"Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend."

"In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her. Even a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights became just another card for Pelosi to deal and swap."

Ha ha. Camille Paglia's column is up.

... Pelosi's hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.

Paglia loves the macho approach to achievement, but what happens when the seeming victory deflates? It will deflate, won't it? If it doesn't deflate in 4 hours, call your doctor.

Not that Paglia loves the healthcare bill. She does not:

This rigid, intrusive...

Call the police!

... and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare.... Massively expanding... Steel yourself for the deafening screams...  jammed, jostling anterooms....

I'm screaming already. The government needs to stop jamming our anterooms. 

Obama sure needed a lift and got it from Pelosi. The administration has seemed to be drifting lately. Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan -- another rats' nest we should pull our troops out of overnight. Then there was the bizarre disproportion in Obama's flying to Denmark to flog a Chicago Olympics yet not having time to make it to Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall -- which suggests a frivolous provincialism as well as ignorance of history among the president's principal advisors. And Obama's muted response to last week's massacre at Fort Hood has exposed ambiguities and uncertainties in the U.S. government and military about how to respond to homegrown militant Islam. The presidency is a heavy burden -- a prize that can become a curse.

You'd think that the man who was once seen as a master of political imagery would not have allowed himself to generate so much material to fit that very specific and negative template.