When hatred is the only theme
One of my fellow LJers is a nice young person who finds herself as practically the only Republican Catholic in her college environment. As such, it is easy to understand that she should indulge in some modest and polite rejoicing at the discomfiture of a candidate and a party that opposed everything that was dearest to her. Less understandable, however, was her bright-eyed pleasure at the thought of meeting the so-called conservative columnist Ann Coulter. I wrote to tell her that this woman is not anyone to be proud of; and I promised an analysis of her most recent column to show what is so bad about her. Here it is. I promise that the sentences in italics are Ms.Coulter's whole article; I have not removed so much as a comma.
As we wait for CBS to concede the election, Democrats are claiming Kerry lost because Americans are stupid - and if there's one thing voters respond to, it's crude insults.
This is not only the first step of a brilliant strategy to win the red states back, but also inconsistent with the Democrats' theory that Bush was an illegitimate president for the last four years because Democratic voters in Florida were too dumb to follow an arrow to the circle by Al Gore's name. How stupid were the alleged Gore-supporters who couldn't figure out how to cast a vote in the 2000 election?
The lunatic reduction of the multiple issues with the Florida vote of 2000 to "Democrats being too dumb to follow the arrows" sets the stage. Those of us who paid attention at the time remember the dubious registering process that seemed to have something against black voters; the horrible voting forms that needed piercing, giving rise to the notorious issues of the hanging or pregnant chads; the strange attitude of the Republican State government, ran by the "victorious" candidate's own brother; and the small matter that Gore had indubitably won the popular vote, by a matter of 150,000. Coulter not only opens with a gratuitous insult - having the cheek to warn her opponents against "crude insults" - she brings up a matter on which her own side remains vulnerable, whatever may have happened since. This is not only viperish, it is stupid: attacking where you are and remain weak. And there is something about this which is even worse than the actual error, since the confident manner in which Ms.Coulter states fallacious nonsense seems to mirror a confidence that, having won, she is entitled to say what she wants.
Using classical Marxist thinking, liberals can't fathom how issues like abortion and gay marriage could trump ordinary people's economic interests -- which liberals axiomatically assume are furthered by the Democrats' offers of government assistance. Democrats are saying to voters: How can you be so stupid to subordinate your own selfish economic interests to "moral values," the betterment of the country and the general welfare of people you don't even know?
"Classical Marxist thinking?" In front of this enormity, one hardly knows where to begin. Marxism has hardly anything to say about voting patterns, and its appeal has historically relied not on promises of personal financial improvement (which, in a collectivized society, would be at any rate highly unlikely), but on "values" - the moral appeal of sacrificing oneself for the collectivity and for future generations. Its enemies at the time, who knew what they were fighting, attacked its moralism and its pie-in-the-sky promises of future perfect worlds. Only Ann Coulter could come around and tell us that the expectation that voters will take into consideration the economic welfare of the country and of one's own family is "Marxist thinking". (Britain's legendary Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was obviously a Marxist when he advertised the merits of his government with the slogan which went down in history, "You've never had it so good": and Margaret Thatcher was being Marxistic when she attacked the poor record of the Wilson-Callaghan government with the equally memorable "Labour isn't working".)
It can only be false consciousness. If liberals think the Bush vote was composed of illiterate homophobes who fear women in the workplace, perhaps the Democrats should start demanding literacy tests to vote.
This one hardly deserves response, except that a better argument ought to be produced by someone who insults others' understanding. It is true that some Democrats have spoken and behaved irrationally in the aftermath of a shattering defeat; but the suggestion of a literacy test is only Ms.Coulter's own idea of mockery, which is a shameful and ungentlemanly thing to do to a defeated opponent. It also happens not to be particularly funny.
Garry Wills - who fills in "occupation" on his federal tax return with "self-hating Catholic" - denounced America in the New York Times as an unenlightened nation full of people who believe "more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution."
By contrast, apparently, "enlightened" people believe in the Aborted Birth more fervently than they believe in national defense. And just in the interest of fairness here, Garry: At least there's some documentation on the Virgin Birth story. For people who believe so fervently in evolution, these Bush mandate-deniers sure are resistant to it on a personal level.
This begins to be like an argument. She has something that looks like a point ("...at least there's some documentation on the Virgin Birth story"), although she clearly fails to appreciate the strength in depth of the science in favour of evolution. (The Pope has publicly endorsed the science in question, and there are sixteen centuries of Christian writing warning against using the Scriptures against the evidence of science.) Nevertheless, the argument from historical documents (which is what the Gospels are) is, if not very compelling, at least an argument; which is something we had not had thus far. But immediately she throws it away on another cheap insult. What is more, the insult itself is cast in a category that shows how wholly second-rate her mind is. She uses the word "evolution" as equivalent with "improvement"; something of which a few minutes' reading of C.S.Lewis (supposedly a favourite among conservatives) should have cured her.
On the same day, on the same nuanced Times editorial page, both Wills and Maureen Dowd wrote that Kerry was defeated by a "jihad" of Christians. The jihadists, according to Wills, were driven by "fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity." Dowd said they were "a devoted flock of evangelicals, or 'values voters,' as they call themselves ... opposing abortion, suffocating stem-cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage." Finally - a jihad liberals oppose!
It begins to be clear that Ms.Coulter's style is simply this: give a much simplified account of some Democrat position or other, and stick a cheap gibe at the end of the paragraph. Here it is actually self-damaging, since the mere statement of what those twin fools, Dowd and Wills, had said, would have been enough to make them laughingstocks. By the cheap implication that all liberals are Muslim-loving, anti-Israeli, jihad-backers, she actually undoes her own point: in order to smear the whole political opposition with the position of some, she actually neglects to gaff and spear the two big fishes - Wills and Dowd - who are actually wiggling on her hook.
Speaking of gay marriage, as long as liberals are so big on discussing "mandates" and whether Bush has one (they say he does not), I think the one thing we can all agree on is that there is definitely a "mandate" against gay marriage. In fact, a clear majority of us are uncomfortable with the word "mandate" because it sounds like Wayne asking Stephen out for dinner and a movie.
Again, a decent point - that the American people has spoken quite clearly on "gay marriage" shot to Hell by the itch of tagging it with an unfunny insult. This one is genuinely illiterate. As every educated person knows, a mandate is a commission from a superior authority to a delegate or deputy, such as parliamentary representatives receive from their voters (or teachers of theology from the Pope). The bit about gay assignments here are therefore simply cretinous.
Reacting to Bush's re-election in that calm, reasoned way we have come to expect of liberals, they are running to psychotherapists, threatening to move to Canada and warning of a Fascist police state - including their fear of a Hollywood "blacklist." (Now you understand how the myth of McCarthyism began, red states!)
This would require too many words to demolish it. I will only hint at a few points. The McCarthy phenomenon is more complex, from both sides, than she seems to think. Every election features people who fall into deep depression or meditate leaving the country - whichever the country may be. Again, there is something here that could develop into an argument - the exaggerated and sometimes hysterical fears of a police state which are being aired on several quarters - but Ms.Coulter completely misses the opportunity to develop anything.
One depressed Kerry voter committed suicide at Ground Zero. Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party is also contemplating political suicide by making Howard Dean its next chairman.
This is probably the lowest point in the whole column. However you view it, that suicide at Ground Zero is a tragedy. To try and get a laugh by tying it up to what she describes as suicidal Democrat politics shows the most abysmal lack of taste and manners, a vulgarity so crass as to make the most hysterical Bush-bashers sound like ladies and gentlemen by comparison.
Some Democrats are so despondent they've contemplated (hushed whisper) prayer. They're just not sure if they're supposed to pray to Bill Clinton or to their "Higher Power."
So Republicans have a monopoly on prayer. And on God. I just hope Ms.Coulter is not Christian; she certainly does not seem to understand much about Christianity.
The day after the election, documentary filmmaker and Upper West Side denizen Mitch Wood told the New York Times: "Watching my kids this morning, going down the street, flicking things in the air, jumping around, I wondered, are they going to have that sense of freedom that I had growing up?"
As if on cue, a commercial jetliner piloted by Islamofascist hijackers did NOT crash in front of Wood at this point, killing his entire family instantly, in silent testimony to the national security we currently enjoy under President Bush. Wood gave no indication of noticing this.
What is one to say about this? I think anything I could say would be repetitious.
A teacher on the Upper West Side, Ireena Gurvich, said, "I'm thinking of leaving the country." Gurvich said she wanted to go to Canada because, "it's a kinder and gentler United States." And yet you still ask why our children cannot read or write.
Even by her standards, to say that students "cannot read or write" because one schoolteacher sees similarities and differences between the US and Canada, is a non sequitur of overwhelming proportions. What is so illiterate about calling Canada "a kinder and gentler United States"? Or do we call anyone an illiterate because they hold opinions different from Ms.Coulter?
Another denizen of the Upper West Side, Patty Fondrie, said: "If it gets bad, we'll go to France," where she will probably be murdered by Muslims.
Ah, yes, it happens every day. In the end, one becomes numb: one fails to react to the continuous stream of ignorance, distortion, misconception, and sheer nonsense. I cannot even be bothered to defend France, which, down the ages, has been mocked rather more effectively than by this American unfortunate.
Michael Conway, an administrator at United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, Calif., was quoted in the Times worrying, "What's going to happen, some kind of blacklist?" - suggesting an entirely new, if somewhat scatological connotation, to the term "A-list."
I think we have a long way to go from Michael Moore being an honored guest at the Democratic National Convention to a "blacklist" -- except for actors who believe abortion and gay marriage are "wrong." But here's hoping.
And so the article peters out; not with a formal conclusion, for it is too shapeless to have one, but with another insult. For once, it is a deserved one: it is true that the Hollywood brand of leftie is a particularly ridiculous one, and that they are prone to statement that make the ordinary person cringe. But even here - well - why could she not at least cut the last three words?
This is the woman in a nutshell. Ignorant about science, unwilling or incapable to develop a coherent argument, pathologically dependent on sneering closing sentences to a point that damages her prose style, mired in cliches, astonishingly incapable of understanding what she opposes, this woman is, to the life, exactly the kind of monster that a determined Democrat would create if s/he wanted to create a living caricature of everything the world hates and fears about American conservatism.
As we wait for CBS to concede the election, Democrats are claiming Kerry lost because Americans are stupid - and if there's one thing voters respond to, it's crude insults.
This is not only the first step of a brilliant strategy to win the red states back, but also inconsistent with the Democrats' theory that Bush was an illegitimate president for the last four years because Democratic voters in Florida were too dumb to follow an arrow to the circle by Al Gore's name. How stupid were the alleged Gore-supporters who couldn't figure out how to cast a vote in the 2000 election?
The lunatic reduction of the multiple issues with the Florida vote of 2000 to "Democrats being too dumb to follow the arrows" sets the stage. Those of us who paid attention at the time remember the dubious registering process that seemed to have something against black voters; the horrible voting forms that needed piercing, giving rise to the notorious issues of the hanging or pregnant chads; the strange attitude of the Republican State government, ran by the "victorious" candidate's own brother; and the small matter that Gore had indubitably won the popular vote, by a matter of 150,000. Coulter not only opens with a gratuitous insult - having the cheek to warn her opponents against "crude insults" - she brings up a matter on which her own side remains vulnerable, whatever may have happened since. This is not only viperish, it is stupid: attacking where you are and remain weak. And there is something about this which is even worse than the actual error, since the confident manner in which Ms.Coulter states fallacious nonsense seems to mirror a confidence that, having won, she is entitled to say what she wants.
Using classical Marxist thinking, liberals can't fathom how issues like abortion and gay marriage could trump ordinary people's economic interests -- which liberals axiomatically assume are furthered by the Democrats' offers of government assistance. Democrats are saying to voters: How can you be so stupid to subordinate your own selfish economic interests to "moral values," the betterment of the country and the general welfare of people you don't even know?
"Classical Marxist thinking?" In front of this enormity, one hardly knows where to begin. Marxism has hardly anything to say about voting patterns, and its appeal has historically relied not on promises of personal financial improvement (which, in a collectivized society, would be at any rate highly unlikely), but on "values" - the moral appeal of sacrificing oneself for the collectivity and for future generations. Its enemies at the time, who knew what they were fighting, attacked its moralism and its pie-in-the-sky promises of future perfect worlds. Only Ann Coulter could come around and tell us that the expectation that voters will take into consideration the economic welfare of the country and of one's own family is "Marxist thinking". (Britain's legendary Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was obviously a Marxist when he advertised the merits of his government with the slogan which went down in history, "You've never had it so good": and Margaret Thatcher was being Marxistic when she attacked the poor record of the Wilson-Callaghan government with the equally memorable "Labour isn't working".)
It can only be false consciousness. If liberals think the Bush vote was composed of illiterate homophobes who fear women in the workplace, perhaps the Democrats should start demanding literacy tests to vote.
This one hardly deserves response, except that a better argument ought to be produced by someone who insults others' understanding. It is true that some Democrats have spoken and behaved irrationally in the aftermath of a shattering defeat; but the suggestion of a literacy test is only Ms.Coulter's own idea of mockery, which is a shameful and ungentlemanly thing to do to a defeated opponent. It also happens not to be particularly funny.
Garry Wills - who fills in "occupation" on his federal tax return with "self-hating Catholic" - denounced America in the New York Times as an unenlightened nation full of people who believe "more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution."
By contrast, apparently, "enlightened" people believe in the Aborted Birth more fervently than they believe in national defense. And just in the interest of fairness here, Garry: At least there's some documentation on the Virgin Birth story. For people who believe so fervently in evolution, these Bush mandate-deniers sure are resistant to it on a personal level.
This begins to be like an argument. She has something that looks like a point ("...at least there's some documentation on the Virgin Birth story"), although she clearly fails to appreciate the strength in depth of the science in favour of evolution. (The Pope has publicly endorsed the science in question, and there are sixteen centuries of Christian writing warning against using the Scriptures against the evidence of science.) Nevertheless, the argument from historical documents (which is what the Gospels are) is, if not very compelling, at least an argument; which is something we had not had thus far. But immediately she throws it away on another cheap insult. What is more, the insult itself is cast in a category that shows how wholly second-rate her mind is. She uses the word "evolution" as equivalent with "improvement"; something of which a few minutes' reading of C.S.Lewis (supposedly a favourite among conservatives) should have cured her.
On the same day, on the same nuanced Times editorial page, both Wills and Maureen Dowd wrote that Kerry was defeated by a "jihad" of Christians. The jihadists, according to Wills, were driven by "fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity." Dowd said they were "a devoted flock of evangelicals, or 'values voters,' as they call themselves ... opposing abortion, suffocating stem-cell research and supporting a constitutional amendment against gay marriage." Finally - a jihad liberals oppose!
It begins to be clear that Ms.Coulter's style is simply this: give a much simplified account of some Democrat position or other, and stick a cheap gibe at the end of the paragraph. Here it is actually self-damaging, since the mere statement of what those twin fools, Dowd and Wills, had said, would have been enough to make them laughingstocks. By the cheap implication that all liberals are Muslim-loving, anti-Israeli, jihad-backers, she actually undoes her own point: in order to smear the whole political opposition with the position of some, she actually neglects to gaff and spear the two big fishes - Wills and Dowd - who are actually wiggling on her hook.
Speaking of gay marriage, as long as liberals are so big on discussing "mandates" and whether Bush has one (they say he does not), I think the one thing we can all agree on is that there is definitely a "mandate" against gay marriage. In fact, a clear majority of us are uncomfortable with the word "mandate" because it sounds like Wayne asking Stephen out for dinner and a movie.
Again, a decent point - that the American people has spoken quite clearly on "gay marriage" shot to Hell by the itch of tagging it with an unfunny insult. This one is genuinely illiterate. As every educated person knows, a mandate is a commission from a superior authority to a delegate or deputy, such as parliamentary representatives receive from their voters (or teachers of theology from the Pope). The bit about gay assignments here are therefore simply cretinous.
Reacting to Bush's re-election in that calm, reasoned way we have come to expect of liberals, they are running to psychotherapists, threatening to move to Canada and warning of a Fascist police state - including their fear of a Hollywood "blacklist." (Now you understand how the myth of McCarthyism began, red states!)
This would require too many words to demolish it. I will only hint at a few points. The McCarthy phenomenon is more complex, from both sides, than she seems to think. Every election features people who fall into deep depression or meditate leaving the country - whichever the country may be. Again, there is something here that could develop into an argument - the exaggerated and sometimes hysterical fears of a police state which are being aired on several quarters - but Ms.Coulter completely misses the opportunity to develop anything.
One depressed Kerry voter committed suicide at Ground Zero. Meanwhile, the entire Democratic Party is also contemplating political suicide by making Howard Dean its next chairman.
This is probably the lowest point in the whole column. However you view it, that suicide at Ground Zero is a tragedy. To try and get a laugh by tying it up to what she describes as suicidal Democrat politics shows the most abysmal lack of taste and manners, a vulgarity so crass as to make the most hysterical Bush-bashers sound like ladies and gentlemen by comparison.
Some Democrats are so despondent they've contemplated (hushed whisper) prayer. They're just not sure if they're supposed to pray to Bill Clinton or to their "Higher Power."
So Republicans have a monopoly on prayer. And on God. I just hope Ms.Coulter is not Christian; she certainly does not seem to understand much about Christianity.
The day after the election, documentary filmmaker and Upper West Side denizen Mitch Wood told the New York Times: "Watching my kids this morning, going down the street, flicking things in the air, jumping around, I wondered, are they going to have that sense of freedom that I had growing up?"
As if on cue, a commercial jetliner piloted by Islamofascist hijackers did NOT crash in front of Wood at this point, killing his entire family instantly, in silent testimony to the national security we currently enjoy under President Bush. Wood gave no indication of noticing this.
What is one to say about this? I think anything I could say would be repetitious.
A teacher on the Upper West Side, Ireena Gurvich, said, "I'm thinking of leaving the country." Gurvich said she wanted to go to Canada because, "it's a kinder and gentler United States." And yet you still ask why our children cannot read or write.
Even by her standards, to say that students "cannot read or write" because one schoolteacher sees similarities and differences between the US and Canada, is a non sequitur of overwhelming proportions. What is so illiterate about calling Canada "a kinder and gentler United States"? Or do we call anyone an illiterate because they hold opinions different from Ms.Coulter?
Another denizen of the Upper West Side, Patty Fondrie, said: "If it gets bad, we'll go to France," where she will probably be murdered by Muslims.
Ah, yes, it happens every day. In the end, one becomes numb: one fails to react to the continuous stream of ignorance, distortion, misconception, and sheer nonsense. I cannot even be bothered to defend France, which, down the ages, has been mocked rather more effectively than by this American unfortunate.
Michael Conway, an administrator at United Talent Agency in Beverly Hills, Calif., was quoted in the Times worrying, "What's going to happen, some kind of blacklist?" - suggesting an entirely new, if somewhat scatological connotation, to the term "A-list."
I think we have a long way to go from Michael Moore being an honored guest at the Democratic National Convention to a "blacklist" -- except for actors who believe abortion and gay marriage are "wrong." But here's hoping.
And so the article peters out; not with a formal conclusion, for it is too shapeless to have one, but with another insult. For once, it is a deserved one: it is true that the Hollywood brand of leftie is a particularly ridiculous one, and that they are prone to statement that make the ordinary person cringe. But even here - well - why could she not at least cut the last three words?
This is the woman in a nutshell. Ignorant about science, unwilling or incapable to develop a coherent argument, pathologically dependent on sneering closing sentences to a point that damages her prose style, mired in cliches, astonishingly incapable of understanding what she opposes, this woman is, to the life, exactly the kind of monster that a determined Democrat would create if s/he wanted to create a living caricature of everything the world hates and fears about American conservatism.