Talk about a bitch-slap.

Anyone who has read more than a handful of posts here will know that I utterly detest Ann Coulter. I put her and Michael Moore into pretty much the same boat. So what a pleasure to listen to this brief interchange between a radio talk show host and Coulter. Warning: the language is rather strong. But boy did he slap her down. Top notch entertainment.

Coulter, backed into a corner, tries to lie her way out.

If there were two people I could wish out of the political debate it would be Ann Coulter and Michael Moore: the Laurel and Hardy of politics. True one is incredibly corpulent while the other is an anorexic stick figure but their styles are similar. Both concoct facts and engage in smearing. They are both shrill and have the same level of ethics as the other.



If you watch the above clip from MSNBC you will see what I mean. Elizabeth Edwards called in to the show where Coulter was appearing and asked her to not engage in personal attacks but to focus on the issues. She specifically said that debating issues is fine but that Coulter lowers the tone of political debate (a real understatement) with her ridiculing people on a personal level.

Watch how Coulter reacts. She lies. She immediately twists the comments and starts claiming that Mrs Edwards was demanding that she stop writing her books and columns. Edwards did no such thing. Coulter repeats the lie several times. This is typical Coulter style (or lack of style). Of course she won’t give up the cheap shots she uses, without them her books were be slim volumes indeed.

Ann Coulter on Coke

What do you call?

Question: What do you call an undead entity, known to cause trouble wherever it goes?

Amswer: A Coultergeist.

Yes, we take the credit, or the blame, for that one.

Right wing confab honors gay porn star.

We all know about the CPAC conference, the big conference of Right-wing luminaries that is held every year. It was hear that Screech Coulter went into her tirade about John Edwards being a faggot. It was also here that they honored Corporal Matt Sanchez with the Jeane Kirkpatrict Academic Freedom Award. In fact here is Sanchez with the Screech herself.



But it seems that try as hard they want the Right can’t get away from the gay issue. Apparently the man the conservatives just honored is a gay porn star. Or was a gay porn star. I don’t know if he is gay or not. But he supposedly sold his sexual services to men at one time. (This is supposedly the ad he used to do so.) We do know he had sex with men and that is enough to have him thrown out of the military.

Now I would like to see the Right deal with this. The man is worthy enough for them to give him an award but at the same time he shouldn’t be allowed in the military. We will see what Mr. Sanchez has to say about all this on his blog. We will also see what the military does about this. As far as I know Sanchez is not denying the story but confirming it. I suspect he won't be invited back to the Bill O'Reilly show. If you absolutely must see some evidence of Mr. Sanchez's career go here.

Coulter's "magnificent" Jew-hating friend.

Imagine you are an author of some note, not necessarily a good author, but at least well known. You have a new manuscript which you finished which you know will be attacked as a screed of hate. To whom would you send it for advice? Would you go to someone even more notorious for their public hate? Would you send it, for instance, to someone who has publicly attacked Jews and hung around Nazi sympathizers? Let’s say you knew such a person and for some reason you thought they were a valuable advisor for your manuscript, would you praise them in the book by name? Ann Coulter would.

After my column regarding the Screech I picked up a copy of her vile work Godless. I needed an appetite suppressant (ever wonder why she was so skeletal -- she reads what she writes every day). I was flipping through the book when I cam across the “Acknowledgements” which Coulter pays to her “long-suffering, magnificent friends”. These are the people she sent chapters to for their input. She says they “helped” her with the writing process. Those are important people to an author. And one of those people was Joe Sobran. (Godless by Ann Coulter, Crown Forum, page 303.)

I suspect this is the same Joe Sobran who used to a writer for National Review and is well known in conservative circles. That would make sense. But Sobran was well known for his anti-Jewish obsessions. Surely someone who prides herself on her ability to “research” the facts would have known she was working with a friend to Nazis. After all Sobran was fired from National Review because of his anti-Semitism. It wasn’t a secret. And Sobran hasn’t tried to hide his anti-jewish obsession by any means.

He was the keynote speaker to a conference of Holocaust revisionists -- people who say there was no intentional gassing of Jews by the Nazis and that this is a propaganda campaign by Zionists in their campaign to take over the world. This group, the Institute for Historical Review runs a publishing house called Noontide Press. And it prints and sells openly pro-Nazi books. What they have in print varies from month to month but here are some of the titles they current sell:
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion are, of course, standard fair for any budding Nazi. And when you finish with that you can read The International Jew attributed to Henry Ford but written by others as his bequest.

You can buy The Palestine Plot which they promise is a “penetrating overview of the Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to gain world power...”

Another popular title listed is Bolshevism From Moses to Lenin: A Dialog Between Adolf Hitler and Me which promises to be a “penetrating look at the role of the Jews in world history, from Biblical times to the 20th century, by the poet and playwright to whom Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf.

Of course there is much more on racial supremacy of whites and standard extremist tracts. But when you want to move on to the more serious material it is there as well. You can get a DVD of the Furher himself giving an “exciting address” which “conveys Hitler’s fervent and yet reasoned speaking style”. As a bonus it promises a “defiant, humorous introduction by Joseph Goebbels, and a thrilling description by Goebbels to radio listeners that captures the enthusiastic spirit and mood of this giant rally.” Gee, doesn’t it just make you all warm and fuzzy. You might want to order it along with your own copy of Mein Kampf in hardback for just $20.00.

And right in this mixture is a DVD they sell of Joseph Sobran speaking to these Nazis, white supremacists and others. Sobran’s talk was For Fear of the Jews. They quote Sobran as praising the revisionists and have him saying, regarding Jews: “If they can’t tell the truth about ‘Holocaust deniers,’ how can they tell he truth about ‘the Holocaust’ itself?”

So maybe Sobran was just stupid. Or maybe he harbors such sentiments himself. We can read what he writes about Jews. He says Jews, who he calls The Tribe, take evil positions on issues but what is interesting is not that they are merely “wrong, but that they are anti-Christian” and that they intentionally do so. He writes,”the Tribe adopts certain social attitudes and political positions even though these are repugnant to most Christians. It adopts them chiefly because they are repugnant to Christians.”

Yes, people have often hated Jews but Sobran informs us they deserve it. He writes:

“Enough already. It’s time to face the possibility that Jewish problems are sometimes due to Jewish attitudes and Jewish behavior. My father once remarked to me that the Jews are disliked everywhere they go because of “their crooked ways.” Though, as I later learned, Dad had been an altar boy, he said nothing about Christ-killing; he’d long since left the Church and he didn’t particularly care who had killed Christ. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly dislike Jews; but he did think it was their ethics, not their biblical record, that had earned them their low reputation.”

“The popular verb jew would seem to bear him out. So do countless ethnic jokes about Jewish sharp dealing and devious conduct. So, in fact, do Talmudic passages authorizing Jews to relieve gentiles of their property, if they can do it without incurring anger against Jews in general. These are the sorts of things that actually irritate (and sometimes amuse) non-Jews. Has anyone ever heard a joke about Jews killing Christ?”

“The Tribe’s obloquy long predates the Third Reich’s propaganda. Government libel campaigns, a feature of the modern world of mass communication, rarely succeed for long; even popular myths die out over time. But a durable reputation, lasting over many centuries, is hard to account for unless it contains some truth confirmed by experience. Few Christians have said that the Jews killed Christ; they have always said that the Jews rejected Christ, as indeed Jews still do. The Tribe itself makes rejecting Christ a defining feature of Jewishness, even more than adhering to Judaism.”

This is a man that Coulter calls “magnificent”. Gee, had she been born a little sooner she could have had “magnificent friends” like Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher. Sobran was fired years ago from National Review because of his Jew hating. His involvement with the neo-Nazis started ten years ago. His essay on The Jewish Faction which exposes the way “the Tribe” operates was published in 2004. Ann Coulter sought out his advice and help after all these things were public knowledge. And then she calls him a “magnificent” friend in a book she published only last year. She did more than that in fact. She wrote an introduction to one of Sobran's books herself. And she did so after his anti-Jewish views were public knowledge. If Hillary Clinton had a friend this closely linked to the Communist Party you could bet Coulter would be squealing at the top of her lungs.

The Ann Coulter Cesspool

I certainly do remember the first time I had heard of Ann Coulter. It was a few years ago and I was flying into the United States to speak at a conference. I had not been to the US for several years. I landed at Los Angeles and went into a bookstore at the airport.

There was a row of the newest conservative books. Previously I had a relatively healthy respect for conservatives in spite of various disagreements. I leaned Republican, by which I mean in a normal race I would prefer to see the Republican win over the Democrat. I had read Buckley frequently, read National Review, Human Events and even had a membership in the Conservative Book Club though I did not consider myself a conservative.

I don’t remember which book of Coulter’s was out that day. They all seem pretty interchangeable to me. I picked it up and started reading. And I was shocked. One of the things conservatives had always claimed was that they were the defenders of honor, tradition, civilization, etiquette, and civility. Coulter was dishonorable, uncivilized, rude and vile.

I had older views of what it meant “to be a lady” and Ann Coulter was no lady. Nor is she a gentleman. She lacked every one of the graces that I associated with being a decent human being.

I was shocked by her dishonesty. I am fairly well informed on what people think or don’t think. I read vociferously from across the political spectrum and I kept finding that she misquoted, misstated or invented comments from her opponents. She twisted things into grotesque distortions. I saw no necessity to lie. Ann Coulter apparently saw no necessity to tell the truth.

I was taken aback that she would stoop to slander as a form of argument. Conservatives argued that thinking was important. I was used to individuals who would take what the Left was saying and carefully analysis it and dissect it and repudiate it. But Coulter was the stereotype of the brainless blond bimbo. She never engaged her opponents intellectually. I can only assume this was due to a lack of ability on her part. Those who think argue, those who can’t think slander.

It was as if all intellectual argument was too difficult for her to grasp. Instead she slandered, smeared and attacked. And hers were dishonest attacks, not based on reality but based on her twisted view of others.

She writes with such bitterness and hatred that one wonders what kind of demons she faces herself. Her venomous tirades are so utterly devoid of human decency that one can only conclude that she is a very unhappy individual intent on inflicting her misery on others.

She seems to find a particular need to attack gay men perhaps because she so often looks like a badly done drag queen. Al Gore, she announced,was a “total fag”. At a recent hate festival for the Right she spit out the comment: “I was going to comment on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the world faggot, so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.”

There was a time that words like faggot, nigger and such were reserved to the uncultured, uncouth, lower classes, particularly those with a penchant for boozing and scraping in the gutters. Now the conservative movement holds it up as the epitome of intellectual debate. Hate Buckley if you want but at least he was civilized and if he insisted on insults he usually did them in a somewhat cultured way -- his exception, and low point, was his vile attacks on Ayn Rand when she died.

But Coulter never gets out of the gutter. She seems incapable of logic and fairness. And she is devoid of writing talent. I love a well constructed sentence or paragraph. The beauty and inspiration of words is something I appreciate. It is something that, now and then, I manage to accomplish but not nearly as oft as I wish. But with Coulter there was never any beauty in what she wrote. Her words were perfect reflections of her own personality.

Her words were scratchy, her logic emaciated, her books steeped in make-up to hid the true ugliness underneath. Her screeds are bitter tirades that scream loneliness and boil over with hatred and contempt. She writes the conservative equivalent of pornography and not even the run of the mill kind of porn. Hers is packed with violence and disgusting perversions.

What makes Coulter so bitter? I don’t know. A lesbian friend of mine suggested that Coulter could be a closet case. Certainly when someone regularly uses crude words for gay people as a term of slander I start to wonder. She is unmarried but that doesn’t necessarily surprise me. I see what’s she like after she’s had the full day to prepare and I can understand why no sane man (or woman for that matter) would wish to crawl into bed with her. She could bath in gravy and a German shepherd would still head for the hills. I couldn’t imagine sleeping with her next to me. One would stay awake all night with one eye askew lest she sink her fangs into one’s jugular to feed.

Now I will confess there is one aspect of Coulter I appreciate. I believe the new theocratically inclined Right is a danger to individual rights, limited government, free markets and social tolerance. I think they are a threat to decency. Ann Coulter is on their side. So many in the modern Right are mimicking her and the more vicious they become the more they disgust the voting public. It is people like Ann Coulter, Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and others who are infesting the Right with irrational, indecent, rhetoric. And that alienates people.

They are so ugly in their temperaments that they make it almost impossible for the civil, the humane and the decent to cast a vote for the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan built up the modern conservative movement with his devotion to the concept of individual liberty and his basic personal decency. He preferred his wit and humor to verbal assaults. Coulter despises liberty and baths herself in the most indecent of rhetoric. She, and those like her, are dismantling the conservative movement and putting it out with the trash in the gutter -- a place she knows so well.

So Ann, keep up the good work. There are still a few people who actually believe that conservatism is about decency and civility and the higher virtues of Western civilizaiton. A few more speeches by you and that myth ought to be dead once and for all. If I were the Left, instead of trying to fund Air America, I’d be running radio stations that are all-Ann Coulter, all day, 7 days a week. But what I find really amusing is that modern conservatives are so detached from reality and sanity that they actually think she is helping them. I guess that is even better. They are undermining their own cause by promoting her.

So dear Republican friends. Give Ann a hand. I would think you can find her books remaindered for pennies on the dollar. Buy they by the hundreds. Hand them out. Learn her rhetoric by heart and repeat it often. if you father is a Democrat call him a “faggot”. if you sister is worried about global warming tell her that she’s a genocidal Nazi wanting to exterminate Jews. Spare no one. I want to see a conservative movement that is made up of Ann Coulter clones. Nothing would kill the conservative Right faster.