Honestly. CP is the only woman I have ever read or seen or met who deserved to be called a cunt.

Flamers, light your flames. I really don't care.

"Can Palin ever come back?"

Will you ever go away?

"Callers coming fresh from her rallies are always heady with infectious enthusiasm."

Yes, enthusiastic calls of "kill him" and traitor" were indeed infectiouns Camille. Infectious enough apparently for the CIA to take note. Do you try to be this stupid Camille. Just wondering?

" like a host of others, have shifted my news gathering to the Web."

Right, I'm sure at sites like Drudge.

"as I know from listening to talk radio."

Yes, we get it. You never fail to mention that fact in every article you write here. As an aside Camille, it only makes you look like more of a lightweight to acknowledge how much you dig talk radio which is almost exclusively right wing drivel.

"Hey, wake up -- Palin cleaned Biden's clock! By the end, Biden was sighing and itching to split."

Yes, I totally agree. That did indeed happen in the bizarro universe. You know, the one where the exact opposite happens of everything here on earth.

"This was, in fact, the central point in my crusade in the 1990s against post-structuralism, whose monotonous foundation was the tunnel-vision linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. What a dungeon post-structuralists locked themselves and their hapless students into."

Yes of course we all remember that. How could we forget? By the way, could you try to write this more pretentiously next time?

"Why provide more fodder for the vultures and harpies of the Northeastern media?"

Well self-described, Ms. Paglia.

Oh god, not again.

Cammie, you made a whole hell of lot of errors which you forthrightly fess up to in this column. However as an academic with internet access and interweb column this is beyond dumb.

If you're going rake muck and act like the bad girl at least get your facts straight then you don't look so dumb and it's easier to be taken seriously.

p.s. I read the column but as everyone already knows, the real show is with the letters.

Hey Paglia, don't think for even a minute that anyone here with a grain of intelligence actually thinks you use real letters in this type of column. You or someone who works for you clearly writes these logrolling pieces of cowdung disguised as real letters from your audience. None of them have ever passed the smell test. So to sum up. You, my dear lady, are full of shit.

Also, please excuse my typo in an earlier post. Infectious is what I meant to write not infectiouns. I was too quick to go to press. I must be from the Northeast.

Is it that time of month already? And like a virus circulating throughout an airplane, that other shitty cold known as Wingnut will surely follow in a day or two. Why do you do keep doing this to us Salon?

I love watching Sarah Palin's fans try to spin this latest demonstration of her irresponsible, capricious nature and her illiterate mangling of the English language. But even by Paglia's standards, it's hilarious to see her, in the same column in which she defends Palin, still calling Obama's highly effective Cairo speech "first draft material." (Okay, I know that technically it was a "letter writer" who wrote that, but we all know perfectly well that Paglia writes those letters to herself). Tell me, Camille, in your immense experience and wisdom as a teacher, if Obama's speech was a "first draft," what was Palin's statement? It sounded to me like a petulant little kid whining that she was taking her dollies and her dishes and going home, but then, I'm less susceptible than you to a student who flashes pretty legs while spouting b.s.

i'd just like to point out that singer dave gahan (the one with the much documented drug abuse) has only recently starting writing songs. he was just a frontman at the point that "never let me down again" was written; that credit should be given to martin l. gore, the bands primary songwriter. who has had well documented troubles of his own.

great damn music, tho.

...by the sidebar link's summary: "Obama, U2, lesbo porn".

Palin and Paglia deserve each other. Similar strategy: whenever someone disagrees with you, call them elitists. Easy peasy!

And am I the only one who suspects that those letters are not from real people? And that Paglia writes them herself, painstakingly tailoring them to her own particular, ridiculous idiom?

We did get a talk radio mention, yes, but no shout-out to her Italian working-class roots. It's at least one or the other, if not both. That's how she proves she's a "Real Murican".

Why am I so unsurprised that Paglia is quietly itching to be in love with Palin. Probably because she persists in using her talkshow radio listening habits as some sort of proof of credibility.

Palin cleaned whose clock at the VP debates? What were you watching, Camille? Why, again, am I entirely unsurprised that you watched that stilted, nonsensical performance littered with inappropriate buzz word recitation after inappropriate buzzword recitation and decided it was a slam dunk? Biden (by plan) certainly had no extraordinary attempts at soaring rhetoric, but at least he avoided sounded like a Press Kit robot whose verbal syntax routine was about 90 degrees off true.

You are without question one of the most stunning and continuing examples of poor opinion currently published on these pages, Paglia. And that's saying something.

Apparently Palin's faults lie not in her ignorance, her lack of articulation, her "pallin' around with terrorists" hate-mongering, her quitting her elected office so she can find a bigger spotlight, and her wild, ongoing misstatements about how the American system of government works (what with the "department of law" and all).

No, her only mistake is not preparing her speech sufficiently to avoid "provid[ing] more fodder for the vultures and harpies of the Northeastern media." Because anyone who criticizes her - all the "preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags" - are obviously the real villains here. Did Camille run out of vituperative insults for journalists, or did her editors just tell her she was out of space? She has certainly bought into Palin's martyr complex with repsect to the media. One advantage of doing so is that you can ingore any valid criticism that shows up there, because there is none - they're all out to git 'er!

As for hate crimes: I can understand reasons both for and against hate crimes. But it's best not to spread misconceptions about them. Some important facts:

(1) There are already hate crime statutes based on race, religion, and national origin, and nobody in the legislature is talking about getting rid of them. The debate is entirely about whether they should cover sexual orientation as well. The fact that suddenly people who never objected to hate crime laws are going wild about them now has little to do with hate crime laws and everything to do with anti-gay bigotry. Otherwise the objections would have cropped up much earlier.

(2) Hate crime laws do not say that attacks on a member of one group are inherently worse than attacks on a member of another group. For example, hate crime laws concerning sexual orientation kick in when a crime is motivated by hatred or prejudice based on sexual orientation. This applies when a straight man beats up a gay man because he hates gays, or when a gay man attacks a straight man because he hates straights. In fact, it applies when a lesbian beats up another lesbian because the attacker hates lesbians (it happens), or if a straight man beats up another straight man because the attacker hates gays and mistakenly believes the victim to be gay. It does not apply if a straight man beats up a lesbian simply because he wants to steal her tool belt.

In other words, it does not make any one person's like more valuable than another's. Of course, in the real world, it will come up most often when straights beat up gays. But that's not because of a flaw in the law; it's because straights beat up gays more often than the other way around. We can fix this inequity by having straights beat up gays less, or by having gays beat up straights more. Take your pick.

Camille's victm-blaming comments about Matthew Shepard are worse than despicable. Her statement that "a hate crimes law that claims to be able to penetrate the mind of the perpetrator should be equally open to questions about the victim" creates an insane symmetry, moral equivalency at its worst. The "motive" of a murder victim is not, in U.S. law, as significant as the motives of his killers because the victim is not on trial. It sounds like Camille thinks he should be, though.