Camille,

As a smart insightful women I am flummoxed that you continue to think Barak Obama will be a good thing for this country. He could not even pass a background check to become an FBI agent, he is a junior senator with no qualifications or experience and has the anti-American belief system you so beautifully discuss in your article. Ayers and Wright are his soul brothers, both avid America-haters and not hiding it at all. Why would you think then he should be president of the United States?

Please explain this illogical decision you've made. John F. Kennedy was a conservative by todays standards, and you hail him as someone you admire. He said, "ask not what your country can do for you...."; Obama stands firmly on everything this country will do for you, with cradle to grave entitlements. Camille!

should just pen a love letter in her curlicue language to SP, and see if the latter can understand word one. Couldn't finish this, too ridiculous, enough to make one sick.

Will Morgan’s letter was painfully ignorant, not powerful and your response was ironically colored by your own ivy league isolation.

There are many people in our nation where ideological opposition to a war, or much of anything really, isn’t an option. I thought we were beyond the bullshit of placing blame troops rather than the leaders sending them off to war.

People like Will fuel all of the Fox News bullshit. Hey buddy, try to keep your mouth shut for a few more weeks - we really need to win this one.

I've known a number of women like the strong Italian ladies that Paglia's letter writers have mentioned, and they would eat Palin for lunch and spit out the bones. Her "aw shucks pioneer marm" schtick is exactly that. It's an act that's becoming more and more transparent. She can't even speak in her folksy "Northern Exposure" accent consistently -- now ya hear her droppin' her Gs, God love ya, and now you don't. Frankly, I think she's all antler and no moose.

The real question is not whether Palin will transform feminism. It's whether she's qualified by judgement, temperment, experience and policies to be vice president. And I have yet to see any evidence that's convinced me that she is, in any way, shape or form.

She certainly appeals to people on an emotional level and can whip a bunch of authoritarian followers into a frenzy, but she can't -- or won't! -- articulate her policies, she seems clueless about things she might be expected to be knowledgeable about (such as the world oil market), she rejects objective science, and she lacks intellectual curiosity.

Her leadership style seems to boil down to an endless and tiresome game of "Queen Bee and Wannabes." Those who disagree with her are enemies; she cannot brook dissent and filled her city and state governments with a batch of unqualified flunkies. Above all, the Queen Bee's power and popularity must be preserved. This is hardly an image that will transform feminism. It's a level of dysfunction more appropriate to a badly-run hockey parents association, with Palin as president of the backstabbing, ego-driven mess.

Also, for being some kind of heroic transformative mother figure, Palin strikes me as the kind of mother who eats her young. She's already tossed her daughter Bristol under the campaign bus and seems poised to do the same thing with little Trig, while Track's been conveniently shipped off to Iraq where he can't embarrass her any more and she can use him to shut down hecklers by hiding behind his service record. Mother of the year, she isn't. And if this is the kind of motherhood that Paglia things should be a model for women everywhere, we're looking at dysfunction as far as the eye can see.

Dear Camille,

Unlike many of the previous posters, I have no problem with your admiration for Sarah Palin's style--I myself reacted quite positively to it the first time I saw her. But despite her readiness to "be tough" and "do what is needed", her will to play "the big boy's game", etc., her ideas and viewpoints are mostly old-fashioned and wrong: being against abortion even in cases of rape or incest, favoring creationism, her apparent lack of experience and manicheistic ideas ("Putin rears his head") in foreign policy, etc.

You have stated in this column and in the preceding one that you disagree entirely with Palin's views, and that you will vote for Obama. I understand in principle the idea of admiring a person's abilities and political skills while totally disagreeing with the ideas s/he stands for; but I wonder if you could keep this in case McCain-Palin wins the election. After all, as a VP (and perhaps as a President, in case McCain becomes incapacitated at some point), Palin will act on her ideas and therefore make decisions that you will certainly want to criticize. How would you do that? I am curious about n how you could keep admiring the style of a person while heavily criticizing her actions.

At least in my opinion, the heavy criticism Palin has had from the left has more to do with the ideas than with her style. A lot of the exaggerations are to be expected in the political debate around a presidential campaign, so I don't care so much about them. The reason for these exaggerations, however, is not her style, but her ideas. If she had more progressive ideas--rather than being simply a strong-willed woman--I am sure the left would embrace her. (But, of course, if this were the case, she would not be on McCain's ticket.)

Sarah Palin is not a frontier woman. Calling her one or to mention her in the same breath as those genuinely tough pioneer women is wrong, in my opinion.

It is NOT tough to take high-powered rifles into the woods and the air to shoot defenseless wolves from helicopters. This woman and her ilk are repulsive and, to me at least, the embodiment of inhumanity with no sense of fair play AT ALL.