Posted on 07/01/2002 3:36:10 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON -- The first time someone described Ann Coulter as a "right-wing telebimbo," she was stunned and maybe a little hurt. But now she wears it as a badge of honor.
"As Mao said, "It's a good thing to be attacked by your enemy,' " she told me Friday in one of the many interviews she has been doing to promote her new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
As Coulter proved on NBC's Today show early last week, she will do or say just about anything to promote herself and her book -- even calling Katie Couric "the Eva Braun of liberalism." She says the only interview she has spurned lately was with radio shock jock Howard Stern.
Coulter is one of several attractive women lawyers on the far right and far left who have capitalized on cable television's need for talking heads of both genders and made careers for themselves as television pundits. The list includes conservatives Kellyanne Fitzpatrick Conway, a pollster; Laura Ingraham, a radio talk show host; and the late author Barbara Olson, as well as liberal Susan Estridge, who ran Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign.
Glib, outrageous and exceedingly contentious -- these are the trademarks of the women pundits who are savagely referred to as telebimbos or "fembots." With short skirts and plunging necklines, they seem to be trying to provoke a response with both argument and sexual tension.
A native of New Canaan, Conn., with a law degree from the University of Michigan, Coulter broke into television in 1996 as one of the first regular guests on MSNBC. At the time, she was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee for then Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan. Soon she was working full time as a pundit with a syndicated column and hefty lineup of regular television gigs.
As she tells it, fame was her destiny. "It was pure fate," she says. "I was just bumbling along practicing law. I never sought this for myself. . . . God just decided, we've got enough lawyers, you are supposed to be on TV."
God may have had a little help from Bill Clinton. Like many of the women of her ilk, Coulter emerged on a wave of Clinton hatred. She worked behind the scenes to assist Paula Jones in her legal harassment suit against Clinton and talked it up on television. Her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors, was a bestselling anti-Clinton screed.
Some say the heyday of Coulter-style women pundits passed with the end of the Clinton presidency. But Coulter has zeroed in on another topic that gets her just as riled up: liberals. She admits they may be a dying breed, but her harangue against them works perfectly on cable television, where the formula is to have a liberal and a conservative who insult each other.
Coulter's strongest argument is that liberals such as George Stephanopoulos and Couric are hired to present unbiased news on television, while conservatives like herself are relegated to the position of offering opinion. She also objects that liberals portray conservatives as dummies or Nazis.
So how does she prove her point? By calling Couric the Eva Braun of liberalism.
On CNN's Crossfire last week, conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, a handsome young man who comes as close as you can get to being the male counterpart of the fembots, took Coulter to task for using the very tactic against liberals that she condemns them for.
But Coulter knows better. "When conservatives use colorful language," she says, "it tends to be true."
As far as that "Plunging necklines" dig is concerned, I always say "you use what you've got handy!"
When Tucker interviewed Matt Drudge recently, Tucker was indistinguishable from a mendacious, "Liberal", propaganda "journalist". Drudge decimated him, but was a mini-replay of Drudge's stunning victory over the Washington Press Club with Carlson in the roll of "Mainstream 'Journalist'".
If we had a few politicans with her courage maybe we wouldn't have to be defending the Pledge right now.
I PRAY they are a dying breed.
Now, I'm a long time Ann fan -- but I remember when she restrained herself at least somewhat, and could not be accused of adopting the more deplorable tactics of her adversaries. Example: aside from the overt connection with Adolf Hitler, just what point did it make to call Katie Couric an "early-morning Eva Braun"? Further example: What point did it make, what gain to conservatism did it accrue, to call Gary Johnson, one of the Southwest's best respected governors -- and a Republican, at that -- "really stupid"?
For all of that, Slander is a good resource book, if you need a reference from which to provide evidence of the low quality of left-wing rhetoric, or the depths to which liberal point men will descend in contests with conservatives, regardless of the medium or level. It's also quite frequently very funny. Miss Coulter has the gift of sarcastic wit, and she pushes it to the limit in the book.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason: http://palaceofreason.com
Bump!
[Miss Anne] Coulter emerged on a wave of Clinton hatred.
Amazing how the universally-Psychopathological-Projection-Syndrome-suffering [Don't look it up in your DSM-IV -- I invented it!] libbbuurrrrlllls impugn those of US who despise the Ms and Mr Hitlery Rotten-KKKli'toons' "ideas" [Including the 222 million Americans who've never voted for either of them] with responsibility for the envy-motivated and rage-driven hatred that they all feel all of the time.
Let's see, A million.. that would marginally improve the odds of all conservative men of getting a date with her.. LOL
My mind can conceive of very few other statements ever made as asinine and blasphemous as this one.
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