This is your icon........a foul mouthed, bigoted, hateful human being who even the National Review can't take. Scary.........very scary.
Do you think Ms. Coulter isn't afraid to say what you all are thinking?
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Nobody does smug like Ann Coulter. Like the other CF sorority gals, she is always ready to flash a look of incredulity at anyone stupid enough to hold beliefs different from her own. It's a look of self-satisfied disdain, and she's got it down as perfect as Edgar Kennedy's slow burn. For all of her jibes at the snobbishness of liberals who patronize the people they purport to be championing -- and she is often quite right about that -- Coulter doesn't project a sense that she is speaking for anyone beyond her little clique. She has none of the populist demagogue's gift for humor (sarcasm isn't the same thing) or geniality, two of the things that made Rush Limbaugh so popular. (The guy conducts his show something like the DJ he once was, performing his political rants as patter. You half expect him to segue into an ad for drag-racing or spin "a hot new platter from the Shirelles.")
There's no point arguing with someone like this, no matter what side she's on. And predictably, "Slander" is not an argument for balance in the media or for civility in political discourse, even though it pretends to be. "Instead of actual debate about ideas and issues with real consequences," Coulter fumes, "the country is trapped in a political discourse that increasingly resembles professional wrestling." If you can read that sentence coming from the Chynna of the far right and not wet your pants with laughter, you've got more control than I do.
Coulter complains because the New York Times likened Tom DeLay's efforts to turn the nation into a theocracy to the Crusades and the Salem Witch Trials. She steams up at Ted Kennedy for saying that the logical extension of Robert Bork's constitutional vision, judging from his previous judicial opinions, would bring about the return of segregation, a decrease in rights for women and extraordinary powers to the police to override any right to privacy. She gets her thong in a bunch over commentators who point out similarities between Timothy McVeigh's anti-government beliefs and the demonizing of the very idea of government that came out of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Congress.
All of this she considers unforgivable rhetorical exaggeration, yet she has no trouble calling Bill Clinton a rapist. She compares liberals who favor affirmative action to the Ku Klux Klan (they're both practicing racial separatism). She derides as disingenuous liberals who claim people they disagree with have a right to say what they want (even though she herself begins a later sentence "The New York Times has every right to ...").
In short, Coulter can call any liberal any name that strikes her fancy and yet pretend she still wants "actual debate about ideas and issues." And if you can't take her hard knocks, you're a "pantywaist" or a "girly-boy," as Coulter called the editors of the National Review after they shit-canned her following an editorial in which she wrote, of Muslim nations, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." That column provoked an outcry on the right as well as the left. When the National Review declined to run a follow-up in which Coulter argued, "We should require passports to fly domestically. Passports can be forged, but they can also be checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males," Coulter, accused her editors of censorship, even though she'd ridicule any liberal who claimed the same thing. National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg commented, "It's called editorial judgment, and there's a world of difference," proving himself able to make a distinction that's beyond many liberals and conservatives.
Coulter has a lot in common with the liberals she despises. Just as, for some liberals, there is no such thing as a principled conservative, in Ann Coulter's world there is no such thing as a principled liberal. And it seems there aren't even that many principled conservatives. To determine who passes muster and who doesn't, she applies standards of ideological purity that Stalin would admire. Phyllis Schlafly makes the grade, but not Bill O'Reilly. John McLaughlin passes, but not William Safire ("voted for Clinton"). Jerry Falwell squeaks by, but not Pat Robertson (wanted to drop the impeachment and spoke in favor of China's one-child policy). In the book's most hilarious moment she lauds the unshakable conservative credentials of right-wing publisher Henry Regnery by telling us he was deemed "the most dangerous man in America." Where? Why, in Pravda.
Getting mad at Coulter is exactly the reaction she sets out to provoke. Debating her on her "ideas" does about as much good as kicking a retarded puppy. She has no ideas and she's not a thinker. Here are a few of the plums awaiting any Little Jack Horner who sticks his thumb into "Slander":
The "religious right" is a nonexistent creation of liberal paranoia.
There was no conflict of interest when Fox News allowed Bush's cousin to call election night results.
Rush Limbaugh's epithet "feminazis" is accurate because it refers only to the women who prefer abortion over childbirth.
Television, newspapers, and magazines can inflict liberals on the public because, unlike radio, books and the Internet, they don't operate in the free market.
"Liberals don't believe there is such a thing as 'fact' or 'truth'."
I could go on, citing claims and quotes, but since I do believe in fact and truth, I don't believe anything Ann Coulter says without seeing it in its original context. The following passage gives a good example of how "Slander" works:
"After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the clearly expressed position of the New York Times editorial page, the Times responded with an editorial on Thomas titled 'The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.' That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called 'a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,' 'race traitor,' 'black snake,' 'chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,' 'house Negro' and 'handkerchief head,' 'Benedict Arnold' and "Judas Iscariot'."
The passage is conveniently phrased to make it look as if the quotes, as well as the headline, appear in the Times editorial. They don't (notes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker). Coulter sets up the passage to give the impression that the Times called Thomas a "lawn jockey" and a "house Negro" and hopes that we won't notice that she's fudged it.
Next page | Do conservatives really want this spokeswoman?
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