Ann Coulter: America's fiery, blond commentatrix [MARK STEYN on ANN COULTER!]

www.macleans.ca ^ | June 21, 2006 | Mark Steyn

[RonDog]

MARK STEYN

Ann Coulter: America's fiery, blond commentatrix

June 21, 2006

One crack about 9/11 widows and the author of Godless loses her audience. Too bad.

MARK STEYN

Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it's been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn't that great?" and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer.

But nobody's talking too much about the finer points of Miss Coulter's argument. Instead, everyone -- from Hillary Rodham Clinton down -- is going bananas about a couple of paragraphs on page 103 and 112 in which the author savages the 9/11 widows. Not all of them. Just the quartet led by Kristen Breitweiser and known as "the Jersey Girls." These four widows have been regular fixtures in the New York TV studios since they first emerged to complain that the average $1.6 million-per-family compensation was insufficient. The 9/11 commission, in all its ghastly second-guessing showboating, was largely their project. As Miss Coulter writes:

"These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. The whole nation was wounded, all of our lives reduced. But they believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much."

And at that point Senator Clinton jumped in to denounce the incendiary blond commentatrix as (dread word) "mean-spirited." Maybe so. But in 2004, the Jersey Girls publicly endorsed John Kerry's campaign for president: they inserted themselves into the political arena and chose sides. That being so, to demand that they be insulated from the normal rough 'n' tumble of partisan politics merely because of their biography seems absurd. There are any number of 9/11 widows. A few are big George W. Bush supporters, many are apolitical. I was honoured to receive an email the other day from Deena Gilbey, a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center and remained in the building to help evacuate his colleagues. A few days later, U.S. Immigration sent Mrs. Gilbey a letter informing her that, as she was now a widow, her residence status had changed and they were enclosing a deportation order. Having legally admitted to the country the men who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act after having enabled his murder is to further traumatize the bereaved.

The heartless brain-dead bonehead penpusher who sent out that letter is far more "mean-spirited" than Miss Coulter at full throttle. Yet Mrs. Gilbey isn't courted by the TV bookers the way the Jersey Girls are. Hundreds of soldiers' moms believe their sons died in a noble and just cause in Iraq, but it's Cindy Sheehan, who calls Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world," who gets speaking engagements across America, Canada, Britain, Europe and Australia. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisy cutters, the media don't go to Paul Bigley, who rejoiced that the man who decapitated his brother would now "rot in hell," nor the splendid Aussie Douglas Wood, who called his kidnappers "arseholes," nor his fellow hostage Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who's invested 50,000 bucks or so in trying to track down the men who kidnapped him and visit a little reciprocal justice on them. No, instead, the media rush to get the reaction of Michael Berg, who thinks Bush is "the real terrorist" rather than the man who beheaded his son.

But it wasn't until Ann Coulter pointed it out that you realize how heavily the Democratic party is invested in irreproachable biography. For example, John Kerry's pretzel-twist of a war straddle in the 2004 campaign relied mainly on former senator Max Cleland, a triple amputee from a Vietnam grenade accident whom the campaign dispatched to stake out Bush's Crawford ranch that summer. Maybe he's still down there. It's gotten kinda crowded on the perimeter since then, what with Cindy Sheehan et al. But the idea is that you can't attack what Max Cleland says about war because, after all, you've got most of your arms and legs and he hasn't. This would normally be regarded as the unworthy tactic of snake-oil-peddling shyster evangelists and, indeed, the Dems eventually scored their perfect Elmer Gantry moment. In 2004, in the gym of Newton High School in Iowa, Senator John Edwards skipped the dreary Kerry-as-foreign-policy-genius pitch and cut straight to the Second Coming. "We will stop juvenile diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other debilitating diseases . . . When John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again." Mr. Reeve had died the previous weekend, but he wouldn't have had Kerry and Edwards been in the White House. Read his lips: no new crutches. The healing balm of the Massachusetts Messiah will bring the crippled and stricken to their feet, which is more than Kerry's speeches ever do for the able-bodied. As the author remarks, "If one wanted to cure the lame, one could reasonably start with John Edwards."

"What crackpot argument can't be immunized by the Left's invocation of infallibility based on personal experience?" wonders Miss Coulter of Cleland, Sheehan, the Jersey Girls and Co. "If these Democrat human shields have a point worth making, how about allowing it to be made by someone we're allowed to respond to?"

Now that's a point worth making. As it is, thanks to Coulter cracks like "Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy," even chaps on the right are doing the more-in-sorrow shtick and saying that they've been making the same basic argument as Ann and it's such a shame she had to go too far with her cheap shots because that's discredited the entire argument, etc.

The trouble with this line is that hardly anyone was objecting to the professional widow routine pre-Coulter. Well, that's not strictly true. Yours truly objected. After the Zacarias Moussaoui trial, I wrote:

"The first reaction of the news shows to the verdict was to book some relative of the 9/11 families and ask whether they were satisfied with the result, as if the prosecution of the war on terror is some kind of national-security Megan's Law on which they have inviolable proprietorial rights. Sorry, but that's not what happened that Tuesday morning. The thousands who died were not targeted as individuals: they were killed because they were American, not because somebody in a cave far away decided to murder Mrs. Smith. . . It's not about 'closure' for the victims; it's about victory for the nation."

But nobody paid the slightest heed to this line. For all the impact my column had, I might as well have done house calls. Then Coulter comes in and yuks it up with the Playboy-spread gags, and suddenly the Jersey Girls only want to do the super-extra-fluffy puffball interviews. So two paragraphs in Ann Coulter's book have succeeded in repositioning these ladies: they may still be effective Democrat hackettes, but I think TV shows will have a harder time passing them off as non-partisan representatives of the 9/11 dead.

So, on balance, hooray for Miss Coulter. If I were to go all sanctimonious and priggish, I might add that, in rendering their "human shield" strategy more problematic, she may be doing Democrats a favour. There's no evidence the American people fall for this shtick: in 2002, the party's star Senate candidates all ran on biography -- Max Cleland, Jean Carnahan (the widow of a deceased governor), and Walter Mondale (the old lion pressed into service after Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash). All lost. Using "messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to" doesn't solve the Democrats' biggest problem: their message. The Dems, says the author, have "become the 'Lifetime' TV network of political parties." But, except within the Democrat-media self-reinforcing cocoon, it's not that popular. A political party with a statistically improbable reliance on the bereaved shouldn't be surprised that it spends a lot of time in mourning -- especially on Wednesday mornings every other November.

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[Victoria Delsoul]

Bumpity bump.

Hey Ron,

I just talked to Saber on the phone. He said he saw you last Wednesday at NBC studios.

He said hi.

[Victoria Delsoul]

The media folks are obviously completely freaked out by her, which is a good thing in my mind.

And I loooooove it! LOL.

[ChessExpert]

Here’s another CoulterQuote from the book that people can get upset about. Don’t miss the double-entedre:

“When our troops came under a bloody attack in Somalia in 1993, President Clinton ordered a humiliating retreat - on the advice of John Murtha. ... perhaps out of force of habit, Clinton pulled out before finishing.”

Let me guess: Oh, how offensive! I’m shocked! Ann’s writing is counterproductive. Blah, blah, blah. Some won’t pass up the opportunity to be moderate and priggish all at the same time.

My advice is to read the book. I think it’s great: wise, witty, and courageous.

[RonDog]

I just talked to Saber on the phone. He said he saw you last Wednesday at NBC studios.

LOL! You bet!

He wasn't even on my "super secret" COMMANDO list for that FReep...

...he just showed up at EXACTLY the right time, and EXACTLY the right place to be able to join us.

Great minds think alike!

We recognized each other from an OFFLINE meeting -- a few years ago, at a Michelle Malkin booksigning.

So what are you doing talking to someone from the Dark Side, anyway?

[Victoria Delsoul]

As far as I am concerned, he ain't dead - he's alive and well - you know what they say about cats, lol.

Hey, I gotta run. I need to finish stuff for tomorrow's class.

Nighty night, Ron. :-)

[RonDog]

:o)

[finnigan2]

MacLeans likes to think of itself as Canada's answer to Time magazine - right down to the layout and left wing slant on politics. They hired Steyn because he's the best word-smith in the business, but they gave him the role of doing book reviews where I guess they thought they could get his writing ability without putting up with any of his right wing crap.
Well, guess what. Steyn has turned his book reviews into a thinly disguised political commentary column and MacLeans must be pulling their hair out.
As Humphrey Bogart once said about negotiating with movie moguls; "it's important that you have f--- you, money."
Steyn has lots of f--- you money and he's letting MacLeans know.
I give Steyn about six months before they fire him.

[DCPatriot]

I wish he had the energy to be a radio or cable host.

[King Prout]

You have the right to be wrong, so carry on.

I also have the right to be factually correct, as I am in this case and intend to remain.

to you and all the other idolatrous Ann-droids out there:

How about you concretely define the number of examples of error found in chapters 8-11 you require, and what degree of refutation you desire for each, that will coerce you to admit that Ann Coulter, on this topic, does indeed consistently display bogus citations, factual and analytic error, and ludicrously false/distorted presentations throughout her diatribe against evolutionary science?

ADDITIONALLY:
How about you pledge your honor and word here and now to abide by your stated requirements (once you pony them up) and swear to publicly admit that you are in error and Ann is, on science, a talentless hack?

[Jerez2]

Wow. I am in awe. What a great pair to have on OUR side.
BTTT!
Again!!!!!

[TexasBeth]

I sure don't, but she does have some wonderful art on her page.

[pissant]

Ann bitch slapped Hillary into next week. That one stung.

[pissant]

My wife wants to read the book now, since I was constantly laughing out loud while reading it.

[pissant]

And he tweaks his priggish buddy, Hugh Hewitt, with this article. Which I think well deserved (though I Like Hugh)

[AnnaZ]

Definitely let her read it. And then hand over all the other ones. This woman is a bestseller for good reason.

Slander at times almost made me cry (the left is truly cruel), but then I'd be howling at her denunciations of their behavior. Coulter is brilliant.

[proudpapa]

ROFLMAO:

When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisy cutters...

[soccermom]

LOL! Uhhhhhh.... Did you read the last paragraph of his editorial? For all his blather which, incidentally is no different from what all those in "the Coult" have been saying, he finally admits my point. The "strategerie" never worked in the first place! Got it????? The voters never have fallen for the "victim" stunt. He noted Ann is inadvertently doing Democrats a favor. The American people were onto them all the time. Ann didn't "expose" anything. It seems that is what I was saying!
As for Steyn's claim that no one else was pointing this out before Ann, I suppose I dreamed up the exchange between O'Reilly and Letterman. O'Reilly was able to call Sheehan for what she was, without attacking her and he didn't back down from Letterman when Letterman tried the "how dare you say that" tactic. Also, as I mentioned in the other thread, Rush Limbaugh was a pioneer in exposing this "strategerie" with the Ron Brown Funeral video clip.

[youngjim]

For all his blather which, incidentally is no different from what all those in "the Coult" have been saying, he finally admits my point. The "strategerie" never worked in the first place! Got it????? The voters never have fallen for the "victim" stunt. He noted Ann is inadvertently doing Democrats a favor. The American people were onto them all the time. Ann didn't "expose" anything. It seems that is what I was saying! --soccermom

So, on balance, hooray for Miss Coulter. If I were to go all sanctimonious and priggish, I might add that, in rendering their "human shield" strategy more problematic, she may be doing Democrats a favour. --Mark Steyn

Well, we can all agree here that you are indeed a sanctimonious prig.

[pgyanke]

How about you concretely define the number of examples of error found in chapters 8-11 you require, and what degree of refutation you desire for each, that will coerce you to admit that Ann Coulter, on this topic, does indeed consistently display bogus citations, factual and analytic error, and ludicrously false/distorted presentations throughout her diatribe against evolutionary science?

I looked and looked but couldn't see anything concrete yet in all of your protestations about Ann... this one included.

Here's a hint: rather than dancing around telling us how much smarter you are than Ann Coulter, why don't you actually cite something... just one thing! I've been waiting all through this thread for you to get specific and nothing so far has been more specific than she "consistently display[s] bogus citations" [NAME ONE], she commits "factual and analytic error" [NAME ONE], and provides a "ludicrously false/distorted presentation" [DUH... IT'S HER BOOK. GO WRITE YOUR OWN IF YOU WANT TO PRESENT ALL SIDES OF EVERY ARGUMENT. OTHERWISE, SHOW WHERE SHE'S FALSE.].

So. Put up or shut up... pick something she is wrong about and show us just how wrong she is. I'll check back from time to time to see about your progress...

[jellybean]

not that any Ann-droids...

Love it!! Thanks!