Preface: I thought and still think that the funniest movie I've ever seen was Parker and Stone's Team America World Police, which is one of the most subversive films ever made. Some of the funniest scenes in it are the merciless parodies of self-important Hollywood celebrities who are, in this film, members of the so-called Film Actors Guild, whose name in several scenes is captioned below the celebs in abbreviated form: "Sean Penn, FAG." etc. And the audience in the theater roars with laughter, and I have to admit that laughed too.
I don't believe in giving mystical, incantatory powers to ANY word, whether this one or the n-word or any other. In a society that has largely rejected religious traditions, offensive terms have become a sort of holy-of-holies that we react to the same way that the Ayatollah reacted to The Satanic Verses. And I won't do it, I won't participate in the Two Minutes Hate.
That said, I think that that Team America thing was the sort of sensibility AC was trying for in that speech; she was trying to be all edgy and hip and South-Park-Republican.
The problem for her is that you can't be both an insider and an outsider at the same time. You can't speak at the same dais with serious political figures and talk like that. You can't talk like that and expect to hobnob with people who want to get elected.
It's particularly bad on the Right, because as Michelle says here, a lot of social conservatives who may be anti-gay-rights still don't like to hear people, especially women, use bad language.
Anyway, she's badly hurt her career with this. She is now Kryptonite for her preferred political constituency. To talk like that in that forum was inexcusably rude, and she's earned her current professional stuffstorm.
I doubt it. Anyone who knows Ann Coulter knows what to expect, and that's what we love her for--the red meat. We don't ask our candidates to do that-- she's our designated hitter and she has a great slugging percentage. Opposing pitchers hate her but so what.
I went to her website last night to try to order one of her autographed books. I got to the home page OK but couldn't get onto the page to order her books, traffic was too heavy.
The problem for her is that you can't be both an insider and an outsider at the same time. You can't speak at the same dais with serious political figures and talk like that. You can't talk like that and expect to hobnob with people who want to get elected.
&&
I think that yours is the best analysis I have seen here. Coulter got a lot of attention for this and, thereby, drew a lot of attention away from the legitimate candidates and ideas.
And she probably could have gotten away with the whole thing if she had used another word, e.g., "metrosexual" or "girly-man".
I suspect that Coulter really does not care about the end result and just loves all of the publicity.