Thank you, Ellemm.

I grew up in the "poor" category (one winter, we took an axe to our furniture because we had no firewood), and good grades were simply expected of me. From a young age, I saw stay-at-home moms and actually didn't want to be an adult for fear of having to assume this role (I realize the notion of some little girls NOT desiring motherhood is crazy to some of you. Feminism was a logical segue to my girlhood desires). Of course, my parents explained that this was why good grades were necessary, so I wouldn't have to depend upon anyone else for financial assistance.

Subsequently I worked my ass off. At one point, I was working and attending school full-time, while taking additional classes at another institution. For about a year, I had no weekends. Later upon transferring to another school, I was told that having a job outside the program was not recommended; I did anyway.

But hey clearly Palin knows more about hard work than this "elitist, NYC liberal." If this statement makes you feel better about yourselves, go ahead and believe that.

Actually, Kennedy didn't get us into Vietnam. There were American combat advisors in South Vietnam under Ike, too. But don't let a little thing like the facts get in the way of your stupid rant and about what very, very bad people you think liberals are. LOL

Please, Salon, listen to your readers and give up on this demagog of the contrarians. Her whole way of dealing with her self loathing is to irritate as many other people as possible. Can't you just send her over to Fox News where she can find an audience, albeit a shrinking one? If you want to publish alternative view points the least you could do is find someone with a little credibility. Stop enabling her illness.

Obama's position on talking to Iran, is the same position as Henry Kissinger and Colin Powel. As a Jewish person with great love for Israel, I Trust Obama. Everyone will hold

his feet to the fire much more than they will McCain.

McCain will do as he please, lie to the American people and Israel, and run a secret government not answering to anyone

just as Bush and Cheney has done for the last seven years.

Sarah Palin is not a smart politician, she is a great script, speech reader, not writer, reader, with a nice smile, and great personality. We need far more than that in a

Vice-President/ possible President.

She cannot answer questions where actual intelligence is required. Let's not confuse a good reader and great personality, with true intelligence and knowledge of the issues (something Hillary has).

But that's beside the point. She's not qualified, either.

I mean, Hugo Chavez is popular in his country, but that doesn't mean he's great shakes.

Fine. Sarah Palin may be no dummy, but she appears woefuly ignorant of the world beyond Alaskan politics, and almost jingoistic in her apparent view that any country or culture that has pronounced differences with or attitudes toward the United States is, perforce, our enemy.

Regarding several letters critical to the pro-choice or pro-abortion perspective, I recall a Vatican official admonishing Bosnian Muslim women who had been beaten, gang-raped and impregnated by Serbian troops to blithely "have their babies" (a view that would no doubt have been endorsed by Sarah Palin). I was outraged, and as an ex-Catholic I felt that such Vatican ideologues deserved the same fate that befell King Edward II of England in the 14th century (look it up).

"The university culture at Columbia and Harvard through which Obama passed has been drenched in a reflexive anti-Americanism for several decades. Armchair blame-America-first leftism is the default mode. Disdain for the military is rampant, and conservative voices are rarely heard."

Dr. Paglia, why are you wasting your time at Salon when you could be cohosting a show on Fox with Fred Barnes?

I have enjoyed the mental spectacle of the prophets of Baal slitting their wrists over their discomfiture concerning one, Camille Paglia. Yuck, yuck. Camille is intriguing. Nobody tells this chick, Camille, what to think. Maybe she wouldn't like to be called a chick. It is a compliment, however. There I go again, smirking about all the blather over Camille. So sorry.

Paglia is an cloistered lesbian academic who doesn't know the first damn thing about straight families and the changing roles of fathers today. Todd Palin isn't some kind of "new paradigm" or whatever the fuck she thinks he is. He's a guy just like millions of other dads in America who pitches in when he can. Paglia is so out of touch with reality that it's hillarious.

I almost fell off my chair when Paglia railed against elitism. I think she's after Lynn Forester irony crown.

I bet she just has a crush on Sarah Palin.

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.