Call her Mrs. (Phyllis Schlafly) ~ Ann Coulter

EVEN TAKING INTO account the extraordinary capacity of the left for hallucinatory self-aggrandizement, the insipid blather about the feminists and the total radio silence on Phyllis Schlafly is astonishing.

The elite media cast about for women to praise, hailing any female who has achieved the amazing feat of having passed the bar exam, but treat the stunning accomplishments of Phyllis Schlafly like the publisher of the New York Times treats his SAT scores. (It is a dark secret that must not be revealed.) Schlafly simply cannot be mentioned – except for the occasional demeaning caricature.

About the time a young Hillary Rodham was serving as inspiration for the perfect little girl in the Hollywood thriller "The Bad Seed," Schlafly was remaking the Republican Party.

In 1964, Schlafly wrote "A Choice, Not An Echo," widely credited with winning Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for president. The book sold an astounding 3 million copies. (The average nonfiction book sells 5,000 copies.) Goldwater lost badly in the general election, but the Republican Party would never be the same.

Goldwater's nomination began the retreat of sellout, Northeastern Rockefeller Republicans who hoped to wreck the country with slightly less alacrity than the Democrats. Without Schlafly, without that book, it is very possible that Ronald Reagan would never have been elected president.

As the feminists spent 20 years engaged in a death-match debate over whether it is acceptable for feminists to wear lipstick, Schlafly was writing 10 books, most of them on military policy.

She co-authored "The Gravediggers," accusing the elite foreign-policy establishment of cheerfully selling out the nation's military superiority to the Soviet Union. That book sold 2 million copies. She also co-authored the extremely influential (and extremely long, at more than 800 pages) "Kissinger on the Couch," methodically dissecting Kissinger's foreign policy and attacking his beloved Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty.

Meanwhile, the feminists moved on from the weighty lipstick debate to pornography. (As Irving Kristol has suggested, their primary area of agreement was that 18-year-old girls performing sex on stage should be paid the minimum wage.)

An early and vigorous proponent of a missile defense shield, Schlafly has written extensively about ICBMs and missile-defense treaties. Her work was a major factor in President Reagan's decision to proceed with the High Frontier technology.

Having reached agreement on the necessity of a minimum wage for prostitutes (oops "sex workers"), feminists turned their inexplicable wrath on the titles "Mrs." and "Miss."

About the same time, Schlafly noticed that the Equal Rights Amendment was sailing toward ratification without anyone noticing. When Schlafly took up her battle against the ERA, the Senate had passed it by 84 to 8. The House had passed it by 354 to 23. The ERA was written in to both the Republican and Democratic Party platforms. Thirty states had approved it in the first year after it was sent to the states for ratification. Only eight more states were needed.

But the ERA had not yet faced Phyllis Schlafly. Over the next eight years, thanks to Schlafly and her Eagle Forum, only five states ratified it – but five other states rescinded their earlier ratifications.

What the feminists lacked in linear thinking, they made up for in viciousness, control of the media and Hollywood glitz. As Schlafly said, feminists had "the movie star money and we have the voters." With an army of women behind her, Schlafly defeated the ERA, beating both political parties, two presidents, the Senate, the House and a slew of Hollywood celebrities.

Soon feminists took up the issue of girl-firemen, demanding to know what possible arguments there were, pray tell, for women not to be firemen. (A short list: their inability to pick up the hose, their tendency to cry and panic when confronted with dangerous situations, the effect on families whose homes are on fire when they open the door and see the female equivalent of Michael Dukakis in a tank.)

Schlafly moved on to ludicrous United Nations treaties, the Violence Against Women Act, sexual harassment law, values-clarification programs and other monstrosities too numerous to catalog. People who dismiss her as a mere demagogue or rabble-rouser either don't read her work or don't have any idea what actual "scholarship" is.

She was nearly the first woman ever to attend Harvard Law School – though it did not then admit women, Schlafly's Harvard professors found her so brilliant that they offered to make an exception for her. (She declined.) Instead, she married, raised six amazingly accomplished children and later attended law school in her 50s – all while fighting the establishment in her free time. She is brilliant, beautiful, principled, articulate, tireless and, most important, absolutely fearless.

That Phyllis Schlafly is the mortal enemy of a movement that claims to promote women tells you all you need to know about the feminists. That most people know more about Madeleine Albright's brooch collection than Schlafly's achievements tells you all you need to know about the media.

I'm trying to recall Ann's list of accomplishments before being noticed as "ta daaaaaaa" - a blonde.
If you are in fact serious, HERE is a good place to start, from http://www.anncoulter.org/bio.html:

ANN COULTER
Ann Coulter is a lawyer and author of the New York Times best seller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. Her most recent book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, is a number one New York Times Best-Seller.
Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including Politically Incorrect, Larry King Live, Hannity and Colmes, The O'Reilly Factor, American Morning With Paula Zahn,
Crossfire, ABC’s “This Week,” Good Morning America, the Leeza Show, and has been profiled in TV Guide, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and George Magazine. She was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001.
Coulter clerked for the Honorable Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and was an attorney in the Department of Justice Honors Program for outstanding law school graduates.
After practicing law in private practice in New York City, Coulter worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan. From there, she became a litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, a public interest law firm dedicated to the defense of individual rights with particular emphasis on freedom of speech, civil rights, and the free exercise of religion.
A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.

She is neither beautiful, principled or articulate.
Besides being an anorexic opportunist, her rhetoric is loaded with hyperbole - and judgin by her live appearances, she actually believes her own crap.
She'd been annoying for years, but she finally slipped over the edge with me when she mocked Mineta's experience in the internment camps as a child, and called it no big deal.
Agree or disagree with the man's methods, being locked into something akin to prison as a 10 year old, and knowing your family lost all assets just because of your racial background is a horrific experience, and will affect you the rest of your life. For her to say it was no big deal indicates a fundamental lack of character, integrity and compassion.
For the record, here is Ann's attack on Mineta - posted in its entirety - from http://www.anncoulter.org/columns/2002/022802.htm:

Mineta's Bataan Death March

February 28, 2002
According to initial buoyant reports in early February, enraged travelers rose up in a savage attack on the secretary of transportation. Hope was dashed when later reports indicated that the irritated travelers were actually rival warlords, the airport was the Kabul Airport, and Norman Mineta was still with us.
Thanks to the hard work of the Department of Transportation, which had already arrogated to itself responsibility for commercial air safety, 19 Muslim terrorists had absolutely no difficulty in turning four planes into cruise missiles almost simultaneously on Sept. 11, resulting in the death of thousands of Americans.
Outside of government work, that's known as a "failure." But in the government, it is grounds for greater responsibility. In its wisdom, Congress turned over yet more power to the Department of Transportation: Nice work – what else can you do for us?
Almost instantly, dreary, wrathful federal bureaucrats conceived of methods to make air travel still worse. Even those of us who burn with an all-consuming hatred for federal bureaucracies had to tip our hats.
First, the government prohibited airport screeners from looking for terrorists. Second, the government scrapped airline pricing systems that allow passengers to pay $2,000 to avoid 50-minute lines. Just like in the Soviet Union of beloved memory, "equality" was the important thing. (Except government officials like Cabinet official Tommy Thompson, who skip the airport lines.) We'll all die, but at least we'll all die together.
The only bright side is that in the government's obsessive drive for "equality," perhaps airport security guards will be forced to start searching Arabs now, too.
Ethnic profiling is the only reasonable security measure that has been thwarted in the war on terrorism. Every other anti-American, left-wing attack on the war has failed miserably. Liberals denounced military tribunals, FBI interviews with Arab student visitors, the detention of terrorism suspects, monitoring conversations of jailed terrorists and the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo.
All to no avail – except ethnic profiling.
The whole country knows that goosing little old ladies boarding planes is not going to make us any safer. Even left-wing lawyer Floyd Abrams had the sense to say: "There's a big difference between being interned and being searched a little more at an airport." But we can't stop it. Transportation Secretary Mineta is angry and he wants America to suffer.
In early December, "60 Minutes" host Steve Kroft interviewed Mineta about his dogged refusal to permit an extra check of people who look like the next and last 50 terrorists.
Kroft noted that of 22 people on the most-wanted list right now: "[A]ll but one of them has complexion listed as olive. They all have dark hair and brown eyes. And more than half of them have the name Mohammed." (They are also all males in their 20s and 30s.) Thus, he asked Mineta if such people should be subjected to a little extra scrutiny. "No," Mineta responded, "not just on that basis alone."
Other more important factors, Mineta explained, included asking "things like, 'Did you pay cash for this ticket or charge it on a credit card? Do you have a one-way ticket or a round-trip?'"
Inasmuch as this was Steve Kroft and not Diane Sawyer conducting the interview, there was a relevant follow-up question: "Did the terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center have one-way tickets?" No, Mineta admitted, the Sept. 11 hijackers all had round-trip tickets they bought with credit cards.
Let the record reflect that among President George Bush's dazzling team of advisers, the only stink-bomb is the one Democratic holdover from the Clinton administration. It is absolutely contemptible that Bush will not rid us of this scourge.
It is safe to assume that it was not Mineta's stellar accomplishment of having sat on the House Public Works and Transportation Committee for 18 years that has led both Republican and Democratic presidents to seek his services so ardently. He is given plumb government jobs solely and exclusively because he is a minority.
But Secretary Mineta is burning with hatred for America. He has taken the occasion of the most devastating attack on U.S. soil to drone on about how his baseball bat was taken from him as a child headed to one of Franklin Roosevelt's Japanese internment camps.
As Mineta has endlessly recounted in interviews of late: "I remember on the 29th of May, 1942" – note that he remembers the day – "when we boarded the train in San Jose under armed guard, the military guard, I was in my Cub Scout uniform carrying a baseball, baseball glove and a baseball bat. And as I boarded the train, the MPs confiscated the bat on the basis it could be used as a lethal weapon."
Good God! A guard took Mineta's baseball bat as a child, and as a result he's subjecting all of America to the Bataan Death March! Someone please give him a baseball bat.

You are right about one thing: Her work is "loaded with hyperbole."

IMHO, that is a GOOD thing. :)

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