Pot. Kettle. Black.

"Every penny Rush has earned was the result of his rapport with a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by the liberal monopoly of major media"

Sorry. Maybe you should have phrased it "...a vast audience who felt shut out and silenced by their imagined "liberal" monopoly of major media..."

from the one who's made an entire career of BEING DEAD WRONG ON ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.

still give this sad little woman free money?

I love ya Camille but you're so full 'o shit about Obama's new staff it's passed the rafters in piles. You're comfortably settled in to resume your role in the roost as the contrarian and throw in your lot with lard ass Limbaugh and all the those dead asses that brought us to Baghdad...bravo! That's using your brain. The rest of the country is on to new business.

Only a truly self-absorbed dope can spin together the short comings of a presidential staff less then 60-days old and a groupie trip to Brazil and Daniela Mercury.

Give me a break. This kind of silly combo is insulting in so many ways. If there's phoning or faxing it in...this must be farting it in over tin cans and string.

why does salon employ you?

Camille, this piece was truly excrable. The Obama administration has made some mistakes--but your solutions (fire them all!) are ridiculous and disproportionate to the small-ish mistakes they've made so far.

And I've no truck with anyone who can praise Rush Limbaugh in the same breath as a suggestion of stupidity in the administration. The irony practically drips off my screen...

...exEcrable!

Camille posts in the Salon forums as Jebldom.

Dare I hope for a full fucking essay on that cunt?

-- you can bring back "Kansas O'Flaherty" if you promise to put a stake through Paglia's heart.

"Yes, they have all been blindsided and overwhelmed by the crushing demands of the presidency."

Is she for real? I'm not sure if she is just a complete idiot or if she is THAT in love with Obama. Read that line again and think about it.

Camille, you are now about to experience the full fury that we conservatives experience on a regular basis - hell hath no fury like a liberal demagogue scorned (and hell hath no fouler mouth, either.)

Personally, I thank you for picking this hill to die on - it's as good a hill as any, and should be one that both liberals and conservatives fight together to defend. However, you're already taking serious 'friendly fire'...I hope you make it through.

You and your soul mate Sirota should be just two more hecklers and jackals writing comments of shocking negativity and willful falseness like the thousands of others of the same taxon of humanity. That Salon has the likes of you two writing for them only goes to show that creeping sociopaths can worm their way into any group. But hey, I already knew that.

...can we get this intellectual lightweight a padded cell with O'Reilly and a few other folks with narcissistic personality disorders. Just close the door forever.

It put the Republicans in a horrible bind. Either they had to defend a very polarizing figure, or alienate their own base. Actually, many Republicans found a third option that was even worse: attack Rush, THEN apologize. Then they get to alienate their base and look weak at the same time. I'm looking at you, Michael Steele!

The Obama administration has certainly made mistakes, but that was FAR from a mistake.

As for the free speech angle, HUH? People pick on Rush, and he defends himself. That's free speech at its finest.

Only ignoramuses believe that Rush speaks for the Republican Party.

I must say that, however much I disagree with you on certain aspects of American politics, I totally agree with your depiction of the vitality of the Brazilian arts scene. Carnival in Rio has indeed become Big Business, but in places like Salvador -- the Mecca of Brazilian carnival lovers -- or my own hometown, Recife, it is still as earth-shattering an experience as you describe. And it is interesting that even I don't at all disagree that Daniella Mercury is an extremely powerful figure, in the Brazilian scene she does not stand out as much as she would in America--63 songs in 6 hours with a 15 minutes' break, that sounds about normal. :-)

OMG! All my adult life I hear such respect people have for Paglia, particularly for feminism and women's rights.

But, my God, reading her posts her @ Salon it sure makes me wonder. Maybe it is kind of like being born too late to see the young, think Elvis. All I got to experience was the old fat washed-up Elvis.

Or maybe Camille's political sense is really that bad.

But to say that Rush Limbaugh is JUST LIKE any other successful broadcaster and does not deserve scorn and being called-out is astonishing. This is a man who calls feminists "feminazis", Obama a socialist, Michael J Fox a faker and Nancy Pelosi a monster.

And you are one of the many voices calling for new people and "change" in DC, but get yourself all worked up because he doesn't know antiquated gifting protocols for the UK PM????? Good grief!

Well, congrats Salon and Camille! Your wonderful piece has earned a place right on Drudge's site. Way to go! Enjoy the infamy!

I pretty much hate everything Limbaugh says, and think he's a misogynist and racist, etc. But I'm on a Democratic mailing list that last week called on us to "tell the Republicans in Congress to repudiate Rush" (um, like that will sway them?) and this week proclaims "Rush is too extreme for America." WTF??? Isn't that the core insult that Republicans like to use for anyone to the left of Palin?

So this time I'm with Paglia, that even terrible free speech is better than trying to silence a voice. The way to change the bad speech is to find it irrelevant and uninteresting (not likely in our media markets, I realize), and let it talk to a smaller and smaller audience, and to make the good ideas more compelling (I know, I'm a dreamer:-)