Atheist, Democrat, professor and social critic—that’s Camille Paglia. But in a recent interview with Salon, she had some choice words for the liberal media.
In a discussion about Jon Stewart and his influence on the media, Paglia declared, “At what point will liberals wake up to realize the stranglehold that they had on the media for so long?”
Could Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid suffer collateral damage from the wreck of Bill Cosby’s reputation? Quite possibly, believes author, professor, and unreliable liberal (that’s a compliment) Paglia, who contends that “there is a big parallel” between Cosby’s scandalous sexual behavior and that of Bill Clinton.
In an interview with Salon, Paglia speculated that Hillary’s public reaction to her husband’s randy antics won’t sit well with the young female voters whom you’d expect to be ardent supporters of hers: “Hillary has a lot to answer for, because she took an antagonistic and demeaning position toward her husband’s accusers. So it’s hard for me to understand how the generation of Lena Dunham would or could tolerate the actual facts of Hillary’s history.”
The Atlantic writer Jeffrey Tayler is annoyed at the “educated elite” in our country. Why have they not risen to the occasion and labeled passionate religious belief a mental illness?
The writer’s disappointment followed the release of an article on The News Nerd entitled “American Psychological Association to Classify Belief in God as a Mental Illness.” In the story, Psychologist Dr. Lillian Andrews had stated: “The time for evolving into a modern society and classifying these archaic beliefs as a mental disorder has been long overdue.”
One year ago, a British newspaper published a list of President Obama’s ten favorite television shows (the top three, in reverse order: Breaking Bad, The Wire, and M*A*S*H). Not on the list was The Daily Show, on which Obama guested yet again this past Tuesday, but Penn State's Sophia McClennen thinks that if Obama had been more of a TDS fan, he long ago would have realized how irrational his conservative opposition was.
In a Friday article for Salon, McClennen asserted that Stewart and Stephen Colbert “had insight into U.S. politics Obama never seemed to understand. ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report’ were one of the main sources of truth telling about U.S. politics and the nature of the Republican Party before and during the Obama presidency.” Those programs, wrote McClennen, illuminated “the twisted thinking, hubris, disdain for large segments of society, and closed-mindedness that forms the common, core mind-set of Fox viewers.”
In a piece for Salon this morning, Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper proclaimed that all black people are “one police encounter from the grave,” and that white people must start lumping themselves together as “ the face of the oppressor.”
Leave it to the leftists at Salon.com to blame the victim.
Writer Scott Eric Kaufman today blasted conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for alerting police to a threat of violence from transgendered journal Zoey -- formerly Bob -- Tur. While Kaufman allowed that "Tur was clearly in the wrong to threaten Shapiro," Kaufman whined that Shapiro was "playing a coward's game here":
A movie dramatization of the Stanford prison experiment opened this weekend, but if you believe Andrew O’Hehir, that’s not the first time the 1971 psychological study has been restaged in some manner. O’Hehir asserted in a Saturday piece that over the past few decades, “the Republican Party has been the subject, willing or otherwise, of a version” of the Stanford experiment, with the result that the GOP is now “a xenophobic, all-white party of hate that seeks to roll back not just the Civil Rights movement and feminism, but the entire Enlightenment.”
He's tanned. He's rested. He's ready. Al Gore 2016! Wha-what? It's the premise of Salon blogger Sean Illing which reflects a growing realization among the left that Hillary Clinton is a fatally flawed candidate. Okay, fine, but is Al Gore really the best alternative they can come up with? Illing makes the case for Gore but leaves out a few fatal flaws about Mr. Global Warming.
First let us watch Illing bemoan the candidacy of Hillary and why Bernie Sanders does not fit the bill as a replacement:
Historian Rick Perlstein, the author of three books (so far) on American movement conservatism from the mid-‘50s through the mid-‘70s, believes, in essence, that conservatives are tribalists whose central task is to promote hatred against other tribes. According to Perlstein, two recent news stories serve to illuminate that process, which, he suggests, involves an almost scientific-sounding conservation of the right wing’s bigoted energy.
“Conservatism is like bigotry whack-a-mole,” wrote Perlstein. “The quantity of hatred, best I can tell from 17 years of close study of 60 years of right-wing history, remains the same. Removing the flag of the Confederacy, [Donald Trump] raising the flag of immigrant hating: the former doesn’t spell some new Jerusalem of tolerance; the latter doesn’t mean that conservatism’s racism has finally been revealed for all to see. The push-me-pull-me of private sentiment and public profession will always remain in motion, and in tension.”
The Miracle on Ice and Hoosiers aside, the underdog usually loses, and Penn State's Sophia McClennen speculates that it’s happened again: Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show because he’s “exhausted” and "dejected" from battling Roger Ailes and the Fox News juggernaut. “Could Stewart really be giving up his show due to Fox News fatigue?” wondered McClennen in a Wednesday article for Salon. “It’s time to take seriously the idea that Fox News killed the greatest satire show of our nation’s history.”
Amid mounting evidence of Bill Cosby’s depraved behavior, many have changed their minds about Cosby the person. Should they also reconsider, for very different reasons, their affection for his megahit sitcom, The Cosby Show? Lefty writer Chauncey DeVega thinks so. In a Sunday article for Salon, DeVega opined that the series “lied to its white viewers about the nature of racism, white supremacy, and white privilege” and “enable[d] the colorblind white racist fiction and delusion that anti-black racism is a thing of the past.”
The Huxtables, claimed DeVega, were “an African-American version of the model-minority myth, one of the favorite deflections and rejoinders of white racists in the post-civil rights era, where there are ‘exceptional’ minorities and the rest are failures because they do not work hard, are lazy, and complain too much about white racism. While unintentional, ‘The Cosby Show’ enabled some of the ugliest Reagan-era fantasies.”
Since Democrats belong to the party of government, it stands to reason that their presidential candidates actually want to be president -- including Bernie Sanders, who’s a Democrat only for the sake of convenience. Republican candidates? Not necessarily. Some of them, according to writer Sean Illing, are “half-baked celebrities allowed to hijack the process to promote their private careers.” Case in point: Donald Trump.
“It says something significant about the Republican Party that there’s space for someone like Trump or Sarah Palin or even Herman Cain in it. These people aren’t credible candidates; they’re product-pushing brands,” wrote Illing. “Trump’s circus act isn’t possible in the Democratic Party…Only in the Republican Party do unserious candidates emerge as contenders…Only among conservative Republicans are hucksters like Trump embraced.”