Via Robbie I find an article from Salon by Camille Paglia. Read that bio if you don’t know who she is as it frames her article.

Some choice quotes from her article:

But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package. Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

We all knew years ago that the mainstream media was no longer a source of true journalism. They’ve got agendas to push, like everyone else.

By foolishly trying to reduce all objections to healthcare reform to the malevolence of obstructionist Republicans, Democrats have managed to destroy the national coalition that elected Obama and that is unlikely to be repaired. If Obama fails to win reelection, let the blame be first laid at the door of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who at a pivotal point threw gasoline on the flames by comparing angry American citizens to Nazis. It is theoretically possible that Obama could turn the situation around with a strong speech on healthcare to Congress this week, but after a summer of grisly hemorrhaging, too much damage has been done. At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate. Given the GOP’s facility for shooting itself in the foot, that may well happen.

I fear that as well. Nevertheless, the Dems cannot get cocky and think their jobs are a lock. I’ve already heard mutterings like “force it down our throats in 2009? We’ll shove it up your ass in 2010.” The 2010 Congressional elections aren’t too far off, and while it’s only a midpoint for President Obama, it’s going to be one heck of a barometer. Plus if the Democrat majority in Congress gets lost in the election, that will have huge impacts as well. Maybe that’s part of why they’re trying to shove all their pet legislation through now, while they have the short window of opportunity.

*sigh*

Yes, that’s the responsible way to legislate.

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year’s tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators?

They’re that out of touch.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Quite true, and I’ve wondered that myself. I’ve never seen such a group of millionaires that claim to understand “the little people” as much as them. But what’s worse is how those little people believe them. Ah wait, she addresses this further down:

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

Going further into the healthcare debate:

By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences — in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy — of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

Amen to that. But that tends to be how many arguments tend to go. If you can’t back it up with facts, make emotional appeals. While emotions are important, it’s generally bad to establish law and policy upon them. Just like with gun control, most of what the pro gun control folks spout are emotional appeals. When you look at the facts, it doesn’t add up.

Thankfully, Ms. Paglia also takes the Republicans to task:

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women’s control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

I couldn’t agree more. I know folks tend to see me as a Democrat/Liberal/Obama basher, and certainly I am critical of them. But that doesn’t mean I’m a Republican/Conservative/Bush lover. I think they suck too. I think the whole “preservation of marriage” stuff is a load of crap — it’s nothing more than anti-homosexual standpoints, because if you really cared to preserve marriage then you’d work on that ugly divorce rate between heterosexuals first! That’s far more a threat to the “sanctity of marriage” than any homosexual ever would be. The PATRIOT Act… don’t get me started on that.

Anyway, heck of an article from Camille Paglia. Go read it.

A lot of people were pitching a major fit about President Obama and the speech to the children.

My take? It was somewhat understandable. There’s a lot of distrust of the man, his administration, and the current Congress. With the way things are right now, people were afraid he was going to turn it into some sort of agenda push.

Me? I expected the worst but hoped for the best. This is not the first time a President has spoken to the schoolchildren. And they’re generally always the same sort of thing: stay in school, education is important, study hard, etc.. And every time this happens, the “opposition party” has always come out screaming that the speech is going to be brainwashing the children. So, the speech and the reactions to the speech are just typical… happens all the time, nothing really new to see here.

My take? I homeschool the kids. Now, we had a 4-H meeting today so I couldn’t watch it, but it can be caught on YouTube and the transcript was posted. But the general plan was to go ahead and watch it with our kids. Then no matter what the message, discuss it. I think that’s really the best way to handle just about anything with your children: participate, be involved, discuss, help them understand.

Overall the speech wasn’t too bad. The overall message was a good one, and the illustrations and construction of the speech were alright.

But I do have a few beefs with the speech:

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

Can someone point out to me where in the US Constitution it says anything about the Federal Government being responsible for education?

The other big thing I wonder is… he spoke a lot about being responsible. He set forth a great number of things — expectations of behavior. I can only hope that he himself, after speaking as he did today, holds himself, his cabinet members, all those czars, members of Congress, etc. to the same standards.