This is unbelievably bad by the standards of both Salon and Camille Paglia, which is like saying that Donald Trump just said something amazingly ignorant about foreign policy, the economy, Christiani…oops! I’m not supposed to do that, because, see, as Paglia scolds, liberals are responsible for the explosive rise of Trump to the top of the Republican shitheap. (Andrew Sullivan has been saying the same thing, almost as tediously and tendentiously.)

Paglia asserts that Democrats have been “playing the race and riot cards against him to the max.” While I’ve never heard of the “riot card” before. I am mystified as to what the appropriate response to people disturbed by racist comments from a leading political candidate should look like. Feigning deafness? Nervous giggling? Sighing, “Ah, that scamp, he’s a bit much, but he’s just trying to breathe life into things”?

Paglia seems oblivious to the fact that Republicans have been pillorying Trump for the same things, as loudly as they dared, throughout the campaign. Well, except for respected voices such as David Duke, The American Freedom Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and various other Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, who in viewing Trump as a racist might as well be shouting their closet liberalism from the rooftops, on Paglia’s view.

Not cryptically, Paglia’s vitriol toward liberals is nothing more than her animus for Hillary Clinton and her supporters. Reaching farther up her own ass than probably anyone with a major media platform ever has to demonize something utterly innocuous, Paglia exposes the hidden motives of Clinton backers with this fever-dream of a parsing of a three-word campaign declaration:

“And is there anything creepier than that current Hillary meme, the campaign slogan ‘I’m with her’? The blurred borderlines of those pronouns (‘I’ numbly dissolving into ‘her’) and that ambiguous preposition (‘with’ her like a child, a lover, or a nurse’s aide with a geriatric patient?) are close to pathological. The Hillary acolytes are joined at the hip to ‘her’, the Great Leader Who Needs No Name, the Maternal Tit daubed in wormwood, the bitter toxin left by men–those spoilers of the universe who created the master structures of modern civilization that provide us put-upon gals with jobs, transportation, abundant food, clean water, housing, electricity, and a magical disease-spurning municipal sewage system that only men seem required to clean and repair.”

Of Trump himself, Paglia observes, “Whether Trump, with his erratic impulses and gratuitous crudities, can morph toward statesmanship remains to be seen.” Facile rejoinders write themselves; how about, “Whether the Beatles, with half of the original members in their seventies and the other half long dead, can reunite for the 2017 Super Bowl Halftime Show remains to be seen”?

There’s more, but…there’s really nothing. This column is bad on so many levels that one of them, the fact that most of it appears to consist of events that may or may have happened as Paglia describes 50 or more years ago, is not even worth noting…oops. Again.