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I mean, seriously…

Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 22 years ago, in 2002, on the World Wide Web.

A question has been rolling around in my mind for the past day or so. Why in the hell does anyone take Ann Coulter seriously? For a while I had hoped that Rightists generally recognized that she is absolutely bonkers, but kept her around for the PR purpose of having a token female to point to when criticized for their overwhelmingly rich, white, and male (Ann Coulter is only two of the three) cadre of talking heads. However, I have seen one too many online comment raving to preach on after her sociopathic gibberish and I simply must accept that some people other than Ann Coulter actually believe this shit.

Perhaps I should not be too surprised; after all, Ann’s writings are currently carried by FrontPage Magazine, the house organ of the equally insane David Horowitz. But still…

A couple of months ago, National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to make it into the runoff for France’s Presidential race before he was crushed by a popular front vote for the incumbent President Jacques Chirac. 19.5% voted for Chirac and 17.5% for Le Pen in the first round; in the runoff, Le Pen received the same 17.5% and the 2/3 of voters who had voted for neither all swung behind Chirac. Despite Le Pen’s crushing defeat and the failure of the National Front to gain any parliamentary seats in the June elections, the fact that Le Pen pulled such a large minority of French voters to his side troubled many Leftists.

Three days before his imminent defeat, Ms. Coulter set out on a quixotic mission to defend his candidacy and ruminate on why the cabal of liberals was directing such blind rage against him. However, somehow, in the process of her delirious, racist ravings (In addition to mutilating girls and burning synagogues, another popular Muslim pastime in France is to steal cars, set them on fire and push them off cliffs), she somehow neglected to mention–either because she doesn’t know or doesn’t care–the fact that Jean-Marie Le Pen is an unreconstructed fascist, who founded his National Front party with Vichy collaborators. In her musings on the murky issue of why Le Pen is described as an anti-Semite, his notorious description of the Holocaust as a mere detail in the history of World War II also slips her mind.

But enough on past foibles. Her most recent column, entitled Liberalism and Terrorism, was brought to my attention by Tom Tomorrow, who noted that Coulter attacked him for not being a real American… because of his satirical cartoon against Right-wing rhetoric that dissenters are not real Americans (Irony’s obituary will be featured in today’s New York Times).

Not that that is all that is ludicrous about her column, of course:

  • No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100 percent, behind John Ashcroft 100 percent, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100 percent, behind surveillance of Arabs 100 percent. (Apparently Arab-Americans who object to being singled out for legal harassment and intimidation aren’t real Americans; neither is anyone who is the least bit queasy about mounting assaults on basic Constitutional guarantees. Anyone who fights for the full protection of constitutional due process against arbitrary seizure of power and tyranny by the Executive, is clearly a terrorist-lover who hates our freedom.)

  • These people simply do not have an implacable desire to kill those who cheered the slaughter of thousands of American citizens. (Let us simply meditate in silence on Ann Coulter’s apparent endorsement of having an implacable desire to murder people on the basis of cheering an evil event–that is to say, slaughtering people for having bad thoughts.)

Coulter goes on to cite George Orwell in an attempt to support massive centralization of power in the hands of the Executive branch, disregard for civil liberties, perpetual war against vaguely-defined enemies, and extensive State surveillance.

I mean, seriously.

5 replies to I mean, seriously… Use a feed to Follow replies to this article

  1. Tyler

    Charles,

    Excellent peice on Ann Coulter. In a weird way I think her articles read a bit like This Modern World. Except, of course, she’s serious.

    Also, thanks for the link to Tom Tomorrow’s web log. I didn’t know he kept one…

    Tyler

— 2004 —

  1. Discussed at www.radgeek.com

    Geekery Today:

    Aid and Comfort

    Thanks to our War President, equating political dissent with an act of treason has become something of a national pastime in Republistan. Tom Tomorrow has…

— 2005 —

  1. Ben Kilpatrick

    We are in a very bad state when one cannot tell the difference between serious assertions and ideas and mockeries of the same.

  2. tim schmidt

    YOU are taking her seriously because YOU listen to what she says, and spend your ‘valuable’ time writing about her.

    Our “War” president has kept this country attack-free since 9/11. Sure, 1500 U.S. soldiers have died, but sleep apnea caused 1400 fatalities in America last year (Date: 10 May 2004 – Source: ABC News)

    Quit giving evil dictators the benefit fo the doubt. We went in to Iraq, and all the bad guys went there too…and we’re eliminating them. Wake up!

  3. Rad Geek

    Our War president has kept this country attack-free since 9/11. Sure, 1500 U.S. soldiers have died, but sleep apnea caused 1400 fatalities in America last year (Date: 10 May 2004 – Source: ABC News)

    I’m sure that, in any context where you don’t have a polemical axe to grind, you wouldn’t dream of being this cavalier about the senseless loss of human life. About 38,000 people died in automobile accidents in 2001. Only about 3,000 people were killed in the September 11th massacre. Does that mean that we should be 12 times as outraged about auto accidents as we are about September 11?

    Of course we shouldn’t. It’s terrible when anybody dies, but our reaction to a diffuse set of deaths by accident are different, for very obvious reasons, from our reaction to deaths that are the forseeable effect of a single, intentional policy decision by one person or a small group of people.

    You know this, of course. So why don’t you apply it when it comes to American soldiers? You might give an argument about why the combat deaths, as terrible as they are, are justified by what was achieved. You’d have a hard time convincing me of that, given what Iraq is like at the moment. But you didn’t bother to do this; you’ve got talking points to repeat and a war to hype, so instead you glibly inform us that 1,500 soldiers’ lives aren’t worth getting upset about.

    You fucking asshole.

    We went in to Iraq, and all the bad guys went there too… and we’re eliminating them.

    Yes. For example, here is one of the bad guys that we eliminated recently:

    Photo: an Iraqi man carries a dead girl of 7 or 8

    –Taken in Basra. From The Mirror (UK)

    Here’s another bad guy:

    Photo: a severely burned infant crying in its mother's arms

    –Taken in Baghdad. From The New York Times

    Again, you could try to make an argument that the deaths of 10,000-12,000 or so Iraqi civilians (by conservative estimates) were terrible, but that they were the terrible price of a necessary war. But common decency demands that you at least acknowledge that it those deaths are terrible, and give some reasons why this war was necessary in spite of them. And you didn’t bother to do this, either. Instead you repeated some glibly bellicose talking points about bad guys and how we are eliminating them, and simply erased the terrible destruction of civilians’ lives and livelihoods. I’m well aware that this is the style of argument that you are accustomed to if you dwell in the rhetorical world of people like Ann Coulter. But that’s as good a reason as any not to dwell in that rhetorical world.

    Because it makes you a fucking asshole.

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