Terry: Camille Paglia’s Salon.com article is also worth reading for her scathing criticism, from the far left, of Obama’s handling of the stimulus bill, cap and trade and health care reform.
But this tonic dose of truth-telling may be too little too late. As an
Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with
which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators
publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic
missteps this year. I suspect there had been private grumbling all
along, but the media warhorses failed to speak out when they should
have — from week one after the inauguration, when Obama went flat as a
rug in letting Congress pass that obscenely bloated stimulus package.
Had more Democrats protested, the administration would have felt less
arrogantly emboldened to jam through a cap-and-trade bill whose costs
have made it virtually impossible for an alarmed public to accept the
gargantuan expenses of national healthcare reform. (Who is naive enough
to believe that Obama’s plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major
cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)
And this on the “ideological brainwashing” at American universities.
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile
toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders
tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy
product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought
and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education
in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college
application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic
that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down,
promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a
style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism,
sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The
Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clich?s that it’s
positively pickled.
In fact, the entire article is well worth reading.
