Thomas M: Check this out re Coulter, the bitch-slap queen of the "Right" ...
...reminds me of your excellent point about W's scorn for all those 'not like him.'
dailyhowler.com
<<snip>>
According to Coulter, Bragg had said that “tacky people were mourning Dale
Earnhardt all over the South.” Her nasty comment reveals the sick heart which
informs her rank, bile-induced volume.
___________
Full text:
by Bob Somerby
somerby@dailyhowler.com
VERY, VERY DEVILISH! Coulter
dissembles right to the end. Check out her final
presentation:
TUESDAY, JULY 23, 2002
CAR WRECK: Some of you think we’re carefully picking our topics when we
write about Slander. Sorry. We fact-checked pages one and two because that’s
where a book begins (TDH, 7/11). We checked the Katie Couric flap because it
became a big flap. We fact-checked Coulter’s section on Schlafly due to Maslin’s
review in the Times. But frankly, we haven’t checked any part of this book without
encountering instant problems. We’d be surprised if there’s any part of this book
where basic “facts” haven’t just been made up.
So yesterday, we got a grand idea. We fact-checked Coulter’s final page—and
you can, of course, guess what happened.
Coulter closes with a screed against the New York Times. “[L]iberals have
absolutely no contact with the society they decry from their Park Avenue
redoubts,” she stupidly fumes. Then, her penultimate paragraph:
COULTER (page 205): The day after seven-time NASCAR
Winston Cup champion Dale Earnhardt died in a race at the Daytona
500, almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the
front page. Stock-car racing had been the nation’s fastest-growing
sport for a decade, and NASCAR the second-most-watched sport
behind the NFL. More Americans recognize the name Dale
Earnhardt than, say, Maureen Dowd. (Manhattan liberals are dumbly
blinking at that last sentence.) It took the New York Times two
days to deem Earnhardt’s name sufficiently important to
mention it on the first page. Demonstrating the left’s renowned
populist touch, the article began, “His death brought a silence to the
Wal-Mart.” The Times went on to report that in vast swaths of the
country people watch stock-car racing. Tacky people were mourning
Dale Earnhardt all over the South!
Typical, nasty, ugly, mean stuff. For the record, Earnhardt died on Sunday,
February 18, 2001. And Coulter is right about one thing. The next day, February
19, “almost every newspaper in America carried the story on the front page.”
Coulter is right about something else, too—the New York Times piece to which
she refers appeared on February 21. It was written by major star Rick Bragg, a
down-home boy from the South. (When Bragg won a Pulitzer in 1996, the Times
notice said, “Rick Bragg, 36, a native of Piedmont, Ala., has long said his life’s
ambition was to write about the South.”) On this occasion, Bragg was writing from
Earnhardt’s hometown; his piece began in the local Wal-Mart because, on the day
of the NASCAR crash, residents bought every last bit of the store’s Earnhardt
memorabilia. As Bragg explained what happened next, the tone of his piece
became clear:
BRAGG (page one, 2/21/01): Today, it was clear what had become
of some of it all: People had written their love on shirts and toys, and
hung or propped them on a fence outside the offices of Dale
Earnhardt Inc., one of the fanciest buildings in town. By morning, the
makeshift memorial stretched 40 yards, and cars lined the country
road.
“You were God to me,” a mourner scribbled on a card. Another
wrote, “My boyfriend’s daddy loved you dearly.”
To the world outside Mooresville and the other little towns around
this red-clay corner of North Carolina, Dale Earnhardt might have
been racing’s biggest superstar, a walking corporation who won
millions in prizes and millions more through smart marketing of his
fame. He may have been the force behind the sport’s rise to
nationwide popularity, after greats like Richard Petty had faded from
victory lane.
But before he was “theirs,” as people here like to say, he was “ours.”
Bragg is hardly a foppish “northeast liberal.” But what did Coulter tell her readers?
According to Coulter, Bragg had said that “tacky people were mourning Dale
Earnhardt all over the South.” Her nasty comment reveals the sick heart which
informs her rank, bile-induced volume.
But forget about the tone of Bragg’s piece; Coulter made a stronger point in that
penultimate paragraph. She complained about the way the Times had supposedly
ignored Earnhardt’s death altogether. Everyone else treated Earnhardt’s death as a
page one story the day it occurred. Coulter’s question: Why, oh why, did the great
New York Times wait two more days to put Dale on its cover?
We suspect you know the answer to that; Coulter was inventing. (Again!) In fact,
the Times did run the story of Earnhardt’s death on its front page on Monday,
February 19. (NEXIS makes this perfectly clear. Which part of “Page 1” doesn’t
Coulter understand?) The headline might have provided a clue: “Stock Car Star
Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500.” The piece was written by Robert Lipsyte.
Here’s how the Timesman began:
LIPSYTE (page one, 2/19/01): Stock car racing’s greatest current
star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale
Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today after he made a
characteristically bold lunge for better position on the last turn of the
last lap of the sport’s premier event, the Daytona 500.
Lipstye discussed the crash itself; recent deaths to other drivers; safety devices that
had been proposed; and Earnhardt’s role as king of the track. Like Bragg, the
Timesman captured the awe in which Earnhardt was held:
LIPSYTE: [NASCAR president Mike] Helton had begun the day by
announcing to a drivers’ meeting that because of its new television
contract with Fox and NBC, Nascar had finally achieved “absolute
professional status.”
At that meeting…Earnhardt sat in the front row, amiably shaking
hands with a parade of corporate executives in suits who seemed
thrilled to touch him.
The feeling cut across all classes. As he moved through the garage
area surrounded by the guests, sponsors and clients of other racing
teams, a man with a videocamera reached out and screamed, “I
almost touched God.” No one laughed at him.
Of course, Coulter didn’t demean the tone of Lipsyte’s work. Instead, she simply
lied about it, saying it didn’t exist. Coulter wanted to close with a bang. She
wished Lipsyte out of existence.
What, oh what, are we to do with someone who dissembles like Coulter? Again,
we’re quoting the next-to-last paragraph in her whole book. As usual, she builds a
screed around an invented fact—one designed to demean those she hates. And
just how nasty is Coulter’s conclusion? She draws an ugly conclusion indeed.
“Except for occasional forays to the Wal-Mart,” she says, “liberals do not know
any conservatives.” But conservatives “already know” liberals, she says.
Conservatives know liberals as “savagely cruel bigots who hate America and lie for
sport.”
Incredibly, that is Coulter’s final phrase. It closes her strange, disturbed book.
Amazing, isn’t it? Coulter—having just lied through her teeth about the
Times—closes with a nasty rant attacking “liberals” for lying! The patent
disturbance informing this book is thus put on its fullest display. Because no one
else—of the left, right or center—lies and dissembles like Coulter. Our question:
Why do TV producers and book reviewers and bloggers seem to think that this is
OK? The entire establishment puts up with Ann Coulter. We ask our same
question: Why is that?
YES, THAT IS WHAT WE SAID: Yes, that’s just what we said. The New
York Times put Earnhardt’s death on its front page twice—on February 19 and
21. (The Washington Times put it there twice, too—on February 19 and 26.) But
Coulter needed a closing riff. So she did her main thing. She dissembled.
HOPIN’ ON HARKEN: Let’s hope that Julian Epstein doesn’t know the basic
facts about Harken. If he’s even modestly informed, his know-nothing outing on
last night’s Crossfire would betray his basic obligation to be open and honest with
viewers. Epstein feigned surprise and shock when told that Bush had been
informed about pending 2Q losses at Harken. Over the last decade, we saw many
conservatives go on Crossfire and play the fool in pursuit of Bill Clinton. Let’s
hope that Epstein doesn’t know how neatly he aped them last night.
More on Harken will follow here. But Coulter, for now, does take precedence.
MONDAY, JULY 22, 200
TRUST BUT VERIFY: When the New York Times’ Janet Maslin reviewed
Slander, she had some good solid fun with a footnote. “[O]ne bit of proof that
Phyllis Schlafly is treated dismissively by the left comes from a People magazine
review of The Muppets Take Manhattan,” she chuckled. Indeed, just how eager
was author Ann Coulter to slam the press corps’ treatment of Schlafly? She went
all the way back to 1984 to cite the Muppet movie review, which included a jab at
the Illinois icon. Of course, Coulter’s text doesn’t say what she’s citing. You have
to read the footnote to see how far she went to find a vile slam at the right.
Maslin has some fun with this footnote, but gives too much credence to others. “A
great deal of research supports Ms. Coulter’s wisecracks,” she writes—apparently
not understanding how much of this “research” has simply been made up by
Coulter. Do reviewers ever fact-check books? If Maslin had checked the “780
footnotes” she approvingly cites, she might have seen—and she might have told
readers—how much of this book is just false.
As we’ve seen, if Maslin had fact-checked Slander’s first page, she would have
found instant dissembling (see the DAILY HOWLER, July 11). Page two? The
same sad result. But Coulter loves to mask bogus claims with a footnote. Indeed,
when Coulter limns Schlafly, she does it again. She slams the press corps’
performance:
COULTER (page 40): [T]he mainstream media ignore Schlafly when
not deploying their trademark elitist snubs. Revealing true facts about
Schlafly would inevitably result in unfavorable comparisons with
inconsequential feminists. Not one of Schlafly’s books has ever been
reviewed in the New York Times. Schlafly is preposterously
demeaned with articles reporting that she is trying to remain
“relevant.”
That last claim is duly footnoted; Coulter cites a Chicago Tribune piece from
8/1/96. (Her charge is plural, but there’s only one cite.) But in fact, the Tribune’s
profile of Schlafly—by the AP’s Jim Salter—is flattering from beginning to end. In
paragraph one, Salter says that Schlafly “will be attending her 11th GOP
convention this month…showing no intention of being irrelevant” (emphasis
added). He closes with a detailed review of Schlafly’s impressive career:
SALTER: Schlafly rose to national prominence in 1964, when she
wrote “A Choice Not an Echo,” a history of the Republican
convention, regarded as a manifesto for the far Right movement that
championed Barry Goldwater.
Then in the early 1970s, Schlafly took on the Equal Rights
Amendment, beginning a grassroots anti-ERA effort that eventually
led to its defeat. [James] Dobson says Schlafly “almost
single-handedly” defeated the amendment.
In the process, she became the subject of scorn by feminists and
liberals. She was spit upon, took a public pie in the face. Feminist
Betty Friedan once told her, “I’d like to burn you at the stake.” She
was vilified in a 1970s “Doonesbury” cartoon.
“That gave me more status with my children than anything I’ve ever
done,” Schlafly said, laughing.
In 1976, at age 51, Schlafly was fighting the ERA, writing an
832-page book about Henry Kissinger and raising six children when
she entered law school. She graduated 27th out of a class of 204.
Baldly dissembling, Coulter says that this Tribune piece was “preposterously
demeaning” to Schlafly. But then, three pages earlier, she told readers that “[t]here
is certainly not the remotest possibility that the mainstream media will ever breathe
a word of [Schlafly’s] extraordinary accomplishments.” Note to Maslin: If you
don’t check all of Coulter’s “research,” she’ll mislead you time after time.
Other footnoted claims about Schlafly are highly bogus. And one more point,
kids—Coulter is cagy! According to a NEXIS search, the Washington Times has
never reviewed any of Schlafly’s books, either.
IT HAD US FUMING, TOO: Just for a bit of comic relief, here’s another of
Coulter’s complaints:
COULTER (page 40): [According to the mainstream media], Phyllis
Schlafly never comes up with a witty or tart reply. She “fumes”
(Newsweek) or “opens her mouth” (New York Times) or “snaps”
(Newsweek).
Admittedly, Coulter’s charges here are odd. But a problem looms in her research,
too. Footnotes bolster each Newsweek quote. But did the New York Times really
say that Phyllis Schlafly “opens her mouth?” Coulter offers no citation, and a
diligent search reveals no such statement. According to NEXIS, there are thirteen
cites in the NYT archive for the entry “Schlafly AND mouth.” But in none of these
articles did the New York Times ever claim that she actually opens it. Our
judgment? Coulter has made a troubling charge. It’s time to bring forward the
evidence.
By the way, when did Newsweek say that Schlalfy “snapped” a reply? The cite is
twenty-three years old. Here’s the offending passage:
NEWSWEEK (4/30/79): The changes [in state divorce codes] can
exacerbate the plight of older women. “We now have a whole new
class of impoverished women not equipped to go into the work
force,” snaps Schlafly. Chicago lawyer Joseph DuCanto, president
of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, agrees. “It’s an
illusion,” DuCanto contends. “A court says, ‘Get out there, lady, and
hustle.’ You go to Marshall Field’s and talk to women clerks. One of
two is divorced, middle class and has to get and work, and that’s the
only work they can do.”
It’s hard to know what Newsweek did wrong. Its writers agreed with Schlafly’s
assessment. But Coulter has a good ear for insults, and she traveled two decades
to find one.
INCOMPARABLE FAIRNESS: None of this denies the obvious. A serious
writer might want to examine the media’s treatment of Phyllis Schlafly, or the
media’s approach to a wide range of issues. But Coulter isn’t a serious writer;
Coulter is a dissembler and clown. That’s why Christopher Caldwell, a serious
conservative, dismissed her book as “political hackwork.” If reviewers would
check out her “great deal of research,” they might see just how right Caldwell was.
TOMORROW: Coulter’s last page? It’s just made up also.
Archives
Week of July 15, 2002: Harken hoopla;
more on Slander.
Week of July 8, 2002: Mostly Ann
Coulter and Slander. |
