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To: Kitten Festival
I agree with Dunn. Here's what I posted on another thread earlier this week:

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.


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";

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 | #


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.
255 posted on 06/15/2006 6:14:41 PM PDT by L.N. Smithee (New popular baby names for daughters of liberals: Fallujah, Haditha, Murtha)
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To: L.N. Smithee

Just out of curiosity did you like South Park or Team America?


330 posted on 06/19/2006 12:33:55 PM PDT by Steve Van Doorn (*in my best Eric cartman voice* “I love you guys”)
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