yet she gets paid to write it

It's become like clockwork. Once every couple of weeks, I glance at the Salon article titles and see one that makes me think: "What the hell? What planet is that wanker living on?" It always turns out to be Camille Paglia's biweekly column.

This week she slaps down Obama for totally botching his first major trip abroad and the G-20. He sure embarrassed the hell out of all of us on that gaffe train, am I right?

Dear Salon

Camille Paglia makes me want to shoot myself in the face. Seriously, I'm setting up a hunting trip with the Vice President as I write this.

Just thought you should know.

Cheers,
el ranchero

Please, Salon, get Camille Paglia off my browser!

When I think of Camille Paglia's writing, I think of a chutney-covered ricecake: lots of hip, snappy, intellectual-sounding ingredients on top with no substance whatsoever underneath. For all the academic vocabulary this woman uses, she has nothing insightful to say, being content instead to foist poorly researched triangulations and reflexive regurgitation of rightwing arguments that haven't been anywhere near true for many years (if they were ever true at all).

I feel like I'm reading Joe Klein, if Joe Klein did nothing but watch FOX News all day.

For instance, if you were to read her tripe today, you'd never guess that Clinton did not, in fact, give an entire sermon in a faux-drawl, but instead was merely quoting a southern writer. You would, however, get the sense that the media really is liberal, contrary to a number of Media Matters studies which show a persistent conservative slant in all major networks' coverage of news and in their talking head lineups, contrary to the lack of a motive for a corporate news agency to espouse liberal views, and despite the lack of any evidence for her case whatsoever-- as well as contrary to what everyone saw with their own eyes in election 2000. You'd have just read her argument that if FOX News just admitted they were a propaganda outlet for the GOP like Rush Limbaugh then it would be hunky dory for them to host a Democratic debate (because FOX News treated the Dem debates in '04 so fairly, dontcha know-- and does she actually think that Rush Limbaugh would be a valid person to host a debate?). And, as the fly on the turd, you'd have been told flat-out that Ann Coulter is a "feminist."

Then there was this:

"Of course, any Salon readers who still follow the mainstream media out of numbed habit will never have heard Hillary's most extreme flights of faux gemutlichkeit. All that Sunday, network radio news, for example, betrayed its liberal bias by running clips of only her noblest phrases. Heaven help any Republican who had made so lurid a gaffe!"

Yes, this is clearly an example of liberal bias, because if a conservative running for president ever made serious verbal gaffes or put on a comicbook accent, the media would make sure he could never win.

That quote was right before a "Thank God for Matt Drudge!" moment that really says all that needs to be said.

Seriously, what does she offer that we don't already get from every preening, uninformed conservative in the media today?