By page 19 I wanted to scoop my eyeballs out with one of my daughter's spoons.
But still I pressed on. As you may or may not know, her latest book is really just an anthology of her articles from the past, mixed in with a few comments about her in a state of awe at how come she isn't more widely published, and topped off with a particularly bile filled introduction. I may not be getting any fresh Coulter material, true, but what I got instead was a look into how her mind works. Kind of like a verbal strip chart that allowed me to come to the following conclusions.
-Ann Coulter is an idiot. This is a completely comprehensive conclusion that I came to after long hours of painful reading, and even longer minutes of even more painful reflection. I base this off of the fact that you can't write the words down that she writes without being an idiot. I'm not attacking her views, nor am I going after her sources or method or anything, I'm simply addressing the fact that the woman seems to have no idea what she is writing as she writes it. Unfortunately, Al Franken beat me to the best term, that being, "irony of the unintended sort."
Case in point, Ann spends a decent chunk of time going after John Edwards for being the kind of lawyer that brings up all those frivolous law suits that GeeDub hates so much. Of course this comes from a lawyer who helped bring together one of the most frivolous trials in recent history, one that you and I had to foot the bill for.
You find stuff like this in just about every article. Typically, since she doesn't really actually put forth any conservative views, she spends most of her time attacking liberals for something, usually forgetting that one of her conservative icons is just as guilty if not more.
-Ann Coulter is a bigot. See, this one is kind of unfair because Ann gave me this one herself. She warns her conservative brethren that liberals will not hesitate to call them racist. Well, I'm not calling conservatives racist, I'm calling Ann one. As well as a homophobe, and a sexist(this last one is actually my favorite). Going back to my first conclusion, Ann markedly points out that liberals are racist, and not she, and then when you dig into her bits on Airport Security, it takes her about a page and a half before she's into racial profiling and stirring up all that "kill the evil brown men," sentiment. It would be funny if I didn't have to go through an entire book on this crap.
But even funnier than the racism, is the sexism. To lend a little credibility to the satirical bit that Cernig linked to in the previous post, here's what I mean. Anytime a liberal congressmen refuses to jump headlong into war without any kind of reflection or anything like that, Ann calls the man, "womanly," or "girlish." Every time she does this, which is quite often, I would close the book for a second and look at the cover. I would then reread the passage, look at the cover again, and then put the book down for a week. The woman makes no damn sense.
-Ann Coulter isn't very original. This is another problem with Ann. See, instead of providing her readers with something new to read each week, she opts for what's behind door number B, that being: Repeat the same thing over and over again. Here is just a small list of things that you can expect to see in about one out of three of Ann's articles:
- Ann calling Sen. Kennedy a drunk
- Ann calling Sen. Kennedy a murderer
- Ann calling Bill Clinton a felon
- Ann calling any and all other liberal legislators "girls"
- Ann calling liberals stupid
- Ann calling liberals stupid(I repeated this one because it's in almost every other sentance. I mean the phrase eventually becomes punctuation after a point)
The main reason why no one gets past page 19 in a Coulter book is because there's nothing new left to read. You can only read that Kennedy is a murderer so many times before you get the point.
-Ann Coulter has no credibility. This one I didn't even have to research, I could deduce this one by reading Al Franken's book, than hers, than her footnotes for this book. That last step is the easiest because there aren't any. After Franken laid into her about her end notes, Ann decided, I guess, to just get rid of them all together. But still, Ann does address the shots fired cross her brow. She does so by blaming the mainstream media for being nicer to liberals than to her.
Ultimately, Ann is a construct of the rightwing hate spewing machine. A king's ransom worth of hate, bile, misconceptions, propaganda etc. all wrapped into a package that isn't all that unpleasant to look at if you're a lonely forty something. While it would be nice to shrug her off as the insignificant chunk of hell that she is, we can't because she, like her compatriots Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage, etc. may not have any wind in their sails but hot air, they do have a good firm grasp on the ears and minds of the American public. With a death grip on America's common sense, they fill our citizen's minds with the kind of ignorant contempt that put Bush back in the white house for a second term. They must be stopped.
Mr. M
2 comments:
i read ann's previous book and found it very informative. her discussion of McCarthyism is an eye opener. McCarthyism should refer to the way McCarthy was slammed by the democrats and the press for uncovering spies in the us government. Yes there were really spies. And yes communists wanted to rule the world. Ever heard of Joseph Stalin? killed 60 million of his own people. Ever heard Kruschev's threat to bury the United states? These people needed to be taken seriously. Any way, sound like your mind's made up and you will only listen to people who have thoughtful opinions like Al Franken. Let's see..... what was the title of his tolerant, respectfully written book? Something about a Big, Fat Idiot?
Well, Anonymous, and you probably won't ever read this, but just in case, it's kind of hard to attack me for not agreeing with Ann on the issues when she doesn't actually defend or state any issues.
Actually, in "How..." she does defend two points. That we should kill all their leaders, and convert them to Christianity, and that airport security should be reformed.
That second issue that she actally defends on its own merit, I actually agreed with her for about a page and a half until she got down to the racial profiling, at which point I went back to my typical, who the hell is this woman? mode.
My point with Ann Coulter is that she fills her entire book with ad hominem attacks, strawman arguments, and blatant slander, all in the name of "talking to liberals." If the title of her book was, "how to insult liberals without actually arguing the issues with them," than I wouldn't have much of a problem, but that isn't the case.
With Franken's book, "Lies, and the Liars Who Tell Them," you pretty much know what you'r getting when you buy the book. A look into lies told by the right wing.
As for McCarthyism, what you fail to see, as is often the case, we on the left are not against defending our country. What we are concerned with is the extremism of the lengths that some go to in the name of defending our country that fails to make us safer, and in fact is detrimental to the U.S.A., whether it be in security or in standing. McCarthy executed a witch hunt, one that went far beyond the confines of ensuring a safer union.
So, dear Anonymous, since you attack me with no historical context, nor with even the slightest attempt to understand both positions of the argument, I ask you the same questions asked of McCarthy himself, "Have you no decency? At long last, Sir, have you no decency?"
Mr. M
Left of Center
Post a Comment