Let’s be honest. The down-to-earth, at times radical, and always controversial libertarian Camille Paglia — nicknamed "Hurricane Camille” because of the blasts she still aims at the liberal feminist establishment — favors Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin.

However, despite her Democratic leanings, Paglia stands out as one of the nation’s most important voices in exposing the perversity, danger, and superficiality of liberalism, a fact powerfully exemplified by what she has to say about Sarah Palin in a recent "Salon” piece.

We wouldn’t expect Camille Paglia to regurgitate the liberal reaction to Palin — from the arrogance, hypocrisy, and superciliousness spewed by the liberal elite (epitomized by ABC’s Charlie Gibson) to the vicious, misogynistic Clintonian "bimbos” spewed by liberal commentators to the reeking filth that flows on websites such as the "Daily Kos.”

And she doesn’t. Instead, she offers her first impression of the remarkable woman from Alaska with the following words:

"Palin [represents] an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism . . . [that combines] male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. [She is] somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist [in a manner completely opposite of] "the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.”

Of course, the admirable attributes Paglia observes make no impression upon liberals, who perceive the governor as just another "man” — especially because of her respect for the military and her belief in its prime importance to our nation.

But Paglia, who has spoken about military tradition at West Point, doesn’t hear Palin’s singing the importance of our armed forces through the ears of a leftist Pollyanna. Rather, she looks at it through the mind of a common sense realist:

"As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women’s studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.”

Having dispensed that excellent piece of take it or leave it advice that young women leave to their detriment, Paglia places Sarah Palin in the historical line of strong, capable American women, further illuminating for us why the governor has lit a fire among the American mainstream, even as liberals mock her as a religious extremist lightweight unworthy of the national political stage:

"She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.”

Of course, Camille Paglia knows that neither corsets nor a genteel manner reveal the real woman. But her reference to a past when women were bound by sexist conventions and whalebone reminds us that a Hillaryesque binding of oneself to angry, amoral, vulgar, power grubbing, leftist ideology doesn’t either.

This understanding of the real woman, that is, a woman who exhibits her femininity with courage, honesty, faith, intelligence, and strength, explains why Paglia can tell us that "A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit.”

It also explains why the Palin has prompted Paglia to recall a landlady of long ago, a woman she regards as "another version of the Italian immigrant women of [her] grandmother’s generation — agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.”

It explains why Camille Paglia, who professes herself "an atheist” and a "firm supporter [of] abortion rights,” can conclude that "the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than [her] own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand.”

It explains why she can go on to tell us this: "I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.”

And this: "The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences.”

And, finally, why she can say this: "I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?”

We conservatives have our differences with Camille Paglia; however, the foregoing ought to convince us as well as everyone else not hopelessly bound to liberal ideology that Camille Paglia brings a hard honesty about the dangerous shallowness of liberalism to her positive evaluation of the second female vice-presidential candidate in American history.

We should, therefore, shout a "thank you” to Hurricane Camille for all her lessons, the most recent of which help us better understand the thoroughly contemptible nature of the insults liberals are directing at Sarah Palin, a true heir of the fortune bequeathed to us by millions of women who asked for little but worked, sweat, and bled everything to protect the life and promote the prosperity of their families, their communities, and their country.