An interesting interview at Salon.com with Camille Paglia, where she skewers the Democrats over the Foley debacle.  Camille wastes no shots in pointing out the Democrat’s blunders, and even takes us back to the Clinton years, to the complaints and criticism about his sex-capades that were not expedient to say then.

This from a noted Democrat is very revealing.  I don’t think I have enjoyed reading anything at Salon more.

She also does a good job of pointing out where the Republicans have failed in the political debate.

And while I do not agree with her positions on the war in Iraq, I do think she has some interesting points along the way regardless.

Honestly the whole interview has merit and I would happily reprint it all, were it not for the restrictions on fair use.  I could spend a whole day extracting and saving my favorite one liners.

(emphasis added- original questions are underlined for clarity)

Salon Interview: Camille Paglia- Our fave pop intellectual weighs in on the Dems’ gift to Ann Coulter (Foley), why Condi’s success matters to feminsts, and Bob Woodward (yawn).

What has been your reaction to the huge uproar over Rep. Mark Foley, which was on the front pages of newspapers in Europe as well as the U.S. for two straight weeks?

Foley is obviously a moral degenerate, and the Republican House leadership has come across as pathetically bumbling and ineffectual. But the idea that this is some sort of major scandal in the history of American politics is ludicrous. This was a story that needed to be told for, you know, like two days.

Mark Foley was never on the radar of anyone outside the small circle of news junkies. So his fall and banishment from Washington were nothing but a drip in the torrential flood of current geopolitical problems. The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push this story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was "Foley, Foley, Foley!" — and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.

After three or four days of it, as soon as I heard Foley’s name, I turned the sound off or switched channels. It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil. Whatever short-term political gain there is, it can only have a negative impact on gay men. When a moralistic, buttoned-up Republican like Foley is revealed to have a secret, seamy gay life, it simply casts all gay men under a shadow and makes people distrust them. Why don’t the Democratic strategists see this? These tactics are extremely foolish. Gay men through history have always been more vulnerable to public hysteria than are lesbians, who — unless they’re out there parading around in all-leather bull-dyke drag — simply fit more easily into the cultural landscape than do gay men, who generally lead a more adventurous, pickup-oriented sex life.

Not only has the public image of gay men been tarnished by the over-promotion of the Foley scandal, but they have actually been put into physical danger. It’s already starting with news items about teenage boys using online sites to lure gay men on dates to attack and rob them. What in the world are the Democrats thinking? We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian. Since when does the Democratic Party use any gay issue in this coldblooded way as a token on the chessboard? You’d expect this stuff from right-wing ideologues, not progressives.

…

It also advances a line the far Christian right has employed for years — to make a connection between gay men and child molesters. It’s one of the most despicable smears imaginable.

And with the Democrats’ record of sex scandals, what the hell were they thinking of?

That line totally made my day. 

For heaven’s sake, after we just got through the whole Clinton maelstrom! What Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky was far worse than any evidence I’ve seen thus far about what Foley did with these pages. Clinton, whom I voted for twice, used his superior power as an employer to lure Monica Lewinsky, who was perfectly willing, into these squalid sexual assignations on the grounds of the White House. There was a time when feminists were arguing, in regard to sexual harassment in the workplace, that any gross disparity in power cannot possibly produce informed consent. All of a sudden, all of that was abandoned for partisan reasons in the Clinton case. I take the European view that any government official has the right to conduct as many sexual affairs as he wishes — off government property. But Clinton, with all his power, somehow couldn’t figure out a way to discreetly meet his chosen women at the mansions of his many friends. I can understand why hotels and motels might have been difficult to manage, with the telltale Secret Service presence. But to use the hallway off the Oval Office for those encounters — to be serviced by a young woman to whom he gave no other dignity and whom he used like a washrag –

And this one….

he turned that hallway into a sleazy mosh pit! The Democrats are being extremely imprudent to arouse all those sleeping tigers again — particularly if their next presidential nomination is Hillary Clinton. They’ve reignited the endless series of charges about Clinton’s allegedly abusive physical encounters with women, beginning when he was governor of Arkansas. The Foley case shrinks in comparison to Clinton’s rumored history of hitting on women in subordinate positions.

Yup

But what if by jumping on and making a big deal out of this, it delivers the Democrats the House and the Senate? Will it have been worth it?

I completely disagree that the Foley case has helped the Democrats. There’s been so much fudging of the polling data, which long before the Foley case already indicated that many Republicans nationwide were turned off by the direction of their party and were planning to sit home on Election Day. It’s a boldfaced lie that the Foley case caused this. Bedrock Republicans have been dismayed by the Bush administration’s overspending and by its inaction on illegal immigration, among other things.

How very true. 

These trends were already quite visible before the Democrats inserted themselves into the Republicans’ slow drift away from the polls. So what they’ve done, in this rabid orchestration of the Foley case, is to risk energizing the Republican base again. Are they mad, or just dumb? They’ve handed the Republicans a reason to go to the polls — to register their contempt for Democrats!

And this was at a moment in the campaign when we needed to keep the fiasco in Iraq on the front pages. For the Democrats to have stolen the headlines and forced the major media to switch subjects has been a tremendous boon to Bush. What kind of disproportion of scale are we talking about here? The Foley case is nothing compared to the disaster in Iraq and the innumerable lives that are being lost or ruined on both sides.

This woman has my respect for having the guts to sayit like it is.

Read the rest, it is not disappointing no matter which way you lean.  She has somethign to say for everyone.