Saturday October 28, 2006

TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS. We hear today, after a blessedly long hiatus, from Camille Paglia, whose anger at liberal colleagues has made her a surprise hit with folks who would otherwise never listen to a humanities and media studies professor say anything, unless she were reading back their fast-food order. Paglia is still mad at other intellectuals, even when she agrees with them:

The feckless behavior of the Bush administration has been a lurid illustration of Noam Chomsky's books -- which I've always considered half lunatic. Chomsky's hatred of the United States is pathological -- stemming from some bilious problem with father figures that is too fetid to explore. But Chomsky's toxic view of American imperialism and interventionism is like the playbook of the rigid foreign policy of the Bush administration. So, thanks very much, George Bush, you've managed to rocket Noam Chomsky to the top of the bestseller list!

Chomsky's "toxic" view, as explicated by Paglia, has been fulsomely borne out by actual events, yet Chomsky is "half lunatic." In fact, to hear Paglia tell it, President Bush himself is more than half lunatic:

...I've become concerned about Bush's mental state in the past few months. Sometimes in his press conferences or prepared statements (which I listened to on the radio), I heard a sort of Nixonian tension and hysteria. His vocal patterns were over-intense and his inflections impatient, lurching and sarcastic. There was this seething quality to his speech that worried me and that seemed to signal that something major is being planned -- perhaps another military incursion.

Interestingly, despite this startling accusation of incipient Presidential lunacy, Republicans are linking to it.

Lord Nazh is phlegmatic: "Granted she has her hang-ups like any good lefty does... scim the lefty parts if you must." This guy says "A liberal Democrat tells it like it is!"; Fraters Libertas is tickled that Paglia "opines on liberal talk radio." In a long post, one Dr. Melissa Clouthier says of Paglia's warning of a Bush mental breakdown that "If I were him, I might be paranoid. I've mentioned this before. I'd be paranoid because everyone does seem out to get me..." One hopes her Doctorate is not in psychology.

Apparently you can get big play from the right by talking smack about liberals, even if you simultaneously suggest that George W. Bush is one sleepless night away from blowing up Iran to still the voices in his head. This suggests a new definition for the term Bush Derangement Syndrome.