that the Democrats, liberals, progressives, call them what you will, have made such a hash of things under Obama and have become, mirabile dictu, an elite.
How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.)
I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom,” made famous by the Byrds?
And here’s Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with “Freedom! Freedom!”
Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song “A Different Drum,” with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: “All I’m saying is I’m not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me.”
Well, sure. But where were you, Camille? We’ve been living in a world-upside-down for over a decade now, even before 9-11 (when people like me started to wake up.)
I know they would probably boot you out of Salon, even though you are the only thing worth reading over there, if you moved any further to the right, but c’mon, girl. Bob Dylan is less liberal than I am.
Reification has set in on the Left.
Don’t you be a part of it. Not to put to fine a point on it “Le gauche n’existe pas.”
It’s over. It doesn’t exist. There’s no there there. We live in a world where Keith Olbermann is a “gauchiste.” What could be more square than that? Enough.
Now about the GOP: You make some good points there, but what Republican, pray tell, is recommending “Dick Cheney for President”? I haven’t heard a single person. The dude walks around with a defibrillator on his back. Bush League comment, Camille.*
*Pun not intended.
____________________
"The force and degree of a man's inner benevolence evokes in others a proportionate degree of ill-will" - Gurdjieff
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." — George Orwell
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*Phil*
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Posted: Wed Sep 9th, 2009 10:16 pm |
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I get all tingly and warm inside when the left says things like
"Reification has set in on the Left."
because it means there are some who are self-aware enough to see how their theories can be seen at work against themselves, distorting and mutilating their own thinking. Camille attracts them and repulses the those who are still unconscious.
____________________
Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo!
Galactic Signature: Blue Self-Existing Monkey
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