White House flack Josh Earnest calls the Planned Parenthood videos "selectively edited".
No. What's being "selectively edited" is the baby:
Eyeballs, hearts, blasting out brains--all in a day's work at
#PlannedParenthood
This is depravity, and it happens every day in Planned Parenthood clinics across America - and only in America. As I've said repeatedly, Sweden doesn't do it, France doesn't do it, Norway doesn't do it... Question to Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi: Is every European social democracy also part of the right's "war on women"?
~Camille Paglia give a fascinating interview to Salon, who don't seem to be entirely aware that they're perfect exemplars of much of her critique:
I'm speaking here as an atheist. I don't believe there is a God, but I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system. They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny. Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death. The great tragic texts, including the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, no longer have the central status they once had in education, because we have steadily moved away from the heritage of western civilization...
I really feel sorry for young people growing up in this very shallow environment where they're peppered with images from mass media at a particularly debased stage... I despise snark. Snark is a disease that started with David Letterman and jumped to Jon Stewart and has proliferated since. I think it's horrible for young people! And this kind of snark atheism–let's just invent that term right now–is stupid, and people who act like that are stupid.
The shallow, self-reflecting pool in which today's generation has been raised is without precedent in the history of the English-speaking world. The scale of solipsistic compliant ignorance is totalitarian - and terrifying, in that it will inevitably be exploited for catastrophic and evil ends.
But on a lighter note:
I think Stewart's show demonstrated the decline and vacuity of contemporary comedy. I cannot stand that smug, snarky, superior tone. I hated the fact that young people were getting their news through that filter of sophomoric snark.
It's also, somewhat paradoxically, a ruthlessly censorious and self-censoring snark:
When the first secret Planned Parenthood video was released in mid-July, anyone who looks only at liberal media was kept totally in the dark about it... It was a huge and disturbing story, but there was total silence in the liberal media. That kind of censorship was shockingly unprofessional. The liberal major media were trying to bury the story by ignoring it. Now I am a former member of Planned Parenthood and a strong supporter of unconstrained reproductive rights. But I was horrified and disgusted by those videos.
But only because she checks "right-wing" media:
Liberals think of themselves as very open-minded, but that's simply not true! Liberalism has sadly become a knee-jerk ideology, with people barricaded in their comfortable little cells. They think that their views are the only rational ones, and everyone else is not only evil but financed by the Koch brothers.
So who are the real rubes here?
~This afternoon I'll be checking in with Neil Cavuto, live coast to coast on Fox News, just after 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific. If you are in the vicinity of the receiving apparatus, I hope you'll dial us up.
