Little Annie Fanny (Gene Lyons Attacks Ann Coulter)BIG BARF ALERT

members ^ | 8/28/2002 | Gene Lyons

[TLBSHOW]

Little Annie Fanny

If Ann Coulter were a relief pitcher, she'd be in big trouble. Instead, she's a Republican attack-blonde, the author of the number one non-fiction book on the New York Times best-seller list, and a ubiquitous presence on TV talk shows. So you're not supposed to take offense when Coulter spouts politicized bigotry that makes ex-Atlanta Brave John Rocker's foolish remarks about queers, weirdos and foreigners in New York sound benign by comparison. Nor to point out that much of the so-called "evidence" of liberal sins in her book "Slander" is simply made up—780 often phony footnotes and all.

Apparently, the glib Connecticut ectomorph has taken to believing her own, well, "propaganda" is the only word I can get in the newspaper. Or maybe she's just a comedy act, as a recent column by one Melik Kayan in the Wall Street Journal hinted. How else could Coulter go on national TV, call NBC's perky "Today Show" hostess Katie Couric "the affable Eva Braun" of American liberalism, then bleat about liberal name-calling?

Eva Braun was Hitler's mistress. So when Coulter calls Couric, in effect, a Nazi slut, it's what Kayan calls "tongue-in-cheek agitprop." Where's everybody's sense of humor? The occasion of the Journal apologia was Coulter's telling the New York Observer—whose interviewer informed readers that he had a "friend" who would enjoy vigorous copulation with the bony pundit—that "my only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Some of these boys, incidentally, sound like they're wearing their bowties too tight. I still recall my amazement at learning that Tory men thought Margaret Thatcher a hottie. "The eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe," was how the late English novelist Anthony Powell described her to me. Evidently,the Iron Lady conjured steamy memories of prep school spankings.

On TV, Coulter conveys all the feminine warmth of a water mocassin, if you can imagine a pit viper with silicone implants. Kayan though, feverishly pictures her walking a metaphorical tightrope "her long-limbed signature silhouette poised precariously aloft, riverine blonde locks riffled by the breeze and legs coltishly pirouetting."

This isn't the first time Coulter herself has fantasized killing liberals. Speaking at a recent conservative gathering, she opined that "We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] 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."

Coulter deliberately courts over-reaction. But anybody with a mean mouth can play her game, as I've tried to show. More insidious is how she mimics the outward form of real journalism without its content, how lazy and/or cowardly establishment types let her get away with it, and the truly ugly subtext to her supposedly harmless joking.

Everywhere Coulter goes, she boasts about those 780 footnotes, which give her rants the appearance of substance. Reviewers for publications as various as the New York Times, National Review and the Los Angeles Times have praised her "massiveamounts of footnoted evidence." None bothered to check the facts behind even her most absurd claims, like the bitter pronouncement that "[L]iberals have absolutely no contact with the society they decry from their Park Avenue redoubts."

Coulter's "proof" is that the New York Times, almost alone among American newspapers, failed to report the death of NASCAR hero Dale Earnhardt on its front page. Also that the story which did belatedly appear mocked "[t]acky people...mourning Dale Earnhardt all overthe South!"

Bob Somerby of dailyhowler.com proved that Coulter's claim was simply made up. TheTimes did run a front page account of Earnhardt's death by sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. Two days later, it ran an evocative account of grieving fans in Earnhardt's home town of Moorestown, N.C.. The author was Rick Bragg, the gifted native of Piedmont, Alabama who covers the South for the newspaper. For that matter, Times editor Howell Raines is an Alabamian.

Somerby and others have exposed scores, if not hundreds, of similar howlers throughout Coulter's deeply dishonest work. His witty demolition job is must reading. Writing in the Washington Post, one conscientious conservative, Christopher Caldwell, describes "Slander" as "a piece of political hackwork.The deeper into her subject she gets, the more she resorts to the tools of calumny and propaganda she professes to critique."

Indeed,it's not too much to say that the "liberal" sins Coulter caricatures—atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason—are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them.That she blames no ethnic group makes it only marginally less offensive.Equally damaging is "Slander's" intellectual fraudulence. Naïve readers have little defense against a book using psuedo-scholarly documentation to tart up ancient slurs.

Conservatives constantly decry decaying cultural standards. Where are they now?

[TLBSHOW]

Gene is a left winger and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Must be a friend of Hillary's.

[Corin Stormhands]

Something certainly got his panties in a twist...

[What Is Ain't]

that makes ex-Atlanta Brave John Rocker's foolish remarks about queers, weirdos and foreigners in New York sound benign by comparison.

They were benign to most, you buffoon.

[Russell Scott]

Gene Gene the Lyons Machine, and Phil DonaWho, are twins. Gene wrote a book once. I don't know if it cracked the best seller list, but it was cracked.

[martin_fierro]

On TV, Coulter conveys all the feminine warmth of a water mocassin, if you can imagine a pit viper with silicone implants.

When Lyons writes like this, I can almost confuse him with a man.

[jwalsh07]

Apparently he still hasn't sobered up from that devastating defeat at the hands of George W. Bush.

[SEGUET]

"They were benign to most, you buffoon."

You don't want me to believe that you really meant to say that do you???

[Kermit]

He comes up with one mistake by Coulter, if and that's a big if, I take Gene Lyons word for it. Coulter doesn't criticize liberals for name-calling, she criticizes liberals for ONLY name-calling, they never back it up with substance. Coulter's name-calling gets backed up with substance.

Eva Braun married Adolf Hitler, right before they committed suicide. I believe Eva Braun was apolitical. She didn't have any political opinions, so it's wrong to call her a 'nazi slut'.

[TLBSHOW]

Gene must be drinking heavy! I think he wishes he was Ann, you know a #1 Bestseller instead he knows he is a bottom of the fish bowl cleaner!

[gusopol3]

didn't he do all the "great reporting" on the "Arkansas Project" that led to Patrick Leahy's inquisition of the American Spectator--while the dog (leftist press) didn't bark about First Amendment rights?

[boris]

"her book 'Slander' is simply made up—780 often phony footnotes and all."

This from a guy who thinks Michael Bellesiles the epitome of scholarly research and detailed painstaking historicity.

--Boris

[PhilDragoo]

Must be a friend of Hillary's.

So much so he did this interview defending her in Salon. The final sentence has a subtle Freudian slip which signals Gene's subliminal desire:

It's frightening to me as a believer in our system that you've got what is essentially the unchecked power of the media to destroy. It's shocking to me that people don't know better. But don't you think people are becoming more aware? I'm alternately exhilarated and depressed. Some days I feel like I'm going to expose them all; it will all come out. Other times I feel like the Dutch boy with one finger in the dike.

Other than this snippet from Lyons on Lesbos, he's as funny as Al Francken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. And as accurate.

He's Maureen Dowd without the well-turned phrase: all bile and no style.

If body part nicknames are the mark of wit, his Little Annie Fanny falls flat. I did enjoy George W. Bush's reference to the Large Adam Fanny as a major-league a**hole.

Gene Lyons with his finger in the dyke.

That's what burbles up from his oblongatal swamp.

[goldstategop]

Either that or our beautiful conservative women get him biting his nails everytime he sees 'em!

[Cindy]

I've never heard of Mr. Lyons nor do I believe I have read a commentary by him before. After reading this commentary twice and looking at Mr. Lyon's choice of words; I wonder if he doesn't like women and/or he doesn't like Ms. Coulter and/or he doesn't like conservatives.

[goldstategop]

LOL! You got it right. With the doubtable exception of Michael Moore I can't think of a liberal political author who was on the NYT best-seller list for longer than a few weeks.

[RandallFlagg]

I'm doing my part. Just bought "Let Freedom Ring" and "Shooting Straight". I wish I could read 'em both at the same time!!!

---

--The judge smiled at the D.A., but it was entirely without humor. "Mr. Barry," he said in a resonant voice, "there is no mention made in the Constitution about making whiskey. There is a very clear mention made of the right to keep and bear arms. You may be entirely right that our government does not issue our soldiers shotguns of the exact type that Mr. Miller had in his truck. However, you are forgetting everything you were taught in grade school civics class." The District Attorney turned crimson at this barb.--UC

[TC Rider]

Other times I feel like the Dutch boy with one finger in the dike.

So maybe Gene is a lesbian trapped in a gay man's body.

He must really hate himself.

No wonder they have all those conferences on gender. This gets confusing.

[thegreatbeast]

I was thinking that this was the movie reviewer guy! But now I place this cur.
A few weeks ago when the book came out, Coulter was indeed ubiquitous on small screens everywhere but I distinctly remember her talking about how her publisher asked her to scale back on the footnotes. I know they were numerous but 780? Is this correct?
" So when Coulter calls Couric, in effect, a Nazi slut,"... is as fine an example of mischaracterization as you will find. Mr. Lyons, were he to read his history, would know that the allusion would pertain to a certain comeliness, a general cotton-headedness and specifically a lack of intellectual depth that Ms. Couric is thought to share with the late mistress of the Fuerher. Eva Braun, incidentally, was no more of a slut than Ms. Couric is thought to be. Again, any knowledge of the historical personage and this fact would have been apparent to Mr. Lyons.
Lyons' worse serpentine affront though is his dull equation of Ann Coulter being an anti-semite.
Trash.

[TC Rider]

And I wouldn't put it past Moore to gin the game either.

Just wait, when the fat finally clogs his last artery, they'll find 60,000 copies of his books in his garage.