Well, she certainly made the national news. On NBC, Bryan Williams was pretty unforgiving. On ABC, Charlie Gibson was less forthcoming, and only showed her at a book signing today instead of shrieking in her interview with Matt Lauer. But she was certainly on the screen, which was I guess her design from the start. At issue is the effect of her genre, not Ann Coulter herself. She simply looks for outrageous things to say and says them. It’s all obviously theater. She claims to be pushing Christianity, but that’s a sort of silly claim. People pushing Christianity don’t usually wear skimpy cocktail dresses, make black leather lingerie ads, or talk like nasty sailors.
The issue isn’t Ann Coulter. It’s the sarcastic, demeaning rhetoric typified by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk. Ann is a rookie compared to Rush. She just packages hers with her near occurrence of good looks. The style is pretty formulaic. Take any issue, find a proponent for the side you oppose, then go after them with a vengence – specifically attacking their motives. All that’s required is a moderately dim view of human beings – self-serving, hateful, greedy, driven by Narcissism, hiding behind some feigned lofty motive but really rotten to the core. In logic, it’s known as the ad hominem fallacy – attack the man, not what they’re saying. So for Ann, the widows of men who were killed in the Trade Towers are "witches" capitalizing on their husband’s deaths. For Karl Rove, Joseph Wilson was on a boondoggle set up by his wife, Valerie Plame. For Rush Limbaugh today, " Just like everything else they’re going to overplay their hand, they’re going to overdo it on Haditha, and people are going to get sick and tired of hearing an elite bunch of people who really have no respect for the US military in the first place start ripping the shreds out of the entire Armed Services over this incident and trying to equate this incident with normal, standard operating behavior in the US military."
I suppose they would level the same charge, that the Liberal Press, the blogs, etc. make similar ad hominem attacks on the Bush Administration, or even Ann and Rush themselves. I expect that does happen, but it’s nothing like the constant. flow of vitriole these two and their cohorts produce. There’s a nasty, degrading flavor to these Right Wing pundits that stands all on its own. I will admit that their comments do evoke impulses to respond in kind. It reminds me of the Elementary School Playground where exchanges of this ilk are common: "Well you’re a great big sissy that picks his nose!" evoking "Well you’re two of them! Buttface!"
I wonder how it came to this? It seems to have started on talk radio, but I expect that the sneering, disrespectful, and dismissive demeanor of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have thrown gasoline on this fire.
Grammar School bullies have become the heros of the right…
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