Palin is too undereducated and under experienced to be VP (or Pres). The media has simply called her and McCain on this problem. She agreed to those long format interviews with Gibson and Couric, neither of which is particularly left-leaning or aggressive. Any of McCain's other short-listed VP candidates would have been able to handle their questions. Palin is just out of her league.

Palin's choice as the VP nominee should be insulting to all women. Its very obvious that she was nominated to bring in the undecided but leaning towards Hillary vote. She was a hasty, hail Mary choice for VP nominee. That choice speaks volumes about how much McCain is willing to compromise his supposed values (and the safety and security of his country) to win this election.

Not everyone woman is a feminist. Palin is decidedly anti-feminist. The facts that she is supporting a shotgun wedding for her daughter, that she would end legal abortion if she had the power, and that she is an ultra right wing Christian should be more than enough for anyone to know where she stands on women's rights. The only question left to ask is if she had to ask her husband for permission to run for office.

Why defend this person? Isn't this like asking the black community to defend Alan Keyes against his many critics?

Remember, Palin thinks that you and your wife will rot in hell for eternity.

Couldn't be arsed to read the whole thing so did Ms Paglia go on to praise Prince's Bat-Dance as the best single of all time, praise Sybil Danning's massive tits in Battle Beyond The Stars as a metaphor for modern feminism and the best sci-fi film of all time, be snide about Bill / Hillary Clinton then use excessive alliteration and tell us which fast food restraunt she patronisingly patronised this month?

I was with you until you got wrapped up in Palin.

I don't see it.

I guess I am discounting her at my own peril.

She is really good at firing up the lower quartile of the voting bell curve... I will give you that.

she is NOT SEXUALLY INTERESTED IN MEN, therefore any interest she has in gender and sexuality cannot be rooted in any deep personal interest in men and women REALLY getting along. It wouldn't do straight men much good if every woman in the world agreed with them on the issues and was at the same time totally incapable of taking a sexual interest in them.

I hated this article so much I put my foot through Joan Walsh and sent Camille Paglia the bill.

Nobody's dummy but yours, Camille. You may be sweet on her, but you'll have to compete with the First Dud. Palin's a hypocritical idiot. You can have her, Camille. You can walk hand-in-hand with her back to the Stone Age.

Neville Chamberlain wanted to stop Hitler's appetite with Sudetenland. Iran has not already grabbed anything. IGNORING YOUR ADVERSARIES IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN ENGAGING THEM. But of course, in this get-the-other-guy, you're fired, get-off-the-island gaming mentality Joe Six-pack kind of Fourth Reich society, some clowns with a viewpoint no longer than their hood ornament can't see any strategy except to yell "Hook-'em 'horns," or "We-re Number One." Horse muffins. I don't care if you owned Iraq; you are not qualified to assess from orbital altitude what is going on is PERSIA, when stuck in split-culture Iraq (a "nation" in name only). A FOR QUE-SARAH, SARAH, "vitality" is no substitute for alacrity. The only time she demonstrates any mental agility is when she can refer to, and recapture, the rehearsed tag-lines from her Karl Rove teleprompter. If that's vital, man do a lot of senior citizens have life in abundance!

I don't always agree with her - but man, I feel like Camille Paglia is a breath of fresh air and independent thinking. Whatever other readers might say, please keep her, Salon!! Having contributors like her with their unconventional opinions forces me to rethink my positions, and it's good for this site. The fact that she receives so many comments from readers is proof enough.

Ms. Paglia, thank you for Sexual Personae. It changed my reading of Dickinson forever, and I have long been grateful.

I'm dismayed by your continuing turn away from the literary toward the editorial, most of all because I find these pieces unfortunately written and incoherent. But here is what I read into them which is, for me, of value. To the other commenters:

Beneath what I can only take to be self-promoting gorilla dust, I think Paglia still has a message, albeit an ineptly presented one. (This sounds similar to her own limp defense of Palin's word-salad here, so I want to be careful.)

The take-home (though not necessarily the one Paglia intends) is that there are American right-wing feminists who do feel truly excluded. And that the risk of not including them will inevitably yield phenomena like President Caribou Barbie.

I'm not saying that Paglia is any kind of coherent representative for this perspective; the point may be in fact that they don't have a representative. But do you SEE these letters she gets? Did you READ them? These people aren't stupid. They're Mormon, or they're rural, or they're uneducated; but they're not stupid. Sarah Palin, in fact, isn't stupid. (But she is uneducated; which, given her age, is a great deal worse, in my opinion. She has the same kind of lethal canniness W. has. It is not, needless to say, the kind I think we need in modern elected officials.)

Quand même, when "elites" run around calling "regulars" stupid? We may still get ourselves elected, for now--at the cost of building an increasingly disenfranchized, alienated, media-contemptuous oppositional bloc. But what will the voting profile be like in 50 years?

While the contents of this letterbag seem abhorrent to liberals, they tell us clearly that we'd better pay attention to this voice of dissent NOW--and seriously, not just by mocking it and throwing Couric and Fey at it. We'd better find a way to include, care for, and feed the self-dubbed "populist" monster, before it takes over and devours the remnants of the free world.