I’ve spent most of the morning listening to Camille Paglia YouTube videos — an interview she did seven weeks ago with Reason.com’s Nick Gillespie, a lecture she gave during the 2012 Chicago Humanities Festival and a 1996 interview she did with Politically Correct‘s Bill Maher. I’ve been a rapt admirer of her contrarian puncturing…her radical, libertarian, anti-leftist-Stalinoid views since the early ’90s. I don’t agree with everything she says, but she’s one of the few truly unshackled, bold-as-brass cultural critics, and I love her obviously valuable, fully considered opinions mixed with her shoot-from-the-hip, motor-mouth way of speaking. She’s always a turn-on. A mind like a bullwhip.

Paglia’s views on Hillary Clinton have always been brutal. She told Gillespie that “she’s exactly my age. Our accents are kind of the same. I understand her completely. So I see all the games and falsehoods and so forth. 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. She’s a fraud! She can’t have an opinion without poll-testing it. She’s a liar. This is not a strong candidate for our first woman president. Hillary does not have it. Hillary is a mess.”