Has anyone ever seen Ann Coulter and Amanda Marcotte in a room together?
Just wondering, you know…
Back when I first started blogging, I titled a post on Coulter “The ‘Whoosh’ Of Credibility Flying Out The Window”.
For some reason the – I’ll be gracious – slow-witted bookers at the big conservative ‘do invited her to speak.
If I get some time at the airport this weekend, I’ll see how many conservative blogs were scathing about Marcotte’s Tourettes, and approving of Coulter’s.
Yeah, I know, it doesn’t prove anything. But I bought a Civic hybrid, not a Prius, and I have to get my smug where I can.
Captain Ed talks sense on this…
I think in some cases it may be fair for people to say: we long ago expressed our non-support of Ann Coulter and anything she says, and now we don’t talk about her.
By the way, isn’t there an argument that if you want such attention-seeking types to get less attention, you should stop making posts calling attention to them?
Evidently the lesson there is never to say you’re done with someone. (link)
Still you can’t silence yourself to stop someone else getting the microphone when they have already been given the microphone.
Which I think raises some questions…
Year after year, the truth remains obvious. Ann Coulter is the “teammate who is most likely to throw an interception or miss a free throw”. (link) And this year like the year before, the ball was placed in her hands. Who said so? Who decided to pay for Ann Coulter to publicly embarrass American conservatives again this year, and how much do they get paid to make decisions like that, and what process leads to getting that job?
I think that is worth talking about, because it bears on a point Hugh Hewitt has raised lately and for good reason: the failure of the Republican federal political elite to accept and internalize appropriate lessons from its electoral misfortunes. Hiring Ann Coulter yet again, to, in effect, define the Republican brand (over the top of the efforts of people like Mary Cheney to strengthen it), exhibits a gross failure to learn from unpleasant experience. How does this happen?
Having said that, I had to check in on Hugh Hewitt, and of course Dean Barnett had already said what had to be said:
On Ann Coulter
Posted by Dean Barnett | 6:54 PM
Idiotic. Disgusting. Stupid. Moronic.
I guess you could say that Ann loves to shock us, but at this point, who’s shocked? She obviously can’t behave well enough to attend a respectable political gathering. (link) (etc.)
So someone who is about as close to the core of the Republican “base” as you can get gets this, no trouble.
But the gap between the people with common sense and the people with power to make decisions seems large, and not to be narrowing.
I honestly can’t say– but let me put it this way. Yeah, the line was uncalled for, but we’re also talking about Ann Coulter here.
Not to be oversophisticated about it, but the joke’s on us for actually doing any more than just rolling our eyes. And that was the joke.
Marcotte lines up strings and strings of expletives and slurs, but all it takes for a conservative (or our ilk) is to mention a word, humorously and indirectly, to be sent packing.
The result? All it takes is a ‘slip’ for a conservative to lose cred in the media.
… and Coulter already realises she’s “Out of the Family”… probably figured she was never ‘in it’.
Loosen up yer damn collars, is what I say.
No, David, it’s not too late. Sometimes you just need a friend to remind you of your conviction.
Stand by the pledge, brother AL! 🙂
Can I just say how offended I am that an old fart of a British Tory has any credibility to declare that Coulter
“truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young.” The onetime cheerleader of South Park Republicanism is truly most comfortable stereotyping and moralizing.
Yeah, that’s another thing: an Andrew Sullivan link, always a bad thing. And recently a Dean Esmay post, to which I of course responded repeatedly.
These people have no credibility and they don’t deserve to be noticed. We’re just rewarding noisy polluters of the channels of discussion, and me too.
Time to pay more attention to brass tacks posts like on navy blimps, and also to hunt up that Grim philosophy post I didn’t have time to deal with when it came out.
Rumor has it that the words were taken out of contest.
She had nice things to say about gays a few minutes later.
I think she was refering to “Breck girl” Edwards.
Well, I noticed that Mitt Romney made a point to kiss up to Ann Coulter, and got her endorsement in return.
One would hope that would sink his campaign. Will it?
Anybody want a list of words the left needs to appologize for?
Since there is nothing wrong with being a fag, how can it simultaneously be a dire insult?
Judging from the comments here, you are all a bunch of pussies – except the women are pricks.
#9 from Walter E. Wallis: “Anybody want a list of words the left needs to appologize for?”
I don’t care about the left.
I care about gold star conservatives like Mary Cheney, who’ve put in years of patient effort to redefine conservatism and America’s great conservative party for the better on this issue, and had the results of their patient toil trashed because some fool gave the microphone of the Republican party to a comic with a history of hurting the party on big occasions just like this.
It’s not fair that people who worked so long and hard on this, with the Human Rights Campaign and the disloyal Log Cabin Republicans running them down, should be have to see it all get torn like this.
Not that I can recall. Then again Marcotte is more or less an unkown nobody.
Ann on the other hand has appeared repeatedly on MSNBC (laughing at a wounded Vietnam Vet about how he lost the war) CNN, FOX, and others. She’s appeared in three movies, she’s written 5 best selling books, and has been a widely published syndicated columnist.
Now I realize it may seem like a good idea to compare the two. But wow. Just wow. Talk about comparing apples to alligators.
Noob Walter writes: Since there is nothing wrong with being a fag, how can it simultaneously be a dire insult?
Since there’s nothing wrong with being a Jew, how can “kike” be a dire insult. Etc.
As one of the token liberal regular commenters, I appreciate your attempt to show up conservatism, Walter, but your agent provocateur behavior here is just too obvious.
The PC world has made US so uptite. The LLL’s and the those Repub’s that cow tow to these demands to put the PC world back in balance after always something someone on the right says is BS.
A premadona that likely is more versed in conditioner usage than a true days labor I am sorry but is rightly justified in recieving a slur of being called a faggot, cisi boy, punk, sugar in tank, girly man. Name calling is name calling and the idea of all these “over the line” words is freekin stupid.
Wanna talk about over the line slurs:
“US troops terrorizing innocent Iraqi women and children in the dead of night” John Kerry
Gutanomo bay is like Nazi Concentration camps Dick Durbin
Every reporter that attempted to paint all US forces as Abu Gharib workers
Dean, Murtha, Kerry, Pelosi, Durbin ect…. all claiming the US President needlesly blantantly lied to get US into a war for X (oil, revenge, idiocy, Jooos).
Those my friends are true “over the line” insults that are baseless and especially the ones that paint our entire Military with a slurr is TRUE RACISM of a select minority group of our population.
Faggot, Bitch, Punk, Cici Boy, Flamer, Beotch, Dummy, Retard, are name calling not racism. Everyone needs to pull the cobb out their a*s (whoops that probaly just got me painted as a Gay hater too) and accept the fact people call people names ya know the old “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” is part of life. Grow UP US. Name calling like it or not is part of human nature and will never go away it is only racism when the names begin to paint an entire section with a certian slur (all US solgiers are blood thirsty, satist, Nazi’s, torturers evil people).
Somehow, I am reminded of the line from the classic Tom Lehrer song, “Be Prepared”:
bq. _Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell_
A.L.:
I’ve been scared to death to post about this, but strictly speaking the “offense” has to do with how seriously the speaker is taken by some, or how humorously they’re taken by others. Mat Stone and Trey Parker have been making these kinds of jokes for a long time, “through the mouths of babes,” and being upset about it is deemed so uncool that they get a pass (as they probably should). On the other hand Ann fully intends to be taken seriously, by and large, and she is taken seriously about making credible accusations concerning the treasonous behavior of the left. (It’s not so much that she makes a good case, as that it’s at least credible that there’s some truth to her claims.)
Moreover, CPAC definitely wants to be taken seriously, so the offense stands in relief to that.
If you’d invited Andy Kaufman to speak at a serious conference on feminism you’d deserve a rebuke, even though his whole schtick was to stand between the obviously humorous and the obviously serious, and never fully let the audience in on the joke. But that was also a fairly self-destructive approach… even tragic, and yet somehow brilliantly funny in retrospect. (The audience universally voted to banish him from SLN after one of his skits.)
Anyway, what I’m saying is that the offense is in direct proportion to the underlying seriousness of intent, and that’s really the line that Ann crossed.
Also, Michael Moore claims he’s only trying to be funny when he violates the truth or the canon of the documentary form, and we all know he’s full of it. Hiding behind humor isn’t appropriate for him, but the left doesn’t seem compelled to apologize for him at all, so there’s something of a double standard assumed by both sides. Our low expectations about the left ought to be more offensive to them than it is, for some reason.
So Beard question: is there a difference between name calling with innuendo and outright calling them a name? And insinuating that someone is illiterate because they misspell a couple of words is that not racist or degrading to all those illiterate peoples in America? I demand a apology for such hate screed?? Were does it end or does it ever end? Turning a standard name calling situation into some kind of overblown racist end all beat all insult of all peoples that must be atoned for is just senseless BS.
Is calling someone a Faggot professional, No, is it civil, No, BUT then is Ann Culture a professional politician, No, is civil conduct needed for Ann’s job, No, is Ann a Rightwing Political Comedian that gasp calls the Leftwing names for laughs Yes, did those names get the desired result of her job make people laugh YES.
Let me get this straight If a rightwing comedian cannot make fun of metrosexual’s, gays, minorities, poor, downtrodden, pacifist, actors, immoralist, atheist and ohh yeah don’t even consider questioning their patriotism, what can a rightwing comedian do to make fun of the LLL’s? (who’s left) How often does Leftwing Comedians say insane slurs and names in their rants against the right? Its OK by PC rules to slam the president in a time of war for murder, Nazism, torture, lying, warmongering, “Bush hates black people”, or slamming our troops for terrorizing Iraqi women children in the night, or say Christians who live by the bible are Christian-Radicals just as dangerous as Islamic Radicals, BUT Ann Culture calls a metrosexual Liberal a Fag through innuendo not even directly and all hell breaks loose. That makes sense? In a perfect Utopia the LLL’s dream of I guess includes a clause that they can dish out as much slur names as they like but the other side cannot answer in kind.
Excuse me I feel just as bad for those “offended” Liberals as I do for the Islamic Imoms that have been preaching pure hatred against the west for generatia but are just “offended” because after multiple attacks with a cherry on top of 3k dead US citizens we dared to fight back and even call the enemy Radical Islamist.
If the Libs can’t take it they should check their own dogs and quit dishing it.
I think it’s part of her publicity plan. Which still doesn’t explain what CPAC is thinking. There’s a reason she has been kicked out of more than one conservative forum over the years. If she wasn’t blonde and good looking, her career would have been over years ago (one could say the same about some redhead NY times columnists).
It gets to the point where the damage is no longer solely Coulter’s, however, and begins to pile up on CPAC for their invitations. I’d say we’re past that point.
Whom one associates with, matters. It certainly matters for the Left, who (to use a Coulterism) have never met an anti-American they wouldn’t get on their knees and blow. It also works the other way, CPAC – lie down with skanks, get up with STDs…
I think the Lenny Bruce rule covers it:
What would Lenny say?
Second. Would you invite Lenny Bruce to your convention?
#17 Joe,
As far as I have been able to ascertain all the c*m s**ts, and a** wh**** are on the left. Why is that? May I add it is unfair? LOL.
I take some comfort in the fact that Coulter once dated Bob Guiccione Jr. Bill Bennett once dated Janis Joplin. However, it seems that Rs must also appear to be dead sober. Or maybe just dead. So they usually go with the I can’t remember defence. Or “not in front of the children”. No comment or blank stares are also popular.
Note also the way she delivedred that line. It was practiced. Delivered first rate. And the little applause dance? Marvelous.
All based on getting people to imagine what she might have done with “John Edwards” and “f**” in a sentence. Very economical and effective.
All based on getting people to imagine what she might have done with “John Edwards” and “f**” in a sentence. Very economical and effective.
Sigh. When I first got really into politics, shortly therafter 9/11 (like many) I listened to alot of “coulters” for awhile. I figured that the work really hard at this, so they likely really, really care about what they’re saying, and maybe, occassionally I would agree with their intent, if not they’re actual ideas. So I listened to limbaugh and hannity. I listened to Savage. I read Coulter’s weekly columns (and others that are printed on townhall.com or whatever that site is). And every day I found myself so mad, so flustered, and I could’t beleive the manipulative crap that was spewed out. Alot of it isn’t even funny, just mean-spirited.
Eventually, you come to the realization that these are radio personalities… They are less concerned about selling ‘the truth’ than keeping your attention. They’re ‘sermons’ are designed to get you fired up (either with them or against them) so that you keep listening, and they keep getting paid. Of course, all of their arguments fall apart on careful dissection, but in the moment it is all terribly exciting. Same goes for those like air-america. Yes, it is economical, but debating serious issues at a Pollitical convention should not be about the economics of name-calling.
Based on that principle alone, pollitical parties should stay away from these people. Of course, the parties themselves endorse this rhetoric because it hurts their opponents without being ‘dirty’ themselves. Still, a time has got to come when we make our parties turn their backs on stupid rhetoric spouted by puppets.