The Uses of Ann Coulter

The big-picture side of me says it's bad for American political discourse that crazies like Ann Coulter are given so much of a platform in public debate.

The strategist side of me, though, loves it. The Edwardses know what they're doing here. Coulter is the right's Ward Churchill, only she actually speaks for a good portion of the right, who are too dumb to realize the damage she does to them.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:52 AM 0 comments

  Oh, for God's Sake

The cult of contrived masculinity just gets more surreal. Via the British blog Harry's Place, here's the Washington Post's report on one Pat Dollard, Hollywood crackpot and right-wing pseudo-warrior:

After his fourth wife left him because she got upset about his hobbies, which included cocaine and hookers, Hollywood agent/producer Pat Dollard decided to get his head together by flying to Iraq to hang out with Marines and fight insurgents and film a pro-war documentary that would make him "the Michael Moore of the right."

A few weeks later, he sent his Hollywood pals a photo of himself with a Mohawk haircut, a machine gun and the word DIE shaved into his chest hair. After that, things started to get weird.

Some like to say that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. In this case, it appears that a conservative is a liberal who went insane:

The booze and dope fueled many crazy antics, and in the spring of 2004, cops handcuffed Dollard and carted him off to the psych unit of an L.A. hospital.

"Around this time he began his political conversion," [Vanity Fair writer Evan] Wright notes. "Somewhere between the Roman orgy and the mental ward he became a staunch supporter of George W. Bush's."

Dollard surfaced in Iraq, tagging along with a group of Marines and generally doing his part to screw up the war effort:

One day while the Marines were on patrol in a town called Musayyib, Dollard encountered an Iraqi selling whiskey. He bought three bottles, got crazy drunk and ripped a sign off a mosque, which angered the locals and sparked a gunfight. On another occasion, according to Dollard and several Marines, he walked into a pharmacy, showed the owner his gun and stole a cache of drugs, including liquid Valium, which he shared with some of the Marines.

See, I keep wanting to quote the crazy parts, but they're all crazy parts. You've got to read the whole thing. It continues to get weirder, and porn is involved. Meanwhile, let's cut to the inevitable:

[S]oon he was hanging out with Ann Coulter and appearing on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes," jabbering about Iraq and evil Hollywood liberals. [...]

In the last scene of the story, Dollard is being feted by conservatives at a Hollywood party, babbling about how the liberal media is "literally allied with the Islamic Fascist Imperialists." Meanwhile, Coulter is pigging out on guacamole and chips and questioning the manhood of conservatives who are insufficiently pro-war.

Again, I'm beginning to expect that the conservative movement has been taken over by a troupe of dadaist performance artists.

Labels: Ann Coulter, conservatives, Iraq, Pat Dollard

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:44 AM 0 comments

  Life Among the Unhinged

At some point I'll try to bring you a roundup of some of the coverage of CPAC from the right. Meanwhile, here's a good post from Digby on the Coulter-versy and what it says about the media and conservatives. He quotes Andrew Sullivan:

When you see [Coulter] in such a context, you realize that she truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young. The standing ovation for Romney was nothing like the eruption of enthusiasm that greeted her. . . .

Her endorsement of Romney today - "probably the best candidate" - is a big deal, it seems to me. McCain is a non-starter. He is as loathed as Clinton in these parts. Giuliani is, in her words, "very, very liberal." One of his sins? He opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton. That's the new standard. She is the new Republicanism. The sooner people recognize this, the better.

Sure, says Digby - but Sully's a little late to the party:

This hideous face of the Republican Party has been obvious to those of us who have been paying attention for a long, long time. It is the single most important reason why our politics have devolved into a filthy grudge match.

For a long time liberals were paralyzed or indifferent as the GOP demonized liberalism as the root of every problem and pathology in American society. We were derided as unamerican, treasonous and evil. After the congressional harrassment of the 90's, the partisan impeachment, the puerile coverage of campaign 2000 and the resulting installation of a Republican president under very dubious circumstances, Democrats of all stripes heard both the Republicans and the media smirking at our outrage and telling us to "get over it."

[...]

When Limbaugh said, "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus - living fossils - so we will never forget what these people stood for," we didn't doubt him anymore.

When Ann Coulter said "we need to execute people like John Walker 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," to rapturous applause at the 2002 CPAC, we knew she wasn't just kidding.

And, yes, when Andrew Sullivan said that we liberals in blue enclaves formed a fifth column, you'll have to forgive us for assuming he was among the people who wished to see us jailed or dead.

It continues today. Dinesh D'Souza just published a book saying that liberals are the cause of terrorism. Ramesh Ponneru calls us "The Party of Death." And when Michele Malkin then creates a career out of calling the left is "Unhinged" and the Washington Post treats her likes she's discovered the Holy Grail.

This is why it is so shocking to us when we see people like Howard Kurtz and various others call for the smelling salts when some members of the left have reacted in kind by saying hateful, violent things about Dick Cheney's assassination attempt. These anonymous commenters are not best selling authors making a personal televised appearance at a gathering that includes most of the Republican presidential candidates, members of congress and even the Vice President himself.

Digby's giving voice to a deep-rooted and ever-growing liberal frustration. It's infuriating to be constantly confronted with such comprehensive and vicious up-is-downism. I try not to dwell on it for blood pressure-related reasons, but it needs to be said.

Labels: Andrew Sullivan, Ann Coulter, conservatives, Digby

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:15 AM 0 comments

  Faggot

That's a seriously ugly word up there. It stands out pretty clearly, doesn't it?

Doesn't it?

Hello?

Anyone?

Wow, it's just that I would have thought, after all that nonsense about a couple bloggers ... Y'know, Coulter was a featured speaker at the major event on the annual conservative calendar. She was introduced by a presidential candidate. She did use a vicious, bigoted slur to refer to another presidential candidate.

Ultimately there will be plenty of other sticks with which to beat Romney and all the other GOP candidates. The 2008 election is never going to won or lost by what Ann Coulter said at CPAC 2007.

But, reapeating some of what I said in the previous post, let's not be too surprised by the extremism and the hate on display. That's who these people are - maybe not all of them, but enough of them. And considering their moral obsession with demanding that Democrats denounce every semi-controversial statement made by anyone on the left - whether connected to the party and mainstream liberals or not - we can assume that the general conservative silence (albeit with a couple of notable exceptions) - indicates assent. These are indeed the kind of people who think it acceptable - indeed, applause-worthy - to publicly call a presidential candidate "faggot."

That's who they are.

UPDATE: I emailed Adam Nagourney, who's covering CPAC for the New York Times, to ask why he had omitted any mention of Coulter's remark. He replied:

> I was not there when it happened, having left the
> room to write a deadline story about the
> presidential candidates, which was what I had gone
> there to cover. Heard about it much later; will
> figure out what to do about it this morning. Thanks
> for writing.
>
> P.S. I'm pretty certain she was not introduced by
> Mitt Romney; he had left the room at the same time I
> did.

As to Romney's connection, I don't know if "introduced" would be the precise word, but Hotline's blog did report it this way:

Mitt Romney faces the biggest burden: he spoke right before Coulter and praised her... not knowing what she planned to say.

At any rate, we may yet hear more about this.

I'll look at CPAC in more depth later this weekend.

UPDATE #2: Nagourney covers the fallout at the Caucus (the Times' national political blog)

Labels: Ann Coulter, conservatives, CPAC, Mitt Romney

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:02 AM 1 comments

  Dolchstosslegende Sighting

Who else but the great Ann Coulter? Oh, and some stupid dog site. Dave Neiwert has it, in his round-up of all the latest in right-wing eliminationism.

Labels: Ann Coulter, Dave Neiwert, Dolchstosslegende

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:40 PM 1 comments