Ann Coulter: 'Will of Allah' pre-empts Iraq invasion

I knew the media were up to something with their wall-to-wall coverage of the Columbia space shuttle explosion. The full story is: Shuttle disintegrated during re-entry; all astronauts killed, including some very remarkable people; very sad; NASA picking up the debris to figure out what happened. It was a plane crash story, only a lot more expensive. So why was the shuttle explosion being covered like the 9-11 terrorist attack?

A quick review of the Treason Times laid bare the objective. Monday's New York Times proclaimed: "As Iraq War Looms, a New Sense of Vulnerability." American hubris blunted again! The article went on to quote a series of random Americans saying things like, "Now I'm hearing a lot of people say if we go to war, we're going to endanger a lot more than seven lives." Another classic Times' Man on the Street said that it "reinforces my belief that we should find diplomatic solutions instead of threatening other countries with war."

The Times' Man on the Street always seems to be standing on a street suspiciously close to Central Park West. For one year, I don't believe the Times has managed to interview a single person who supports war with Iraq in a nation ablaze with war fever.

And now the shuttle had presented a new argument for appeasement. Warning, Great Satan: Your money and technology and little gadgets cannot insulate you from disaster! Breathless news accounts of the shuttle blast were merely a more demure version of Islamic terrorists cheering in the street in reaction to the explosion. If it didn't violate the "wall of separation," the Times likely would be exclaiming: "It was the will of Allah!"

The Gettysburg Address of liberal idiocy was a letter to the editor from a Jim Forbes of San Francisco two days after the crash. The Times titled his contribution to Liberalthink: "A Time of Mourning for Shattered Dreams: A Period of Healing." In full-dress sanctimony, Forbes wrote: "The loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven is a national tragedy. Time is needed for Americans to mourn. I hope that President Bush will do the right thing by slowing down his march to war and focusing instead on the healing that such a blow to national pride requires."

Here was the pithiest concentration of the multiple idiotic things liberals were saying about the space shuttle, the insincerity, the audacity, the smarminess – he even worked in "the healing process." How he must have polished that little gem! The idea that liberals feel the shuttle explosion was a tragedy is patent nonsense. They were jumping for joy at this new excuse to denounce the "march to war." The nation is marching to war at such breakneck speed, it will be two years from 9-11 before we attack.

Melancholy that their relentless nay-saying is having no effect on the president's plans for Iraq, New York Times columnists are now positing imaginary scenarios in which war with Iraq leads to a stock market crash and brings the nation to the brink of nuclear war. Nicholas Kristof has gone the Maureen Dowd route of using the op-ed page of the Times for a dream-sequence column. But instead of dreaming about Bush being retarded, Kristof dreams of catastrophe for America.

Kristof fantasized that, within the year, the North Koreans would be running riot through the Far East with their nukes. The column concluded with Bush apologizing to Secretary of State Colin Powell for invading Iraq. The strain of not having a Democrat in the Oval Office to create foreign policy disasters on his own is driving liberals to fevered fantasies of America's defeat someplace in the world.

In other appeasement news, former U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter has completely vanished from the anti-war scene since news of his sex arrest broke. Three weeks ago, it was revealed that Ritter was caught soliciting sex from underage girls on the Internet in 2001. Until news of his arrest broke, the New York Times had been treating Ritter's reincarnation as a peacenik as the greatest act of patriotism since Justice Souter voted to uphold abortion on demand. It's now Day 17 and counting of the Times' refusal to mention Ritter's arrest. Though the peace movement lost Ritter, it seems to have picked up Jerry Springer. Perhaps Springer is hoping he can get Scott Ritter's wife on the show to confront Ritter and the underage girl.

But Ritter was a free-lance peacenik. At least the Times could count on stability and permanence from John Hartpence Kerry. Poor Kerry was just on the verge of figuring out whether he was for war with Iraq or against war with Iraq when he was told he hadn't figured out his own last name. Kerry was shocked to be told that, despite years of allowing himself to be passed off as an Irish Brahmin, both his paternal grandparents were Jewish and his real name is Kohn. Upon reflection, however, Kerry said there were signs he missed, such as his longtime, recently requited desire to marry a rich shiksa. And now Kerry will need time for the healing process. We must halt the march to war.

Coulter writes about The Media as if it's one unified entity, an entity which also includes all liberal politicians. That's the only way I can think that she'd be connecting the New York Times with John Kerry.

She wasn't actually "connecting the New York Times with John Kerry", except in the puckish manner discussed below. You're straining for something that wasn't there.

Columnists don't have the luxury of being able to write individual columns for each item on which they want to comment, especially if the items deserve different amounts of treatment.

She wanted to comment on several topics, including the "how can we have a war, we're mourning" silliness, the NYT's avoidance of the Ritter arrests, and Kerry's sudden "discovery" of his Jewish roots to pander for votes. So she could either cover them as a mixed bag, which is extremely common for political columnists, or she could dump two of them and not talk about them at all, while expanding the remaining topic to a full column even if it would require fluff padding to fill the required space.

Obviously the former was a better choice than the latter.

Now there are two ways to handle a mixed bag column. The first is to draw horizontal lines between items to help the transition-impaired (or otherwise place some sort of "new topic alert" markers to aid the less adroit readers). The other is to just make the transition from one topic to another while writing and trust in the intelligence of one's audience to see a segue and understand that it is one.

Coulter's trademark method of doing this is the wry segue -- rather than just start a new topic de novo in an abrupt transition, she likes to tie obvious shifts of topic together with wisecracking remarks that highlight some sort of commonality between the topics, no matter how remote, in a conversational "oh, that reminds me" fashion. Besides being entertaining in its own right for both the writer and the reader (and the more remote, the funnier it is), it's also a good writer's device to keep the reader's attention from wandering or skipping to the next newspaper page, as would be invited by a more obvious "and now for something completely different" break. By the time the reader realizes they're starting a new topic, they're already partway into it.

This technique is even more powerful when trying to keep from getting interrupted (by the host, or another guest) during verbal debates or televised talking-head shows, where it's hard to regain the "floor" once you've lost it.

If you're misled by the headline, remember that columnists don't usually pick the headline, the "host" publication does. And even if the author chooses it, it's better to headline the primary topic in the piece than to try to list all mixed-bag topics in a short headline.

You say that she "needs a good editor", but it looks as if she's doing fine on her own on her compositional decisions.

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