Ann Coulter
Setting an example for the rest
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
Feb. 11, 2002 -- Mt. Shasta (APJP) --I wonder what would happen if someone like Michael Moore or Jim Hightower were to stand in front of a large gathering of predominant liberals and say something like, "They should take a few Christians out and shoot them in order to intimidate all the other Christians, because if you don't intimidate them, they'll turn traitor." Not that either would, but just imagine.
I imagine there would be a considerable flap and squawk over it. Free Republic would pick up several thousand extra posts the next day, and radio talk shows would be devoting 90%+ of their air time to it. The person who voiced the opinion would receive thousands of pieces of email, ranging from sorrowful disagreement to death threats. For months and years, he would be harassed by belligerent right wingers whenever he stepped outside. After all, they've been howling non-stop over Robert Altman having said that "Bush is not MY President."
I wonder if we'll see that type of outrage over Ann Coulter?
Rush Limbaugh might criticize her. To his credit, he sharply rebuked Falwell and Robertson for their ill-considered "America deserved the WTC attacks." Then again, he quickly reverted to form, and now screams that failure to support the President by ignoring Enron is disloyal. Maybe not.
It's easy to dismiss Coulter as a vicious nut. That's because she is, in fact, a vicious nut.
Her words prove that.
This is far from the first time that she's used rhetoric similar to that used by Adolf Hitler, and she's already lost several jobs over it.
But that doesn't mean the right will reject her. Talk radio and the rest of the GOP spin machine will remain mostly silent about Ann Coulter. They don't have the moral sense to understand what was so wrong about what she said, and, lacking moral sense, won't even pretend outrage because they will be certain they can get away with it. They'll just file her away with all the other logical and rational skeletons they keep in their closet, and ignore any inconvenience she might have caused.
Like all true cultists, they'll dismiss criticism in advance, having been told, "this is what liberals will say about us".
They can't win by reason or rationality, so they settle for grinding down with stupidity.
There's a lot of that going around in conservative circles. In the name of ideology, they have to believe six impossible things before breakfast, and swallow elephants whole while straining at a gnat
That's what allows them to pretend that Whitewater was in any way equivalent to Watergate or Enron, and it's what allows them to bleat that anyone who says they aren't on the same level is guilty of that well-known right wing buzz phrase, "moral equivalency."
That's what allows them to calmly assert that American law is based on the Ten Commandments, despite the fact that only four of the commandments have any equivalents in American law. The other six are either unenforceable, un-American, unconstitutional, or all three.
It's also what allows them to assume that they can be the world's policemen, punishing "evildoors" wherever they might be, and regardless of the fact that they may not be doing evil at all, but merely resisting corporate imperialism. It's one thing to hunt down Osama bin Laden, quite another to threaten Iran, which isn't guilty of anything other than not wanting to have anything to do with us.
It's a bit silly for a nation that has over 6,000 nuclear warheads and which has just suffered a bloodless coup by neo-fascist forces to talk about how weapons of mass destruction "destabilize" the world. Unless the ideologues in the White House are crazy enough to believe it, nobody believes it.
The world got plenty destabilized in December of 2000, when America fell.
How did the right fall to such a position of intellectual and ethical bankruptcy?
Coulter, bless her anorexic and pointed little head, has given us a highly visible and memorable incident upon which we can, on a daily basis, expose the sanctimony, hypocrisy, viciousness, stupidity and arrogance of the right.
Just point out, over and over, that Coulter said, "When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors."
CPAC, the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in America, didn't whisper a single word of protest.
These people view themselves as the natural leaders and salvation of America, and they have so completely lost their moral and ethical standards that they sit quietly while someone makes death threats and calls 25-30% of the American population "traitors" because they don't agree with Ann Coulter.
It isn't even a First Amendment issue. If there are any competent lawyers in the Federalist Society, they can tell you that calling for the death of members of a group solely on the basis of political dissent is not protected speech.
CPAC members had a chance to show that they were better than Hitler's Brownshirts, and they blew it. They showed that Conservatism is no longer a political philosophy, but instead has fallen to the status of a grubby and paranoid cult.
The Sabbath gasbag shows won't talk about it much. No right winger is going to be asking why the Federalist Society and members of Congress, the courts, state legislatures and the GOP all sat quietly and didn't raise a whisper when Coulter called for the murder of liberals in order to intimidate the rest of us.
These are the people who tell us they know what Jesus wanted, what the Founders of America wanted, and what is best for us.
A half crazed woman stands in front of their showcase convention, and screams that people who disagree with them are traitors, and proposes killing some as an object lesson to the rest.
Not one of the self-styled intellectual, philosophical, moral, religious and ethical leaders of American can find a thing wrong with that. Not one has spoken out.
Are they all moral bankrupts? Or are they all cowards. Or is it both?
In any event, any time some conservative starts talking about "saving America from liberalism" through application of common sense, love of country and Christian decency, just point to Ann Coulter, and point out that Hitler, too, used to appeal to common sense, love of country, and Christian decency.
And then, as now, the conservative leaders merely sat on their hands and refused to respond in the name of ideology.
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