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Ah, Camille, a breath of sanity from the left

From Camille Paglia, and I quote:

A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.

Ahem, precisely. Further:

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

Now mind you, Paglia is an Obama supporter. If she's a member of any vast ideological conspiracy it's the one that supports rational thought and discourse. She stands for the willingness to engage the opposition rather than vilify it.

I think she's pegged the underlying cause of all the vitriol thrown at Palin, and that's abortion. There's really no other reason for the "feminist" movement (as exemplified by NOW, at least) to recoil in horror from a woman who fulfills so many feminist ideals.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

You tell 'em, Camille! Sadly, if most of the "editor's choice" responses are any indication, they aren't listening.

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