Passion of the Coulter

I almost don’t want to write this article. I almost don’t want to give crazy-assed Ann Coulter anything that could be construed as free publicity for her new book, “Godless”, due out today. But then again, I almost didn’t get pregnant with my kid, I almost won Powerball last week, and I almost get rear-ended every time I come to a stop in front of somebody in traffic. So almost doesn’t cut much ice, especially when your subject makes herself as much of a moving target as Coulter does.

Whether she’s insisting that womens’ voting rights should be rescinded, complaining that her unflattering photo on the cover of TIME is evidence of a liberal media conspiracy against her, or championing Joseph McCarthy as an American hero, Coulter has lunaticed her way into the American cultural pantheon and, for this, she deserves her very own article – especially on this day dated 6/6/6 that we so closely associate with heretics. Ann Coulter is a heretic of the highest caliber in the Church of American Liberty.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the past decade, Ann Coulter is an op-ed writer (and by “op-ed writer” I mean “complete fucking lunatic”) whose specialty is angry diatribes packaged into book form against any and all things left-wing. The most readily recognizable trademark of Coulter’s books would be their titles – one inflammatory word like “SLANDER” or “TREASON” or the latest and most hilarious specimen, “GODLESS”. The ranting-without-pausing-for-breath-style prose inside becomes rather beside the point to the eye-grabbing titles, but the basic Coulter philosophy is that if it isn’t authoritarian and run by white males, it’s a danger to the public.

During the Clinton era she had a certain measure of credibility and relevance among her conservative brethren after serving as an unpaid consultant to Paula Jones’ legal team when Jones was attempting to sue Bill Clinton for sexual harassment. Coulter’s biggest coup was to leak a crucial bit of information to the mainstream press: namely, Jones’ description of the distinct shape of the President’s penis. Bourne into the public eye on a wave of bent-nail publicity, Coulter became a darling of the disenfranchised right. Her moderately attractive patrician slenderness and willingness to blurt out Tourette’s-like pronunciations of “treason” on the part of Clinton made her a popular talking head on FOXNews and a bankable curiosity on the other news networks.

With the return of the neocons to power in 2000, Coulter’s rising star shot to the top of the infotainment heap. She slapped together “Slander”, her first book, and discreetly attempted to shave a couple of years off her age in her official bio. “Slander”, a supposed expose’ of malicious lies perpetuated against conservatives by the American left, didn’t offer up much in the way of proof to back up the accusation leveled in the book’s title, but it did offer some significant comic relief in the intervals where Coulter attempted to fill out her page-number obligations by offering up some of her wackier personal credos, especially her views on women. Now, conservative female pundits are notorious for slamming other women, and for the ongoing self-delusion that they are among the very few worthy exceptions to the apparently well-known rule that only wealthy white men possess any intelligence or leadership abilities.

Among other things, Coulter postulates that women have significantly less brain capacity than men, that they are incapable of understanding the right-wing holy grail of the “free market” and that they have frivolous ideas of how government money should be spent: “They want to blow it on things like education, health care, and day care.” She also spearheaded the right’s virulent ongoing campaign to liken Hilary Clinton to some kind of bottom-heavy latter-day Jezebel. She relished in pointing out Clinton’s physical flaws, while at the same time insisting that “only the left will attack a public female figure about her looks. The right never stoops this low.” She especially liked saying stuff like this while making the TV talk show rounds wearing short skirts.

In “Treason” Coulter went further afield, abandoning her by now familiar rhetoric about current events to offer a revisionist history lesson about how stupid we were for failing to listen to Joseph McCarthy about the apparent saturation of the American military with Communists. McCarthy’s infamous slander of Eisenhower’s top military brass notoriously opened up a Pandora’s box of paranoia and accusations, and begat the House Un-American Activities Committee’s destructive and divisive efforts to dismantle the American motion picture industry. It became known as one of the blackest periods of American history for its nightmarishly damaging effect on free speech and civil rights, and McCarthy’s name was attached to it. Coulter’s premise in “Treason”? McCarthy was right and all the rest of us are damned fools. As idiotic as this premise is, it certainly laid a rock-solid foundation for the Bush Administration’s justifications for its ongoing ass-rape of American civil liberties in the name of “the war on terror”. Coulter had gone from being fringe, to being relevant, to being truly destructive, not to her opponents but to the people she was actually trying to HELP.

Fortunately for all of us, Coulter’s rhetoric became so outlandish and extreme that she appears to have come full-circle. Right around the time she started raving to reporters that “leftists are not just misguided, but truly awful, evil people” and began posing for frightening but oddly fetching pictures shouldering a hunting rifle while wearing short shorts, the powers-that-be on the right began distancing themselves from her unhinged extremism. FOX quit calling her quite so often and she came across as a full-blown self-caricature in the TIME piece last year. Even Sean Hannity cut her off in an interview on his radio show, although he did it in his customary ass-kissing, glad-handed manner.

Maybe it’s time for Coulter to take a deep breath and start at the beginning. I haven’t read any of the advance copy from “Godless”, the book about the supposed paucity of spiritual life in the American left, but if she’s smart, she’ll start it off with her most reliable proven fastball – a passage about Bill Clinton’s evil, bent dick.

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