Ann Coulter Crosses the Line

I'm rather surprised she knew who Mencken, or Twain for that matter, was. The woman is an absolute loon. Conservatives don't use victms? Where did they hold the '04 presidential convention again...?

The woman is completely nuckin' futs.

By now it should be obvious that the Blonde Brainstem says what she says, and does what she does, not because of any actual conviction or agenda (or even understanding); but solely to get free publicity, both from the MSM and from bloggers like us, and thereby to sell books. For her, all publicity and attention is good, her sense of shame having been discarded long ago. Her statements get more outrageous simply becauase that's what shock-jocks have to do to keep public attention focused on themselves for free.

She's become the Paris Hilton of the far right: shallow, self-absorbed, amoral, vacuous, and famous only for her ability to make herself famous. I was going to post about her on my own blog, but then I realized I would only be assisting her career. She may be a darling of the supermarket-tabloid-trailer-trash set, but such people will always exist, and the antics of their entertainers are not headline news.

The best response to Ann Coulter is to ignore her like we ignore the mentally-ill homeless people on our city streets.

I live in Japan, and only follow US pop culture through the web, having given up on American newspapers except for baseball and a few columnists.
Is this Ann Colter person some big writer or something? I keep bumping into referances to her, and some product or rap singer or actor or something called Carrot Top, in tones that remind me of Scrappy Do and "My Mother the Car," as recent items to be despised rather on principle, although obviously exceptionally unimportant.

It seems impossible to believe that any energy spent on such obvious fabrications could be worth the effort of attacking, although as foils for humor they may have some place.

Is this Ann Colter person some big writer or something? I keep bumping into referances to her, and some product or rap singer or actor or something called Carrot Top, in tones that remind me of Scrappy Do and "My Mother the Car," as recent items to be despised rather on principle, although obviously exceptionally unimportant.

She is a minor conservative pundit. You keep bumping into references at the moment, because in order to gin up a lot of media exposure on the eve of her new book, she said some calculatedly outrageous things, and basically everyone in America is obliging her right now, reacting as if she actually believed what she said.

And she's a plagiarist too...
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2006/06/ann-coulter-plagiarist.h…

Ed, I'd venture to say that even carnival barkers would be insulted by the comparison!

Tell me again that this is just a joke.

Tell me again that the source of this violent eliminationist "humor" is irony or sarcasm, and not wistful thinking.

Tell me again that because Ann Coulter isn't "serious" about what she says, no-one takes what she says "Seriously".

Tell me again that no-one accept Ann Coulter as actually contributing to the public discourse.

Because I want to believe that this walking violation of Godwin's Law has no more voice than any other neo-nazi who spouts the same garbage. I want to believe that the relative acceptance of her by the media isn't helping to lay the groundwork for the darkest and most dangerous impulses to take root ingovernment. I want to believe that all this talk of violence and demonization of all who oppose is falling on deaf ears.
Because these people are making it really hard for me to ignore her.

"[I]f you have a point to make, send out somebody who isn't a widow, who isn't an orphan, who didn't have a son die in Iraq, who didn't lose limbs in Vietnam to make the point so that we can respond. ... You never see conservatives doing that.

Yeah, there's a reason for that. 'Conservatives' seem to figure it's safer to complain about liberals than it is to enlist. The term 'chickenhawk' doesn't just come out of thin air.

And, she's objecting to victims having their say, because she can't answer them in her style. It's no problem to say; "Yes, you have suffered, but you are drawing the wrong conclusion and here is why" even to a person who has had terrible loss. You just can't be a total jerk about it and that's her problem.

She isn't even worthy to sweep up Michael Moore's cigar ashes, and that's goin' some.

Here's my plan for Coulter. Let's get her on The Daily Show or Olberman's Countdown and then have the host completely and totally ignore her for 3 minutes straight. Imagine the video. Coulter is spouting off and Stewart or Olberman is ignoring her completely, drinking coffee, talking to the producer, etc. Coulter is like an optical illusion - you need to look to illicit the effect.

What does it say about what passes for a conservative in the U.S. today that she manages to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of her excrement on paper?

IMNSHO, she crossed the line when she said -- after telling a fawning interviewer to turn on his tape recorder so he got it verbatim -- "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

After that, she should never have gotten one frame of air time on any responsible broadcast outlet, or one sentence in the press.

I agree with Ed. When I read she compared herself to Mencken I nearly spit out my lunch.

What a deluded individual she must be.

Perhaps, someone can figure out legally how to put Coulter's worst quotes on toilet paper and sell the rolls with the profits going to the survivors of 9/11. Properly quoted with attirbution, such an effort should pass muster as "fair use" in the name of politics. But then that's not fair to toilet tissue which serves a valued, if humble, function. The same could never be said for Coulter.

Tonight's Larry King was on "the coulter controversy" and the guest invited to defend her was David Horowitz. Don't expect a report from though, there is only so much that even I can stomach!

Perhaps, someone can figure out legally how to put Coulter's worst quotes on toilet paper and sell the rolls with the profits going to the survivors of 9/11.

By a lucky coincidence, Boing Boing recently linked to a company that prints custom toilet paper. But as others have pointed out, even wiping your ass on Ann Coulter gives her more credit than she deserves.

I'm not so sure she isn't pulling a Colbert Report on us all. She may in fact be a closet liberal and saw that if she came out against conservatives in today's America, she would be marginalized and forgotten. By appearing to come out against liberals, she's saying the darkest things conservatives want said, and exposing their innermost desires. Never a pretty picture.

The Mencken reference is brilliant, if you want people who have never read him to go look him up. She might be the perfect subversive.

This is funny, given that the last 80 pages of Coulter's new book attempts to attack evolution. Ol' H.L. had a thing or two to say on the subject:

"The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders - that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous - by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil."

"[I]f you have a point to make, send out somebody who isn't a widow, who isn't an orphan, who didn't have a son die in Iraq, who didn't lose limbs in Vietnam to make the point so that we can respond. ... You never see conservatives doing that.

I loved this part. It's like all us smarmy liberals got together and had to persuade the widows and Sheehan to come forth on our behalf.

Mencken? Twain? Why, she isn't even up to the level of L. Ron Hubbard!

Hey now, take it easy on 'ol L. Ron, before he went off the deep end later in his life, he wrote some nice science fiction.

For me, she crossed the line when she became involved with the anti-Semite and (at least) borderline Holocaust Denier, Joe Sobran.

I also do not think she is a mere publicity hound or clown. I find her more poisonous than that -- my comparison would not be to Michael Moore or (*shudder*) Mencken, but to John Stormer (of NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON) or Robert Welch.

I wonder if some of her more outrageous and disgusting comments, like the current "Jersey Girls" ones are not variants of the 'Loss Leader' marketing tactic. She knows she'll lose reputation by them, but they also draw all the attention to themselves and away from the other, less offensively said but more poisonous, comments in her book.

For example, I have read many of the news stories about her and "Godless" during the past week. If I did not have people like you and Orac, I'd never realize how much of her book promotes creationism, or other key points in her 'arguments.' But they will sink into the political discourse until they become cliches the way 'MSM' has.

Clown, maybe, but wasn't there a famous bad movie "Killer Clowns from Outer Space?"

The one person on the public scene that Coulter and her ilk would hold immune from criticism because of 9/11 is George W Bush.

Coulter herself based her infamous "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to christianity" column on the death of her friend, Barbara Olsen, literally before the Pentagon flames had cooled.