Camille Paglia: Dud or Dudder ?

Regardless of what CP says in general, she is totally right that the slew of sexual misconduct allegations against Bill Clinton will present difficulties for Hilary's reelection campaign. Clinton is not a known serial rapist like Cosby but there is at least one rape allegation against him and his "caddish" repuation does seem a bit sleazier/more exploitative than your average man who has affairs. I don't necessarily think this should be held against Hilary but you know, it will be.

I think Hillary's got bigger problems than that, I'm not sure her husband's pecadillos are really going to come up at all tbh

I think she's right about Jon Stewart too. I mean no she's not as unpredictable as flipping a coin and I'd generally prefer to hear the thoughts of Steve Tyler to hers... But she's an interesting figure- very unique and entertaining

I'm not fan enough of Stewart to run to Facebook and post last night's yuks but to call him smug is inaccurate.

Stewart to me is just this ball of making exasperated faces for the benefit of ppl who already agree with him. Is that smugness? Idk it's something distasteful enough that I haven't watched the Daily Show in like five years

Agree on the Daily Show but Paglia reeks of taking the easy way out intellectually every damn time

She strikes me as someone I'd have championed at the height of my priggish undergrad self-righteousness, her clarion of liberalism and unchecked sexual expression appealing to my horny underdeveloped young mind as the very ambrosia of intellectual freedom

Sexual Personae still has good bits, even if I'm misremembering if she gets into Emily Dickinson orgasming.

I'm not disputing that some of her ideas might pass muster under challenge, but someone so cavalier as her must be challenged. Like Mordy, I have no problem with her propagating these ideas, so long as they're properly scrutinised.

+ like say what u will about her, the whole pre-institutionalized religion pagan-focus and admiration for religion even from the pov of atheism is not a widely disseminated pov in american letters

describing her as ‘fascist’ (upthread) seems v off the mark & unfair to me
i don’t take her v seriously as like a deep thinker & disagree with like half of what she says
& yes she’s hilariously self-aggrandizing; her idiosyncrasies now seem predictable;
yet i still kinda like her personality/ as a personality
she’s one of v few contrarians/ mavericks on the american pop-pundit scene nowadays (most pundits well-ensconced in a political-ideological corner); & she’s among the more entertaining/ less insufferable i think
& sometimes, on some things, she’s otm

drash i was thinking i hadn't seen a post from you in a while and i was getting worried u bailed on ilx

:) still hooked

not that i would've blamed u :/

Regardless of what CP says in general, she is totally right that the slew of sexual misconduct allegations against Bill Clinton will present difficulties for Hilary's reelection campaign. Clinton is not a known serial rapist like Cosby but there is at least one rape allegation against him and his "caddish" repuation does seem a bit sleazier/more exploitative than your average man who has affairs. I don't necessarily think this should be held against Hilary but you know, it will be.

― Treeship, Wednesday, July 29, 2015 5:40 PM (3 hours ago)

i dunno if this will be a major issue in 2016 but i definitely think the allegations against clinton would be treated a lot differently now than they were in 1992. i remember salon reviewing the hitchens book and basically ridiculing him for taking the accusations seriously at all.

I think the issue of Clinton as a sexual predator should be treated separately from Republican's exploitation of it.

Sure, but I think either way this is a conversation Republicans are going to force us to have, which worries me because much as I dislike the hawkish, crypto-conservative Clintons I am afraid of having a Republican in office.

The problem with Kathleen Willey, one of the accusers, is she admitted to lying about testimony and had shopped her story around w/Linda Tripp as her unofficial agent.

Also Bill Clinton was the fucking worst on so many issues progressives care about now and Hilary certainly wasn't publicly critical of him then

Sure, but I think either way this is a conversation Republicans are going to force us to have, which worries me because much as I dislike the hawkish, crypto-conservative Clintons I am afraid of having a Republican in office.

― Treeship,

I don't think so. I mean, let's check this space in a year. The GOP can't discuss women because they don't like women. That's why so many of them are gay.

There are just a lot of ghosts that come with a Clinton candidacy

Hm, idk Alfred. Republicans are opportunists and i think they can twist feminist ideals to their own benefit

I haven't seen it work yet. Plus, there's the NYT story published a couple days ago leaking (or allowed to leak) the RNC's approach to attacking Clinton. Anything that impugns her femininity is out.

^^^

The GOP can't discuss women because they don't like women.

this is, sadly, v true - there's no way angle they can approach this from without tripping over themselves.

way

insofar as the RNC has any power (it doesn't).

They could claim the left was hypocritical in protecting Bill Clinton while being aggressive in going after accused people like the Duke lacrosse players or the more recent UVA thing or even that Columbia guy who still claims he is innocent. This could confuse and demoralize Clinton's more lukewarm supporters, turning them to a third party or discouraging them from voting altogether. The republican base, meanwhile, would be more motivated to vote if the relublicans successfully paint Bill as an "abusive psycopath." They might hate women but they def could flatter themselves by thinking they are women's protectors as misogynists often do.

This is all speculative obviously but it seems plausible

treeship, how old were you in the 90s?

Single digits

bringing up bill clinton's personal issues while in office as a way to get at hillary would be disastrous and total amateur hour politics imo

so like treeship said, it's a plausible plan for the republicans to attempt

american political media is not going to rehash bill clinton again. they just aren't.

This could confuse and demoralize Clinton's more lukewarm supporters, turning them to a third party or discouraging them from voting altogether.

there is 0.0% chance of this happening. maybe it should happen! but it won't.

If there is a credible rape accusation that emerges wrt Bill Clinton the progressive media won't ignore it. It's just impossible in this era imo. The right wing media also won't ignore it - i think it would be a "thing" although i can only speculate on how it would play out exactly

There are also harrassment allegations. Just a bunch of stuff

Treeship, how much is Ken Starr paying you?

there were credible rape accusations (which is to say, there were rape accusations) while he was in office and progressive media (hitchens aside) by and large defended him

you're talking about this as if it's some new explosive thing that just showed up and not a very established part of the clintons' life in public for 20 years

Tell me more about how the living ex-president with the highest "favorable" rating among them all, at 64% as polled by Gallup last year, is going to be an albatross around Hillary's neck. It's fascinating!

it's too perfect we're doing this in this thread

never say never i guess

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3176293/Woman-accused-Bill-Clinton-sexual-harassment-launches-anti-Hillary-website-recruit-victims-chronicle-scandal-day.html

ha goole otm

The media and the culture were extremely different in the 90s, like comparing apples to holograms of oranges

Every generation thinks they are the first to discover sex - and political scandals.

Things were in no way totally different in the 90s, you little rascal. Or are you talking about the 1890s? I'm not sure that would work either.

You don't think social media has changed how people read the news and which stories gain traction?

It's just a different news delivery system. Any story that has "gained traction" lately I could probably find several similar 80s-90s stories that also "gained traction" - and for the same basic reasons: sex, violence, moral outrage, spin, & did I mention sex?

I guess I don't want these cases to be re-opened bc i don't want a Republican president. But I also don't have much love for the crypto-conservative Clintons so w/e. I have no trouble believing the worst about that dude.

They already got Bill Clinton. It involved a stained dress. They got him as much as they are ever going to get him.

It took years of concerted and mostly failed effort to pin something on him. I remember when the stained dress emerged, I was like, oh my god, finally, they found something. And they made the most of it.

They managed to turn impeachment into a partisan joke. Why did this happen? Because everybody knew that they had spent forever finding it, had done nothing else but look.

By the way, Hitchens attitude on Bill Clinton was merely the first indication he was actually crazy. I'm no Clinton fan, but I did once really admire Hitchens, having read a bunch of his articles in Harpers during their great period (late 80s to late 90s).

So long as Hitchens kept to Clinton's fiscal and socialpolitical calamities ("welfare reform," the crime bill, DOMA) he was in peak form. If you want to read his Clinton book, stick to those chapters.

Oh, Clinton is despicable on that stuff -- does Hitchens make the case particularly well, given that I've seen it many times elsewhere?

Since you're here Alfred, I'll mention the attack on Norman Podhoretz that CH did is just one of the great jugular knifings ever - did you ever read that one?

Hey, back to Paglia, I was one of those people who bought Sexual Personae when it came out and thought it was really interesting. Speaking of Harpers, they thought she was interesting too....then they had to backtrack. I'm going to hide behind Greil Marcus and Harold Bloom now.....um, those guys thought she was okay, don't blame me!

I don't want to review the horror of those times, but let's not forget how Ken Starr's Whitewater panel transformed into a Starr Chamber when the Paula Jones lawsuit joined forces with it as if they weren't already one and the same (the first independent counsel, Republican Robert Fiske, was treated curtly when in 1994 he found nothing illegal in the Clintons' bungled cattle futures trading). Then there were the leaks to the press, the manipulation of a moronic Newsweek reporter who couldn't see that Linda Tripp had been hanging around Starr's office bringing witnesses since 1993, the SCOTUS decision (for which, regrettably, John Paul Stevens showed no remorse years later) affirming that a sitting president had no immunity against civil actions (I don't oppose the ruling in theory, but the facts dictated that the Court tailor this decision as narrowly as possible).