Camille Paglia Praises Sarah Palin, Maintains Valuable Right-Wing Cred

In today’s Salon, Sexual Personae author and all-around pain in the ass Camille Paglia gives a post-election spin to the transparent contrarian act that keeps people paying attention to her. While praising Barack Obama’s “personal gifts and power of persuasion,” she faults him for his relationship with Bill Ayers and — get this — the fake-birth-certificate story that tantalized wingnuts for months, comparing the press’ lack of interest in the certificate with their “passivity” toward “Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction.”

Paglia also praises Sarah Palin for the “powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes” and her “language,” which she says avails “the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist,” and advises the Governor pursue the example of Richard Nixon along a “rubber-chicken circuit” path to the Presidency. Plus: “I’ve taken the gloves off against John Ashbery, Jorie Graham and the rest of that insufferably pretentious crowd.”