The Proof Is in the Pickle

Liberal writer Camille Paglia punched out her own team pretty bad at Salon yesterday over their demonstrated lack of thinking ability. Her article is well worth looking at (right up until her half-hearted attachs on Bush-Cheney). (“Too late for Obama to turn it around?”)

But this nugget is worth the price of the whole article:

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote "critical thinking," which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms ("racism, sexism, homophobia") when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.

Item: This out-of-control response by Chicago writer Ray Hanania on Congressman Joe Wilson’s capital crime of having “yelled not once but twice (!!!) while President Barack Obama explained to the American people what he hopes his health care reform plan means for the American people.” :

Wilson should be impeached and forcibly removed from the Congress. His apology, which only came after he was denounced by U.S. Senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and other members of his party.

But while Wilson asserted that he let his emotions get the best of him, the outburst symbolized the animosity and hatred that separates Republicans from the Democrats and that has targeted President Obama, the nation’s first African American chief executive officer.

It’s not emotion. It is driven in part by a deep seated racism. Deep down in Wilson’s emotions is a powerfully growing sentiment of racist hatred that does not allow even a reasoned discussion about an issue so important as health care. (“Joe Wilson should resign from Congress over hateful attack”).