Camille Paglia's Happy Romp At Salon Celebrating Sanders' Non-Win

Camille Paglia, who gets the odd byline at Salon despite being almost entirely opposed to many of their orthodoxies, managed to get in a raucous essay on the rot in the Democratic party that Hillary Clinton most ably embodies, and how Bernie Sanders managed (at least in theory) to upend it:

With Bernie Sanders’ thrilling, runaway victory over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, the old-guard feminist establishment in the U.S. has been dealt a crushing blow.

Despite emergency efforts by Gloria Steinem, the crafty dowager empress of feminism, to push a faltering Hillary over the finish line, Sanders overwhelmingly won women’s votes in every category except senior citizens. Last week, when she told TV host Bill Maher that young women supporting the Sanders campaign are just in it to meet boys, Steinem managed not only to insult the intelligence and idealism of the young but to vaporize every lesbian Sanders fan into a spectral non-person.

Steinem’s polished humanitarian mask had slipped, revealing the mummified fascist within. I’m sure that my delight was shared by other dissident feminists everywhere. Never before has the general public, here or abroad, more clearly seen the arrogance and amoral manipulativeness of the power elite who hijacked and stunted second-wave feminism.

Paglia is at her best with the sword, reminding us that Hillary's chief accomplishments have been as a self-serving, corrupt job-filler who hitched her star to her husband's much more impressive political career. She also goes in for an extended recounting of Gloria Steinem's many faults, which long-time Paglia-watchers will find familiar, particularly the editorial direction in which she took Ms. magazine: man-hating, dogmatic, snide, contemptuous of women who chose to be stay-at-home mothers and those opposing abortion on religious grounds, and even anti-scientific. (Steinem opposed the application of biology in academic feminist studies programs, a glaring flaw that informs all such to this day.) But Paglia falters with the shield; Sanders is every bit the hack Clinton is, aided not a little by an equally embarrassing and thin résumé, especially given his political durability in Congress. If he has turned out less corrupt than Ms. Clinton, it surely amounts to the fact he's had fewer opportunities for graft.

Of course, the story of Sanders' "thrilling, runaway" victory isn't over; The Daily Caller ran what appears to be a fairly speculative piece yesterday, repeated in many corners, that, thanks to the Democrats' byzantine primary system, Clinton will win the delegate battle in New Hampshire despite losing the popular vote. Weirdly, the establishment Clinton lost in New Hampshire in 2008 despite winning the popular vote, in a system that appears to largely act as a means to suppress upstarts while seeming to favor them.