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"Would I want Hillary answering the red phone in the middle of the night? No, bloody not."

By Ann Althouse

Camille Paglia, weighing in late, finds a little something new to say about the 3 a.m. ad. And she says it very well:

The White House first responder should be a person of steady, consistent character and mood -- which describes Obama more than Hillary. And that scare ad was produced with amazing ineptitude. If it's 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest"? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour? A president should not be a monomaniac incapable of rest and perched on guard all night like Poe's baleful raven. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.

I also love her bitching about Hillary's retro-feminists:

The cloud of feminist cant about Hillary's struggling candidacy has been noxious. "Media misogyny has reached an all-time high," screeched the National Organization for Women in a press release titled "Ignorance and Venom: The Media's Deeply Ingrained Sexism." Groan. If women are going to play in the geopolitical big league, they'd better toughen up and learn how to deal with all the curveballs. Never has the soppy emotionalism of old-guard feminist reasoning been on such open and embarrassing display. How has Hillary, who rode her husband's coattails to the top and who trashed every woman he seduced or assaulted, become such a feminist heroine? What has she ever achieved on her own -- aside from the fiasco of healthcare reform?

You know, I enjoy Paglia's writing ? though I've had my issues with her! ? but these three-screen-long essays are really a series of disjointed paragraphs that would be so much better as individual blog posts, put up in a much more timely fashion. Maybe she's doing it this way the better to manufacture a book of essays to be published and sold at some much later date, but I think it's a damned shame she doesn't yield to the blog form her writing obviously wants to take.

Full post as published by Althouse on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).