"Hillary is a mess. And we're going to reward the presidency to a woman who's enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers?"

"The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary's record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It's a scandal! Anyone who believe in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He's a sex criminal! We're going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary's ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has her own career, who's made her own career! The woman who failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose law firm was because her husband was a politician."

Says Camille Paglia, in the interview embedded 2 posts down. Paglia also says � responding to the question "Is Hillary Clinton kind of your worst nightmare as a woman?" � "No, she's exactly my age. I feel I know her completely. Our accents are kind of the same. I understand her completely. So I see all the games and falsehoods and so forth. So I've enjoyed it. I've made an entire career practically�in fact I wrote the cover story for The New Republic 'Ice Queen, Drag Queen'�that was 1996, it was way back there."

I'd like to read that 1996 piece. This is the best I can do: here. I have a New Republic subscription, but a search for the title turned up no results. But I can excerpt this:

Ice queen, drag queen: the Great White Feminist Hope is a far more conflicted and self-destructive creature than either her admirers or revilers understand.... The woman her classmates called "Sister Frigidaire" has the "mind of winter" of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man." She, too, in Stevens's words, has "been cold a long time."

This coldness is the brittle brilliance of Hillary's calculating, analytic mind, which at its most legalistic has a haunting, daunting impersonality.... Hillary had to learn how to be a woman; it did not come easily or naturally.... 

That's the woman who lives and is completely understood in the brain of Paglia.

ADDED: The idea that Hillary would not have had a viable legal or political career without lashing herself to Bill is utterly ridiculous. There is every reason to think she would have had a far better career if she hadn't gone off to Arkansas. The idea that her legal credentials weren't good enough to get her a job at Rose law firm is pure fantasy. As for failing a bar exam, that's not an intelligence test. Take a look at the eminent folks who have failed bar exams. Kathleen Sullivan, former Dean of Stanford Law School. Benjamin Cardozo, the Supreme Court Justice. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Paglia rattles off ideas as if to bury us in sheer volume.

But, of course, I agree with her that the first woman President should not be someone who built her career on top of her husband's success and who is implicated in the destruction of women who got in her husband's way. Here I am, last May, making (half of) this point in 37 seconds (along with another reason why I don't think Hillary should be the first woman President):