Camille Paglia on Barack Obama

Camille Paglia on Barack Obama
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone – Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Ref: http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009.09/09/healthcare/pring.html

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 administrations missteps. I suspect that here had been private grumblings 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 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 and alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naïve 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 Republican, 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 the 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 theoretical 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 feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen…

Why has the Democrat 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 problems. 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 3 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…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 pandemic that it is invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of 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…

George H. Kubeck, The above is a classic and will be used as a reference point.