Quacks

Camille Paglia, remember her? Salon.com does and worshipfully publishes her increasingly incoherent outbursts. I won't pretend I got through the whole of her latest, but I did find and can't resist sharing a few choice bits.

For instance, there's this, in which it turns out that Trump, as per Paglia, is in no way the dangerous demagogue or, heaven forbid, "vile racist," a "battalion of political commentators on both the Left and Right" imagine him to be. No, he's a real leader "motivated by rational concerns about border security and bad trade deals."

Where others think Trump’s hairdo just plain freaky, she approves of it as a "retro Bobby Rydell quiff."

Best of all, is the rhapsodic insight in which it is revealed to Paglia that Trump is a "Viking, slashing, burning, and laughing at the carnage in his wake." To her mind, a lashing, smashing hunk of Viking is exactly what Americans need now to snap us out of being "timid and uncertain." Wait, maybe not a Viking. She also compares Trump favorably to "a late Roman emperor," surrounded by a "Praetorian Guard" capable of "supplanting the authority of the Senate and the old patrician class."

Whether as Viking or as Caligula, it's precisely the dangerous demagogue that Paglia utterly thrills to in Trump.

Is she looking for an appointment in a Donald administration, perhaps as Minister of Quack?

Who knows? Or maybe it's just that she's a lot like Donald, quacking on, as she does, in a higher key.

Me, I think Salon.com should retire the tiresome and tortuous Paglia and go directly to the real thing, the Donald himself, for the best quacks.