She predicted the rise of Trump:
Paglia was not surprised by the election results. “I felt the Trump victory coming for a long time,” she told me. Writing last spring, she’d called Trump “raw, crude and uninformed” but also “smart, intuitive and a quick study”; she praised his “bumptious exuberance and slashing humor” (and took some pleasure in watching him fluster the GOP). Speaking two weeks into his administration, she sounded altogether less troubled by the president than any other self-declared feminist I’d encountered since Inauguration Day: “He is supported by half the country, hello! And also, this ethically indefensible excuse that all Trump voters are racist, sexist, misogynistic, and all that — American democracy cannot proceed like this, with this reviling half the country.”
In fact, she has had to restrain herself from agreeing with the president, at least on certain matters. “I have been on an anti–Meryl Streep campaign for about 30 years,” she said. When Trump called the actress “overrated” in a January tweet, “I wanted to leap into print and take that line but I couldn’t, because Trump said it.”
I found this (by the interviewer) revealing, though:
The past few years have felt like a return to the identity-politics wars of the 1990s, another period in which liberals (especially those inside the academy) began to draw bright lines dictating the boundaries of acceptable discourse. [Emphasis mine]
She keeps using that word “liberal.” I don’t think it means what she thinks it means.
It’s almost as if Trump lied to his own supporters and played them for suckers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/upshot/why-trump-supporters-have-the-most-to-lose-with-the-gop-repeal-bill.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&smtyp=cur
But then again, many Trump supporters won’t mind getting economically and financially screwed just so long as they have a president that has validated their racism, misogyny, bigotry and hatred. That’s all they really wanted and that’s why they remain fanatically devoted to him
That and, well, they really aren’t that bright.
Sounds like you have the most to lose from allowing irrational argument. We’ve seen this sort of dumb argument before. Look at some microscopic benefit in a vacuum and claim that people are acting against their own interests.
Here, why are we only looking at health insurance tax credits while ignoring the overall cost and coverage of the insurance purchased? Haven’t you heard of the retail game where one doubles the cost of an item, and then marks it half off?
And need I add that Trump influences more than just health insurance policy? People may have voted for his other policies (like anti-immigration or anti-establishment) rather than whether he’d increase tax credits on health insurance.
Trump, being a pathological liar, never meant his health care promises anyways. But that begs the question as to what kind of fool believed him in the first place.
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/10/14881200/trump-health-care-promises
Trump ran and won promising to cover everyone, avoid Medicaid cuts, and boost funding for opioid abuse treatment. He is now lobbying Congress to pass a bill that does none of those things. Instead, millions will lose insurance and Medicaid spending will be sacrificed on the altar of tax cuts for the rich.
dpd: Could you please, for the benefit of all of us here on Rand’s fine Web site, offer your comments in support of a more confrontational stance against the depredations of Russia over at the previous “New Cold War” thread? That thread is infested with Right-wing Putin lovers, and we need someone over there who can set them straight before we just lay down in the face of the Russian Threat.
Thanks!
That was funny. It would be interesting to read dpd’s
thoughtsscript on sending troops into Syria.dpd almost makes me miss Baghdad Jim.
I’m missing Jim already. At least, he did more than squeeze out a bunch of links and say vaguely insulting things. Maybe we could allocate some public funds so that we can buy a better quality of troll?
Comparing this airhead to Jim is like comparing a tax-scam phone-dialing bot to a competent and successful grifter. Jim creates his own text and usually engages. This thing resembles nothing more than a 12 year olds first raspberry pi experiment.
Point taken. (The following extra verbiage was added to get the comment accepted by Skynet.)
“When [Paglia] was a child, her first ambition was to be an archaeologist[, but then she realized that if she was successful, her career would be in ruins.]”