Posted on 06/15/2006 10:12:05 AM PDT by Kitten Festival
Let me ask you this: when, prior to last week, was the last time you heard of the Jersey Girls? I can’t give a definite answer, which in itself is telling. Not that I was paying any large amount of attention, but there was a lot of noise in between the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, intense media play building up to the 2004 election, which they did their damndest to throw to Kerry, and then… nothing.
They’d shot their bolt, they had their fifteen minutes and more, and that was the end of it. Until last week when Ann Coulter, acting unilaterally, put them back on the front pages with an attack so obnoxious that it immediately (and unjustly – it was the Girls themselves, after all, who debased their victim status for political purposes) threw all sympathy in their direction. A free ticket to a second act. Not to mention providing Madame Hillary with an opportunity to pose as, of all things, the defender of civility.
Thanks a lot, Ann.
Conservatives used to be known for this kind of thing. Much of this was the media’s doing – at any conservative gathering, be it a gun show or a political convention, reporters will make a beeline for the guy in full camo gear or wearing two dozen anti-UN buttons. But conservatives played their part.
The classic figure here is Coulter’s idol, Joe McCarthy. Bellowing about Communists you couldn’t produce (and it cannot be repeated often enough that McCarthy bagged nobody – the Party infiltrators had been cleaned out by the time he showed up) was bad enough. Doing it in an ill-cut Chicago gangland suit with a five-o’clock shadow and fifth of Jim Beam under your belt simply turned it into a circus.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I am coining a new catchword based on this article.
"Conservopussy" - A Conservative who is afraid to attack Liberals on the basis that Liberals might find something in the attack to complain about.
My nomination for post of the year.
Thanks,
OLA
Don't blame Coulter if you didn't catch her meaning. You want to be niggardly with those kinds of assumptions.
I don't know about "undoing." Another way to look at it is that she just ran her course. Reaching the end of a natural media life cycle.
Note also, the number of readers it takes to reach #1 on the bestseller lists is relatively small in modern media terms. Figure low six figures. So that's about 1/50th of the people who watch morning network television shows. Less than the number of people who watch re-runs of the Simpson's.
Worse, telling hillary to 'have a chat with her husband' about the Broaddrick rape, as Ann did, perpetuates the myth of missus clinton's 'victimhood' (even as it all but renders inert Coulter's courageous act of focusing the world's attention on the rape). This is precisely what we do NOT want to do: Victimhood is what makes missus clinton electable. Coulter should have focused instead on missus clinton's culpability in the rapes and predations. see: Sorry to say, Ann Coulter's tactical thinking is as questionable as her taste. |
You wrote, "...Says all I need to know about you."
Sour grapes, sport. Next time, don't enter a battle of wits unarmed.
Ann Coulter's words are strong. She makes her points, sometimes with a dry sarcasm or bluntness that others don't like. But she's one of the few that will stand up to the left without retreating into the PC mode that is so common among a good portion of Republicans these days. And frankly, her writings are mild compared to my thoughts concerning liberals these days.
I really don't care if some dislike her style, but trying to force distance between conservatism and Ann Coulter is a decidedly cowardly political move. PC is a compromise that is too large to accept. We need 10 more Ann Coulters IMHO.
She's writing about politics. The idea behind American politics isn't about weeding out the wishy-washy or the non-true believers. The one over-riding concept is to get as many votes as you possibly can so your guy/gal wins the election.
If Coulter is held up as a test to weed out the fence sitters or alienates moderates then she's doing conservatives harm by sending votes to the other side.
Just out of curiousity...
When you were a naval aviator, did you find jokes about "fraggings" (or whatever the naval equivalent would be) to be funny?
Do you actually think the public feels obligated to consider some subtle secondary definition of the word "enjoy" in order to justify Ann Coulter's statement?
You're kidding right?
Let's get real here.
When you make a public statement, you should think ahead as to what the general public interpretation of it will be.
It's really futile to now say you meant "enjoy" in a way hardly anyone uses it. Not to mention stupid.
Such as the boys at NRO. They are green with envy at the attention that Coulter is getting.
Just to show I am an equal opportunity critic, here's what I posted on the Raw Story forum about a Kerry spokesman calling Karl Rove "porcine";
I am sorry, folks. I agree with Coulter's substance 85% of the time, but I can't agree that there is a net gain in the way she deliberately taunts to draw leftist fire to demonstrate how easy it is to make them violate their own principles.Take her Jersey Girls statement in the book. I was in a bookstore yesterday and read it in context, and Matt Lauer did a serviceable job blowing it out of proportion. Coulter's remark about the JG's 'enjoying' their husbands deaths was part of a much larger point. She spent several pages discussing the kid glove treatment of the likes of 9/11 widow Kristin Breitweiser -- who blamed Bush Administration figures for the deaths of that day repeatedly to the exclusion of the terrorists -- as opposed to Debra Burlingame, who also organized surviving family members for media fights, but was marginalized and insulted by the New York Times editorial page when she fiercely fought against the placing of a pan-cultural Blame America First museum on the Ground Zero grave of her husband.
There is no doubt that Coulter has a valid point: There is a liberal tendency to send authentically tragic but self-serving, intellectually dishonest spokespersons like Breitweiser, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Berg out before cameras and microphones, hoping they will inspire in fence-sitting observers their same distrust of everyone and everything right of center. But Dorothy Rabinowitz, an excellent Wall Street Journal writer who [in years previous] broke the major print media embargo on Juanita Broaddrick's allegation of rape against Bill Clinton, wrote a lengthy treatise on the Jersey Girls that made the same point, but didn't come close to suggesting that they were somehow delighted they had traded their spouses for celebrity.
Rabinowitz, however, wasn't invited on Today or put on the cover of Time. Why not? IMHO, because the left-leaners who run those outlets didn't see any benefit in promoting someone whose opposing view did nothing but make sense. No, they needed someone who would be seen not as a counterbalance, but as an wild-eyed, scattershot display of the reasons why nobody but they in the MSM should be taken seriously. Enter Ann.
Haven't some of you Coulter Cheerleaders wondered why she gets more ink and face time than conservative females like Mona Charen, a pre-Reagan revolution columnist whose book Useful Idiots was everything Treason should have been, or Laura Ingraham, former CBS News reporter and nationally syndicated talk show host? I believe it is because Coulter can be counted on to deliver a foot in the mouth spew that makes the less attentive say, "If you have to be that cruel/silly/tactless to be a conservative, I don't want to be one."
I speak from experience regarding that idea. Before the age of Rush, the only guys I read, heard or saw representing conservatism on a regular basis were the caustic columnist Jeffrey White, John Lofton, and Wally George/Morton Downey Jr. (same act, different coasts). Eventually, the more I learned, the more rightward I drifted -- no thanks to those guys.
For that comment, I was called a "paid c*nt" by the next liberal poster. I am flattered he thinks I am a professional writer.
Well, isn't this amusing? All the people who are slamming Ann Coulter for her rude remarks about a few 9/11 widows (not ALL, as some Democrats and editorialists would have you believe) have revealed themselves to be just as rude...and foolish.Coulter is dead right about the so-called Jersey Girls, Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, et al and the way they were promoted in the MSM as bulletproof critics of the right. But Coulter seems to think that she shouldn't just state facts; she also needs to piss off as many opponents as possible. To many of us who concur in principle with Coulter's opinions, her brashness is counterproductive, because what what remains after hearing or reading Coulter is her fury, and not her substance. Fury may sell books for Ann; it doesn't do much for those of us in her wake, who must qualify our agreement with her underlying points by saying we won't go as far as she does.
So now David Wade, Kerry flack, couldn't counter Rove's remarks about Democrats cutting and running without getting in a dig at his weight. Jeez Louise, Rove "porcine?" One wonders what a guy who works for the junior senator in Massachusetts thinks of the Commonwealth's senior senator, Ted Kennedy, whose physical largesse is only exceeded by his monetary largesse.
Don't you see what's happened here? Look at the headline of this piece. What's the point? That non-veteran Rove has no business calling out the likes of medal-winners Murtha and Kerry? Nope, it's that Mr. Kerry spokesmouth called Karl Rove a porker (not to mention the sour grape-flavored "cellmates" remark). By inflaming his rhetoric too much, the main point has been lost.
Some of you applaud this, and seem to think that this is the path to victory for the Democrats; that personal insults and profane rants create the passion necessary to get the vote out. Think again. As Ann Coulter knows, that's a great strategy for topping the NYT bestseller list. As Karl Rove knows, it's a lousy strategy for winning elections.
L.N. Smithee | Homepage | 06.14.06 - 7:24 am | #
Causing more harm than good? NO WAY! The writter did not see her on the Tonight Show last night. Mostly cheers - and her book is #1 on the New York Times.
Liberals are so focused on her comments on the Jersey Girls (which is a tiny portion of one chapter) that they are completly ignoring the title and premise of the book, in that they are GODLESS, and that Liberalizm is their religion. By not condeming the title, I assume they must believe it true.
Competition. Competitive spirit.
It oozes from your posts.
That's cool.
You be all you can be.
How about she looks like a strumpet
I took strumpet lessons when I was young...
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