Obligatory Ann Coulter pic!
-Jay
Posted on 08/05/2003 12:08:05 AM PDT by DPB101
"Why," asks Ann Coulter, do liberals "hate America?" This is not a question directed towards elements of the European left (though it would be a good - and perhaps difficult - question for them to answer) but towards the American Democratic party and its supporters. The answer, she concludes, more in joy than sorrow, is that "the inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for treason". Liberals, the poor saps, find her compulsive, if horrifying, viewing; conservatives drool over her every word.
Blessed with long, golden hair, piercing blue eyes, and impossibly long, slender limbs, Coulter is the darling of the American right - an all-American sweetheart who mixes a canny Sex and the City metropolitan allure and street cred with blistering right-wing polemics to create a media persona - and profile - that has no equivalent in Britain. Sometimes it seems as though you can scarcely switch on US cable news without seeing another blast of the Coulterkampf, as the fair Ann lobs another grenade at the American left.
Yes, Ann Coulter--quite a piece of work. You can see why television producers can't get enough of her. The day after the 9/11 atrocities she argued that the United States' approach to Islamic terrorism "should [be to] invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity". That column was too much even for the tough-minded types at the conservative magazine, the National Review to take - they promptly decided against running her syndicated column in the future. It takes quite a lot to be considered too right-wing and too reactionary for the National Review, but Coulter managed it.
"They were all hysterical after 9/11," she says, arguing that, apart from the forced conversion bit, US government policy has proceeded much along the lines she advocated.
Lunch with Coulter is a disarming experience. Yes, of course, Coulter's views are, shall we say, robust. (War in Iraq was not about oil, but even, she says, "if it was just for oil - that's like saying it was just for food. Letting a madman have control of half the world's oil is just insanity.") Perhaps, and according to her critics certainly, absurdly so, but lunch with her is more invigorating and entertaining than a couple of hours spent in the company of the stuffier kind of New England snob.
She's sharp, rattlingly good company and it's only later that you sit back and appreciate the implications of what she's been saying.
The difficulty with her thesis, as outlined in her new book, Treason: Liberal treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (it delivers exactly what it promises on the dust jacket, including a lengthy paean to Senator Joe McCarthy, citing him as a great American hero who helped prevent those cursed liberals from selling the US out to the Soviets), comes when the exceptions to her thesis of liberal treachery start mounting up. Someone such as Senator Scoop Jackson, a hero to neo-conservatives and Democrat hawks in the 1970s? An exception.
Senator Joe Lieberman, a modern-day hawk on Iraq? An exception. Tony Blair? British, so he doesn't count. George Orwell? Not entirely relevant. JFK? Yes, another exception. His brother, Bobby, who once even worked for McCarthy? There's really no need to go on.
Much more of this and Coulter's thesis becomes all but meaningless. All liberals are traitors except, ahem, for those that inadvertently did the right thing. But the rest of them, you know, have been trying to sell America to its enemies for 50 years.
It's easy to dismiss Coulter as a cartoon type figure, part Bambi part Cruella deVil, but that's not to say she's a fringe or joke figure. On the contrary, her appeal - and the certainty of her views - mirror the popularity of talk radio and right-wing websites. It's not accidental that her latest book, like its predecessor Slander (an analysis of the supposed liberal bias in the non-Fox News American media) is constantly among the top five non-fiction bestsellers in the New York Times list.
She gets to the guts of a certain strain of conservative thought - the kind that thinks, as she does, that pro-choice liberals are the kind of people in favour of "sticking forks into babies".
Coulter, no matter how much this might horrify professional historians and European sophisticates alike, expresses what many Americans really, deep-down, think.
Add that to her looks and willingness to sell herself and her opinions to any media outlet that wants a piece of the action and it's not surprising that she should be a bestseller. (It's a feature of current US booklists that books about politics and culture dominate - contrasting somewhat with the British fascination for cookbooks written by celebrity chefs.)
What is more noteworthy about Coulter is the tone of hurt verging on self-pity that runs through her work. Like many other right-wing polemicists - the likes of Rush Limbaugh or former Nixon aide J Gordon Liddy on the radio - Coulter sees conservatives as an embattled minority defending America's soul and true self against the counter-culture, liberal vandals who took America hostage with their high-falutin' liberal ideas.
In this view, the United States was once as comely and reassuring as a Norman Rockwell painting and one day, by the grace of God, it can be once again. If only it weren't for the 1960s ...
"I could never be employed by any major newspaper or magazine," Coulter says. "Basically, all my agent did before Slander was published was negotiate kill fees. No-one would publish me, MSNBC kept firing me. When it turns out that I can get past the official censors and operate directly in a transaction between me and the American people it turns out they like me." Were it not for the internet, she says, her career might never have taken off.
Reviewing Treason in the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum, no shrinking liberal hand-wringer herself, wrote: "It's easy to say why this book is bad. What is much, much harder to explain is why so many people think this book is good, or at least why so many people are buying it." Applebaum, like other Coulter critics, seems bewildered by Coulter's popularity and, like other critics, drew a comparison with the equally remarkable popularity of Michael Moore among the left.
The 41-year-old is fond, a la Carrie Bradshaw, of striding around her Manhattan apartment in her underwear waiting for inspiration to strike as she pens her twice-weekly syndicated column that is fired out to more than 80 newspapers across the United States.
She's had problems with stalkers in the past and considers her private life - including whether she is dating or not - to be "classified" information.
Coulter wants it both ways all the time. She likes to shock, and insists that she means everything she says. On the other hand, she dismisses criticism by arguing that it's time these damn yoghurt-knitting lefties learnt to appreciate a joke. Yet from time to time her eyes narrow and she says: "I mean what I say. You need to know that," even as in all but the next breath she's wistfully recalling that if only men and men alone were allowed to vote, Republicans would have won every election since the war, save Barry Goldwater's disastrous campaign against LBJ in 1964. Women's tendency to put their trust in liberals "is a problem".
Yet, in any final reckoning, her analysis is curiously counter-productive. Her stridency diminishes her seriousness, for instance. Coulter may be right to argue that the mainstream traditional media - the television networks and the New York Times - tilt left, but radio and the internet have changed that, something that she barely acknowledges.
Equally, the points she has to make about the complicity towards the Soviet Union exihibited by elements on the left - and the left's willingness to assume the worst of western motives and accept, at face value, the Soviets’ self-proclaimed best intentions - during the Cold War are overshadowed, nay eclipsed, by her determination to bake a conspiratorial cake and eat it all herself.
The right is resurgent and, though the White House still predicts a close presidential race next November, some Republican strategists dream that here can be a generation of Republican ascendancy to match the lock Democrats had on Congress from FDR to Bill Clinton's presidency. If that happens it will be Ann Coulter's readers who are in the vanguard of the Republican takeover.
Born and bred in a comfortably-off - for which read wealthy - Connecticut family, Coulter's conservatism, she says, only turned "violent" when she went to Cornell University and encountered the traitorous left. Her childhood had prepared her for ideological battling - her father was a union-busting lawyer who encouraged debate around the dining-room table.
A spell at the highly regarded University of Michigan Law School followed before Coulter moved to Washington where she worked for a time for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Television was her true calling, however, and when cable news station MSNBC wanted a forthright, televisual, conservative to provoke howls of liberal anger, Coulter got the call and delivered in spades.
If Coulter is loved by a certain section of the Republican party that's as nothing to her appeal to young, college conservatives. She is, in pretty much every respect, their poster-girl. "I can't stand the conformity of campus opinion. That's why I love college Republicans - they don't decide to be Republicans because it's the coolest thing to do. It's because they really know what they are talking about. They're so smart. Their professors all think they are degenerate for voting Republican."
I ask Coulter if her conservatism is in part - and originally - an expression of a natural contrariness. Would she have been a liberal if her university had been dominated by conservatives?
For once she seems at a loss for words, before replying: "Maybe not a liberal but whatever the hegemonic, snobbish view was - I would certainly have rebelled against it." Then, without pausing to draw breath, she's off again, railing against liberals‚"sneering arrogance" that is "like nothing since the Tsar's court. That is the whole key to liberalism."
No wonder she loves the Cuban- Americans who are her new neighbours in Miami Beach. "They are the best Americans. I would say the Italians, because they are great Americans, but the Cubans are better haters and I admire that."
Coulter concludes that "lying" is the liberals’ "most cherished human activity". Ultimately what divides conservatives and liberals is that the former "believe man was created in God's image; liberals believe they are God".
This helps explain why "the left's anti-Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the rights of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy and against civilisation."
Whatever one thinks of these hunks of red meat tossed to the rabid Republican hordes, ultimately one can’t help but suspect that Ann Coulter's televisual ubiquity suggests the law of diminishing returns may in time catch up with her. Until then, however, Americans ought to hang on tight. It's going to be quite a ride.
I can imagine she has. I'll bet I could (screen)name one or two. LOL
Obligatory Ann Coulter pic!
-Jay
No. Ann has green eyes. C'mon, dude....
Proudly posting since the Jurasic
Sorry, mate. That one's in my (ahum) private collection.
Besides, if I revealed that I had such in my possession, my wife would dissect me and kill me...in that order.
;)
-Jay
No. Ann has green eyes. C'mon, dude....
Green, blue, plaid...who cares? I could still just fall into those eyes of hers. *swoon*
-Jay
Alex, it's not fair to us to write this and not get the evidence on film.
Out of curiosity, what do you supposed did?
-Jay
I have no comment;^)
For better or for worse, this is certainly true.
I think it was when she called the editors girly-men or something like that.
Carrie Bradshaw is the nom de plume of an American female, who's columns for some silly almost newspaper, in N.Y.C. was then turned into a book, and from thence, into the American T.V. show " SEX AND THE CITY ".
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