February 17, 2007

"I whooped and applauded as Medea Benjamin... spoke eloquently of the trauma and horror inflicted by the invasion on the women and children of Iraq."

Whooping and applause is the right reaction to stories of trauma and horror? Well, yeah, if you're Camille Paglia. She was having what she calls her "peak Web moment of recent weeks," watching some video of a Code Pink encounter with Hillary Clinton that took place 2003.

Here's the video. You can see women in pink, swaying and singing about peace. Hillary Clinton arrives and says: "You guys look like a big bunch of pink tulips." Wearing turquoise herself, Hillary stands through a mini-lecture from a woman wearing a pink tunic with a scrawled message that includes the huge, misspelled "Hilary." Hillary graciously hears out the woman and then articulates her reasons for voting for the Iraq war. There's more lecturing from a woman in the group, and Hillary tries to appease them with some criticism of President Bush and then deftly disaggregates herself from the meeting.

Paglia: "There's a priceless moment when a protester strips off her pink slip and hands it to Hillary (who had just voted for the war resolution the prior October) as a symbol of her flunking this ethical test. Hillary, who has problems when life departs from script, at first takes the gift, then yanks her hand back and loses her temper. The hapless slip is seized by a female flunky and abducted. It's a classic!"

I don't see Hillary losing her temper. She was right to subtly shrink from a photo op intended to make her look bad. It's not a "gift." It's a visual pun, and she's right not to look grateful for an insult.

And let's not forget that a slip is an item of underwear. When people come up and try to hand you underwear, it shows good instincts not to accept it.

39 comments:

somefeller said...

People are often judged by their enemies. If Hillary can count the Code Pink crowd and Camille Paglia as her enemies, together with the obsessive right-wing blogosphere crowd, she is well positioned for victory in 2008. Most Americans don't fall in any of these people, and have an appropriate sympathy for those targeted by such people.

Squints said...

Pink slip. Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh.

Anonymous said...

My favorite overwrought sentence in her essay...

"I love the way Barack Obama has nimbly upstaged the ponderous Hillary machine. It's a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford bitch fest!"

Sure.

Fen said...

Most Americans don't fall in any of these people, and have an appropriate sympathy for those targeted by such people.

Then why are Hillary's negatives already in the mid-40's?

Unknown said...

"She was having what she calls her peak Web moment of recent weeks."


They look like a bunch of Moonies, not serious people. My opinion of Paglia just plummeted to rock bottom.

demian said...

I was a big fan of Paglia in the 1990s. She was like a laser beam, cutting through the fog of political correctness and illuminating ancient themes in modern political dramas. There was no one else like her.

A decade later, her opinions seem a little stale. "The Web, in my view, is a fusion of verbal with the visual." Um, that would have been insightful in 1997.

Her analysis of presidential contenders seems cribbed from CNN or Newsweek: Edwards is a lightweight; Obama has yet to prove himself; Giuliani leans left but is strong on national security. We know all this. Where is the original thinking Paglia was so well known for?

This column feels mailed in. I hope to see better in coming months.

PeterP said...

Debrett's, the infallible guide to all occasions, advised that should a woman ever find herself in a public place - such as a wedding - and discover that her knickers had fallen down, was in no circumstances to attempt to retrieve them but merely to step out of them and walk away as if it and they had nothing to do with her.

P_J said...

Good for Hillary -- but, Ann, I'm confused.

This reads like you're saying something positive about Clinton. How that can that be since you're an uncritical conservative only pretending to be a moderate?

The Drill SGT said...

This of course was Hillary in 2003. She sounds pretty good there relative to the Code Pink wackos.

I live in DC and the Code Pink folks are vile. They picket and harass wounded Veterans at Walter Reed Army Hospital here, in the name of peace.

Maxine Weiss said...

Considering some of the sheer skirts women are wearing these days.....I think a good slip is an essential.

Of course, some women refuse to wear skirts at all.

Hint hint.

Peace, Maxine

Mortimer Brezny said...

When people come up and try to hand you underwear, it shows good instincts not to accept it.

I would have thought Simon would make use of this line.

Gordon Freece said...

The first thing I ever read by Paglia was a column at Salon.com back around 1998 or so. There was a bizarre, overheated bit describing Bill Clinton as Caligula and (IIRC) Hillary as, for some reason that wasn't clear even then, his horse. The horse Caligula caused to be made a senator. This was before HRC ran for the Senate.

It was sloppy, incoherent, pointlessly malicious, and deeply stupid. In fairness, it was a bit lower than she usually sinks. But not much.


P.S. What if somebody throws the underwear? What then?

Meade said...

And let's not forget that a slip is an item of underwear. When people come up and try to hand you underwear, it shows good instincts not to accept it.

Or even when people like interns come up and flash a teeny triangle at the top of their thong underwear for you to see.

Who would understand this better than Hillary? Underwear can bring down the most powerful.

somefeller said...

Fen said..."Most Americans don't fall in any of these people, and have an appropriate sympathy for those targeted by such people.

Then why are Hillary's negatives already in the mid-40's?"

The two aren't mutually exclusive. The Code Pink crowd (obsessive hard left) and conservative blogger crowd (obsessive, but not always-hard right) probably is about 20-25% fo the country. Add that to staunchly partisan but otherwise normal and sane Republicans, and you get around 40%. Paglia is a minority of one, so she doesn't affect the numbers. This of course assumes the 40% number is correct, but I'll assume it is for this case.

Also, people have been known to vote for candidates they have a negative impression of. Why, if the comments in this blog are to be believed, many if not most Althouse commenters who voted for Bush in 2004 (and perhaps our hostess) did so while holding their nose and with full foresight as to his inadequacies, so they aren't responsible for anything he's messed up, they just voted for him because Kerry was so scarily liberal and was a windsurfer.

vnjagvet said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
vnjagvet said...

Is that exposition an example of the "biological realism" school of thought?

Anonymous said...

Then there was the piece she wrote after the Space Shuttle burned up on re-entry in 2002 in which she said it was an ill omen from Zeus....

Snippet said...

If Hillary had said, "How nice. Be a dear and wash this, then send it to my secretary, K?" I would seriously consider voting for her.

TheManTheMyth said...

How come women constantly forget their earrings but never their panties?

PeterP said...

"When people come up and try to hand you underwear, it shows good instincts not to accept it."

As a general Rule of Thumb for living the good life, it has to be right up there with -

"Never play poker with a man named 'Doc'"

"You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on."

And so forth.

However, there are some conditions one should consider:

Is the person offering you anything other than their own underwear or for any purpose other than for you to put the item in the wash?

- That, by and large, would be the married option.

Is the person actually wearing the item at the time, in which case they are presumably offering the body as well?

- That, by and large, is the non-married option and leads naturally to the further consideration of whether or not the body in question suits your mood and moment.

Is the person offering you their underwear because she [mostly] is fed up with your trampling her flower beds to steal them from the washing line?

- That, by and large, is the pantie thief option. (Debrett's, again, would argue that in such circumstances on no account accept the offer - it merely encourages them.)

vbspurs said...

LOL! I'm surprised Ruth Anne didn't link to my blogpost, but I only just blogged about this very Hillary/Code Pink video, yesterday.

I also posted a photo of a Code Pinko's car, when I spied one on I-95 down here in SoFla, last year.

I presume the state of her car was for a special occasion, and not the way it always is. I PRESUME...

Included in the post, are three shots of "members" in full regalia, the last of whom seems to be a doctored pic.

That's just as well, because it's sad. You won't believe what you see.

You know what I like about that video best?

It shows that Hillary is no where near as batsh*t crazy as those women.

Although her presentation in that meeting (in all meetings that I've seen her), is best described as "flat", I loved how she got REAL steamed at the end, when that women presented her her pink baby-doll.

"I AM THE SENATOR FROM NEW YORK!"

Sure, she was thinking in terms of soundbites, but you can still see that old spark of venom from old Hill.

Good stuff.

Cheers,
Victoria

vbspurs said...

Pink slip. Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh.

Ohhhhh. Doh. I wondered about that.

So what about the pink bra outside then?

I can understand that they are making a sophomoric (no -- moronic) point about handing the President their "pink slip", but what THE HELL is up with their wearing of the slips and bras outside of their clothes?

They look like a sclerotic grandma at the fun fair.

Cheers,
Victoria

Hamlet Au said...

I don't think Paglia writes her stuff anymore, Salon just takes conventional ghostwritten essays and runs them through a Pagliamatic(tm) word processor which appends phrases like "arid weight of Foucault on academia", "as a pagan Woodstock libertarian", tosses in references to Dionysus, Nietzsche, Madonna, and Sandra Berndhardt, etc. and there you go.

M. Simon said...

The female strategy is to get some strong or other wise above averge man as a sperm donor and then marry the average guy to raise the kids.

Average guys make good husbands (on average) the way above average guys not so much.

vbspurs said...

I don't think Paglia writes her stuff anymore, Salon just takes conventional ghostwritten essays and runs them through a Pagliamatic(tm) word processor which appends phrases like "arid weight of Foucault on academia", "as a pagan Woodstock libertarian", tosses in references to Dionysus, Nietzsche, Madonna, and Sandra Berndhardt, etc. and there you go.

LOL. Post of the Day.

BTW, I too like Camille Paglia.

Apart from what Christy has already mentioned, about being a hoot, I can't think of a single pseudo-intellectual, sometime bisexual, talk-a-mile-a-minute feminist like her.

She's fun. And she likes to take potshots at the anti-Establishment establishment.

Her, we need more of.

Cheers,
Victoria

eelpout said...
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Eli Blake said...

dougjnn:

Bologna. If your suggestion was true then why is it that in the 'cow counties' of rural Nevada, where prostitution is legal, there aren't more prostitutes? The ones there are, certainly make an effort to make themselves attractive enough.

Sex drive is certainly a strong motivation for whatever satisfies it (one reason why, for example, pedophiles are never cured). But like alcohol, gambling, tobacco, food addiction or any other kind of addiction, I think it is a minority of people (though I will say probably more men than women) who would 'jump' into a sexual encounter with someone they've never met.



Changing gears...

What this post does bring out though is a topic that we are just starting to hear about (for example the Arizona Republic did a bit on it either yesterday or today.)

Refugees from Iraq.

There are two million of them who have left the country since the war began in 2003. Many are living in refugee camps in neighboring countries. And now we are starting to see more and more of them coming to the U.S.

After Vietnam, we had a flood of Vietnamese refugees. They had a variety of backgrounds. Some were granted protection and entry into the U.S. because they had worked for us or helped us and they were no longer safe in Vietnam. Others followed family members who were in the first group. Some were prostitutes who had children by American soldiers (and a few who had married American soldiers). Many simply left, as 'boat people,' whose homes had been destroyed or taken over by the communists and who preferred to risk the high seas to staying in Vietnam amid grinding poverty in the newly collectivized nation (though as the economy moved towards capitalism, even in an officially communist country, this flow tapered off). Because America had been so heavily involved in Vietnam, we took in huge numbers of refugees.

And the Vietnamese community has by and large been successful. True there have been some problems with organized criminal enterprises within their community, but in general the Vietnamese (some of whom have been my friends) have adapted well to American life and in general are high achievers both academically and in business. Today they are just one more component of American society.

With our continuing involvement in Iraq, the present increasing stream of Iraqi refugees applying for and being permitted to enter the U.S. is likely to increase both in volume and in visibility.

Will Iraqi refugees be the same success stories as Vietnamese refugees? Or will we see them involved in incidents like the shooting in Salt Lake City this week perpetrated by an eighteen year old refugee from Bosnia? There is no question that war scars people, as does becoming a refugee (so by definition we are admitting people who have had some traumatic experiences which will affect how they perceive things), and it is also a concern (which this will sound racist, but it is a fact) that if some jihadist organization wanted to infiltrate its members into the U.S., then having them pose as refugees would be a way to get them in.

There is also a question that will be raised about whether we should allow any refugees from Iraq when there are still Katrina refugees waiting for help in resettling.

Kirby Olson said...

Camille Paglia is a huge supporter of NAMBLA.

http://www.salon.com/april97/columnists/paglia970415.html

She talks about it all over the place. She worries about the children of Iraq. Why? For fear there will be none left to molest?

She's a puzzle to me. She seems to shoot off her mouth in every direction. Sometimes she hits something. Too often it's her own foot.

The song was so embarrassing in this video, and so meaningless. "Love each other as ourselves," as opposed to ... ?

It's amazing to have sympathy for Democratic candidates. Somehow they have to appeal to lunatics like this bunch of Easter bunny women. How can you do that, and still retain your sanity? I hand it to Hillary for keeping her sense of restraint as long as she did.

Anonymous said...

I like Pagila because she calls Islam for what it is. Like her, I don't think Islam is compatible with democracy, nor is it compatible with capitalism. With that said, why are we spreading democracy to a region that is not compatible with it? Why are we wasting our tax dollars, and more importantly, US Soldiers, on a disease that doesn't seem to have a cure. In fact, our actions seem to be worsening the disease and increasing recruits.

Aren't our policies in Iraq like welfare? Throwing money at a problem and only making it worse.

THe sunnis and shias have had issues since Ali, and no amount of troops is going to prevent that problem. We shoud leave immediately and stop wasting tax dollars on people who aren't thankful to us.

Once we leave, maybe the Iraqis will realize they're just killing each other, and if they don't , oh well. Muslims have been killing each other for the longest time. History establishes that Muslims constitute the largest number of victims when it comes to the actions of braindead Islamofascists.

We need to leave, seal our own borders, and prevent that philosophy from entering the American mindset.

Anonymous said...
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vbspurs said...

I like Pagila because she calls Islam for what it is. Like her, I don't think Islam is compatible with democracy, nor is it compatible with capitalism. With that said, why are we spreading democracy to a region that is not compatible with it?

You and I seem to be polar opposites, though I bet you others wouldn't see it that way.

I think any religion is compatible with democracy, because of the different pulls on the human spirit -- one to follow rules civicly with the knowledge that you AND others will be freer in doing so.

The other, to follow rules religiously with the knowledge that you AND others will be richly rewarded later in doing so.

The problem is not Islam, it's the belief in the absolute authority of the sharia, which is indeed, incompatible with democracy.

When Islam and the State are one, like in Turkey, democracy is hard but possible. When the sharia and State are one, democracy isn't possible.

The other problem in the region has to do with strong men in power, who are by definition, not democratic.

Neither Saddam Hussein, nor Nasser, nor Musharraf, nor Qaddafi are religious leaders, and in fact, they always de-emphasised religion as a font of authority, the better to rule themselves.

The problem is different than just Islam, and that is the part the US can attempt to...change isn't the right word.

Perhaps restructure.

As for seal our borders, and it's welfare by any other name...

That's chilling to me. It's like having said that in 1939.

The result would be living in a Nazi world, had we done so then.

Cheers,
Victoria

Anonymous said...

I think not of Hillary

Fat Man said...


CAUSE CÉLÈBRE: 'Can I talk to you about Hillary?' Clinton fundraiser Daphna Ziman buttonholes everyone who crosses her path. By Tina Daunt
L.A. Times Staff Writer. February 16, 2007
:

Daphna Ziman has the best seat in the Polo Lounge, and she's not afraid to use it.

From her vantage point at a table-for-two on a recent afternoon, Ziman watches the lunch crowd with interest at the Beverly Hills Hotel's iconic restaurant. She can see everyone who comes through the door, and she has a full view of the sunlit courtyard, where the elite make their way to secluded tables on a tree-shaded terrace.

Today she's got an eye for more than faces — it's wallets and purses that capture her interest. The 2008 presidential campaign is on and Ziman, a former model who heads her own film and television production company, is one of political Hollywood's top fundraisers for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

It's a battle for every cent and endorsement.

"Hillary Clinton is the right candidate," Ziman explains. "The nation is in deep need for a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future."

Ruth Anne Adams said...

OFF-TOPIC ALERT:

There's an awful lot of blogging not going on tonight. That must be one hell of a party in fabulous NYC.

Adjoran said...

Paglia is a brilliant woman who is often intellectually lazy. Conservatives loved her tart remarks about Bill Clinton in the '90s, but most had never read her previous writings.

Hillary is positioning herself to be the only Democrat acceptable to swing voters. She moves as far left as she has to, always staying just to the right of the rest of the field. It's the old Nixon formula: run to the right (as a Republican, left for Democrats) in the primaries, but only far enough to win, then make tracks to the middle for the general election.

As a nominee, you want the other party to nominate an ideological extremist, because you can then run just to the center of his/her position, and be instantly the most acceptable. LBJ in 1964 against Goldwater and Nixon in 1972 versus McGovern are the classic examples.

Hillary's big problem is if Guiliani is the Republican nominee. His social positions make outflanking him for the middle almost impossible.

PeterP said...

Peter, from 11:34, that actually happened to me once at a funeral. Alas, my inferior breeding showed by my kicking them up to where I could quickly shove them into my purse.

Fear not for your breeding dear lady. Debrett's has a special chapter on correct behaviour at funerals that especially allows for the retrieval of escaping knickers on the basis that, unlike on any other social occasion (by reason, naturally, of the sad solemnity of the moment) it would not be customary - and therefore unremarkable - for female undergarments to be found in general circulation.

More modern editions even suggest that there is the radical (if risqué) preventive measure of 'going commando' - as the phrase is - on all occasions. (That, one has been informed, is the choice of such luminaries as Nic Kidman - a woman of entirely good breeding.)

Fen said...

"Hillary Clinton is the right candidate," Ziman explains. "The nation is in deep need for a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future."

I don't understand this mentality. As if the "violent world" will let you withdraw behind static defenses. Its like replacing the carpet before fixing the hole in your roof, pretending that the storm won't come again.

Fen said...

With that said, why are we spreading democracy to a region that is not compatible with it?

I disagree with your premise. But I would turn it around - I'm losing faith in democracy in general. Half our country is willing to withdraw from the world and allow the resulting power vacum to be filled by a radical theocracy [or China, if we're lucky]. So we can have free health care?

We apparently don't have the will to defend the Enlightenment and Western Civ. Perhaps Tocqueville was right? We've become selfish spoiled brats who don't deserve the Liberty we would deny others.

SGT Ted said...

"Hillary Clinton is the right candidate," Ziman explains. "The nation is in deep need for a mother figure who will lead the people out of a violent world and back into caring for the poor and the disabled, mostly caring for our children, our future."


What a crock. Most people don't vote for a mommy. They vote for a President who will obey the Constitution and respect their civil rights. For those who see Mr Bush as out of control in this regard, how could you ever support someone like Hillary?

Mr Ziman needs a therapist to work out his mommy issues. The same thing can be said for the fawning droolers who see Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton in the same way; infantalising adults in a maternal way in order to control them. It's sexist totalitarianism with a doily neck piece. Its also separated from the reality that there are people who want to kill us and/or subjigait(sp?) us to their medeival religion.