"Worst of the lot is Dick Cheney...."

[Spinoza]

Once again, Camille Paglia...

>snip..... "Worst of the lot is Dick Cheney, with his lumpish provincialism. What a narrow, limited mind! His geopolitics is a vintage-1870s version of frontier Americanism, but he managed to impose it on the over-credulous new president when this Bush took office. It's all so simple to them: The majority of Iraqis and Iranians want peace and modernization, so let's impose democracy at the barrel of a gun. But what ignorance of history: The mass of the population always want to live their own lives; change is always driven by small, committed groups of ideologues and fanatics -- even in our own revolution. Representative democracy is a great ideal, but major shifts are rarely achieved by majority rule, which prefers the status quo.

Everything that's happening now in Iraq was prophesied in Salon before we ever waded in there. The idea that the Democratic senators were somehow misled by the intelligence given to them by the administration is such rank nonsense! It was already obvious this enterprise was pure folly. This administration doesn't seem to realize that the world is much larger than the United States. I hear on conservative talk radio the constant assertion that America is the destined leader of the world, that America is blessed by God and the best place on earth, where everyone wants to live. Therefore anything we do is automatically good, and the only problem is the people who hate us because we're free. Now I'm very pro-American -- my entire family escaped poverty in Italy because they rightly believed in the American dream. My father and five of my uncles proudly served in World War II. But uncritical American boosterism -- automatic endorsement of every government action -- is myopic and self-defeating. I don't think too many people at the top of this administration -- or too many conservative radio hosts, for that matter -- have traveled much outside the U.S. or had contact with other languages. They've had minimal exposure to other worldviews or lifestyles. It's unsettling that politicians with such constricted vision will have been in charge of public policy for eight years of this presidency." <snip
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/10/27/paglia/

[blitzen]

1. one of the few times i have read paglia without disgust n/t