well-known and fanatically-conservative columnist, Ann Coulter grabs headlines every now and then for her latest scalding and error-filled diatribe about something or other. She's basically the Rush Limbaugh of the print world, though far less popular or successful.  She was writing for a major right wing magazine, The National Review, until she went too far one time too many and was fired.

Being canned by the National Review for being too conservative is almost impossible; that's like being kicked out of the SS for wanting to kill too many Jews.  Yes, ugly simile.

Anyway, I've read a column of hers every now and then, usually when it's highly-referred on Yahoo, and had to comment a few times.  Coulter's PoV on anything is easily-predicted, but her actual writing about things is sometimes worth noting, just for the outrageousness of it.

Coulter is not a journalist; she has no interest in fairness or objectivity or presenting information for her readers to make up their own minds about. She's a polemicist, wanting to make a point about something, picking an example that more or less fits the situation, and then presenting the material in the most biased and unfair light possible, in order to make her point.  You have to lack all objectivity and agree with her completely to read anything she writes without voicing numerous objections.

This first example is one of the most dishonest editorials I've ever seen, with constant and intentional twisting of words and taking things out of context to make her point. 

More recent updates are added to the bottom of this page.

April 20, 2002

Here's why I'd never make a good political columnist.  I can't lie well enough.  I can't just talk about one tiny aspect of something, ignore all the other sides of an issue.  I especially can't ignore common sense and logic and the bigger picture.  Ann Coulter has no such hang ups, as this article so well demonstrates.  Slander, innuendo, intentional ignorance, avoiding bigger issues to hammer on a minor one, bald faced lies, taking things out of context... it's pretty well the full package on display.  She's sort of an idiot-version of George Will.  He has the same arch-conservative agenda, but is much more insidious in his promotion of it.  So much so that you hardly know what he's talking about, most of the time.

Anyway, in this article Coulter goes on and on about how essential drilling in the Arctic Refuge is, and how anyone who doesn't support it is on the side of the terrorists.  She of course points out that the administration has blocked all planned fuel efficiency increases, which would make a vastly bigger difference on our oil consumption than every drop in the Arctic Refuge.  And she also is honor-bound to mention the huge cuts in funding that all sorts of alternative energy source work and research have been given since Dubya was "elected".

Oh wait, my bad, she blatantly leaves both of those points out.  Must have slipped her mind.

Well then she must discuss how little oil there really is in the Arctic Refuge, and how it's hardly even worth doing?  Nope, she doesn't talk about how much there will be, and in fact she digs up news that another Alaskan oil field 30 years ago was underestimated in size.  You don't suppose that our ability to estimate the size of an oil reserve has improved any in 30 years, do you?  Must not have, or she'd have mentioned that, in her fair, balanced, honest editorializing.

Well at least she writes professionally, and treats her ideological opponents with dignity and respect, right?  You be the judge, here's a few quotes:

Luckily, the Democrats have all those other issues dear to the heart of the average blue collar worker: abortion on demand, gay marriage and taxpayer-funded crucifixes submerged in urine.

The Democrats' idea of sacrifice is for Sen. Teddy Kennedy to stop getting drunk and groping stewardesses.

When not jetting around the country on his private plane, paid for by the deceased husband of his second wife, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has emerged as a leading opponent of ANWR.

The last remark about John Kerry is probably her lowest.  The man volunteered to serve combat missions in Vietnam, which is where he learned to fly, and he received 3 purple hearts while there.  If he'd joined the National Guard to bravely protect Texas from the Vietcong, like the President did, you don't suppose Coulter would have taken a cheap shot about that, do you?  (Does the pope wear a big hat?) His wife's first husband died in 1991, she's worked running the Heinz family charities since then, and she met, fell in love with, and married Kerry some years later.  So the fact that he has a private plane from his first wife's fortune is relevant in what way, exactly?  Could it be relevant that the President and VP who are pushing the arctic drilling are both multi-millionaires from oil money?  So which does she choose to mention?

On the whole, I find her article relatively disgusting, full of pointless (borderline libelous) cheap shots that do nothing to add to her argument.  She leaves out massive amounts of information that would be of use to anyone who wanted to make an informed decision, and she twists and distorts and omits the few facts she goes anywhere near, so they appear to support her position.  

Oddly, I'm not entirely decided on the issue.  I don't like the idea of drilling for relatively little oil in such a fragile area, but if we were taking other steps that would really cut foreign oil dependency, such as increasing fuel economy, practicing conservation, looking into additional renewable fuel sources, etc, the amount of oil we'd be adding from this new Alaskan drilling would be really substantial.  If we were using 20% less oil, then it wouldn't be an insignificant % of our total, it would be a big chunk, and we could vastly cut the dependence on terrorist-funding oil.  Instead we're doing nothing to conserve, doing much to use even more oil, and pushing for a very risky drilling project that will hardly make any difference.

So is Coulter an idiot, or just a liar by omission?

Even if I agreed completely with her PoV on the issue, I'd find her methods of arguing it repugnant, and her editorial grossly uninformative.

March 29, 2002

Ann Coulter is just right of Attilla the Hun, as the old joke goes, so I'm unlikely to agree with her on much, but this editorial slamming Halle Barry for having big tits and being proud of them, Julia Roberts for kissing black people and enjoying it, and generally savaging Hollywood liberals at every opportunity under the guise of discussing the Oscars really amused me.  It's funny in a very bitter, cruel way, and there is so much projection going on by Coulter (pushing her own evil scheming cynical mind into every dumb actress' skull) that it's sort of queasy-inducing on a second read.  Obviously Coulter has big issues with sexuality and nudity (or at least feels she should pretend to have them, since she's an arch-conservative) in the "tut tut" sort of condescending manner that George Will displays towards... well, pretty much everything.

Nevertheless, I have to laugh at lines like this one from her editorial:

Yes, at long last, the "glass ceiling" had been broken. Large-breasted, slightly cocoa women with idealized Caucasian features finally have a chance in Hollywood! They will, however, still be required to display their large breasts for the camera and to discuss their large breasts at some length with reporters.

Of course Coulter owes her entire fame/fortune to being pretty and blonde and female, so it's rather a case of pot meeting kettle.  But we'll give her some credit for being amusing.

Elsewhere in her article:

After Washington accepted his award, Roberts leapt on him and would not let go. It was as if he had grown some sort of exotic Julia Roberts wart. Not only Washington, but, more urgently, his wife deserves great credit for their forbearance. Whatever indignities Hollywood has visited on blacks in the past, it would be hard to top this.

Yes, Blacks in Hollywood have spent the better part of the past century being passed over for every role but a butler or slave or gangster, paid a fraction what white actors are paid, and shut out of any management or producer or director positions, but that's nothing compared to Julia Roberts hugging Denzel Washington for oh, a good 10 seconds, after he won the highest honor his industry has to offer.

Like most conservative pundits, Coulter tip toes right up the edge of being blatant racism, but doesn't actually call anyone a "nigger", or even a "darkie", so she can get away with it. And of course she scrupulously edits her editorials to be vaguely offensive and hint at her true disapproval of everything, without having the balls to come out and actually say it.  Couch your racism and grumpiness in sarcastic humor and personal insults, write carefully enough to provide yourself with deniability against any objections over your stealth racism, and you're home free!

I think Coulter is pushing her luck a bit with this bit, it's pretty blatantly racist, at least in insinuation.

Whenever white liberals are in trouble, they always run to the blacks. Immediately after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Monica went to a Washington Wizards game where she hoisted some poor unsuspecting black girl onto her lap in full view of the cameras. Bill Clinton dropped the subtlety and dashed off to Africa. After his abomination of a presidency, Jimmy Carter built housing in Harlem.

But I'm sure her target audience, other conservatives who hate blacks but know enough to not come out and start slinging N-bombs, just eat it right up.

I'm sort of tempted to go through her other editorials and find offensive crap, but that's such a bloggy thing to do, find some straw man and demolish it, that I'd hate myself in the morning.

This is rather funny.  Quoted from this site.

Many have dismissed it as a legend, but recent evidence has been unearthed to suggest that the Chupacabra is real, and is none other than Ann Coulter.

The similarities are too eerie to ignore:

July 7, 2002

The unintentionally amusing award of the week goes to Ann Coulter, a (rather stupid) conservative columnist.  Her most recent editorial attempts to equate liberalism with terrorism, primarily by pointing out how all those awful liberals aren't totally happy with outright racial profiling by police, since after all, all terrorists are of course swarthy Arabic looking guys, right?  She doesn't mention the unknown Anthrax mail guy, or Timothy McVeigh, or the possibility of white people (say John Walker?) sympathizing with the Arabic cause, but those oversights are probably just due to space limitations.  She wouldn't leave out such obvious contradictions to her main thesis for any other reason, I'm sure.

Her breathtakingly analytical and objective analysis includes the following gem:

No matter what defeatist tack liberals take, real Americans are behind our troops 100 percent, behind John Ashcroft 100 percent, behind locking up suspected terrorists 100 percent, behind surveillance of Arabs 100 percent.

So she's fine with Ashcroft thinking calico cats are signs of the devil, anointing himself with cooking oil, covering up the statue of lady justice, etc? That's what 100% means, after all. And yes, she actually said, "real Americans".

What made this especially funny to me was the most recent TMW cartoon, which brilliantly (IMHO) skewers the exact mindset Coulter is portraying here.  I'd read the TMW (This Modern World) cartoon a day before seeing Coulter's new article, (I can't stand the woman and her disingenuous bullshit, but she's such a train wreck I'm sort of compelled to read on.) and was chuckling to myself as I read her writing, amused at how completely she fell into the ignorant, intolerant, bigoted, clueless "real American" definition the TMW cartoon lampooned.

The illusion, tragically, was spoiled by Coulter actually referring to the TMW cartoon near the end of her editorial.  Obviously she saw it and disagreed with it, so wrote her hyperbolic editorial keying off the terms and points in the cartoon, while not making clear that it was where she got the whole idea for her editorial from.  She tries to dismiss the cartoon and the principles behind it thusly:

The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with "unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass." This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America. Like all cartoons specially featured in the Times, there was nothing remotely funny about the cartoon. Its point was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans.

I would disagree with her on the humor of it; I found the cartoon pretty amusing.  And I defy anyone to not think this one is amusing. It stars Ann Coulter herself, coincidentally enough.

More to the point, her quoting of the TMW cartoon here is quite clearly an attempt to misrepresent the point of the cartoon. The cartoon is here, feel free to compare for yourself.  The actual passage she's quotes reads:

Do you draw strength from your [unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass] above all others?

The portion in [brackets] is what Coulter quoted.  The bold text is from the cartoon.  She left off the initial 6 words, and the last 3 words, which pretty clearly change the meaning of it from an attack on the concept of religion, which is how she's trying to portray it, to a rhetorical question, poking fun at the megalomania of true believers.

I've written about Coulter a few times in the past, and this is her to a tee.  Misrepresenting the words or ideas of her enemies to try and fit them into her argument.  She also always omits several very obvious examples that would ruin her entire argument, and throws in various ad hominem insults that probably make those who agree with her giggle at her naughty nature, but which just make her look ignorant to any informed reader.  As I said in the blog from April 20th, 2002, "Even if I agreed completely with her PoV on the issue, I'd find her methods of arguing it repugnant, and her editorial grossly uninformative."

July 8, 2002

I wrote some about Ann Coulter yesterday, mostly about her absurdly stupid comments about the TMW cartoon.  Tom Tomorrow, the creator of TMW, addressed her comments on his blog today, in rather clever fashion.  He didn't even bother to focus on her obvious lies and misquotings; he just cuts her legs off with a much larger scale of argument.

Ms. Coulter argues that the point of my cartoon "was simply to convey all the proper prejudices of elitist liberals against ordinary Americans." Actually it was exactly the opposite. The vast majority of people who read my cartoon live in places like Dayton and Austin and Athens and Des Moines and Missoula and Milwaukee and Buffalo and Savannah and Springfield, and while they may not believe that twenty-first century Americans are God's chosen people, and while they may find cause to disagree with Republican policies and priorities, I think they'd be very surprised to learn that they are anything but ordinary Americans. The point is, Americans are a hugely diverse people, with a far greater range of opinions and beliefs and ideas than conservative elitists like Ann Coulter give us credit for--which she might find out, if she ever got out of the self-contained wingnut lecture-and-conference bubble and actually talked to some of the rest of us.

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