Ann Coulter is to political discourse and debate what Hall and Nash were to WCW in 1996. Now if you're not a wrestling geek, what that means is that Ann Coulter breaks all the pre-fabricated rules of what political discourse should be. Politics becomes ridiculous when you assign the characteristics of good and evil to public servants and talk show pundits, but it does make politics more interesting, that's for sure. Ann Coulter is the anti-hero in this over-the-top morality play we call American Democracy.
Ann Coulter just says and writes whatever she feels and isn't tremendously interested in whether or not it's politically correct or that someone's feelings might get hurt. In the long run, this is the sort of thing that takes reasonable debate and obliterates it. In the short run however, she's pretty damn funny and entertaining, kind of like wrestling was before WCW imploded.
Her newest book is a compilation of unreleased and rewritten/unedited columns. If you are new to the Coulter world, this tome is a great way of catching up on the last 5 years of her opinions, gripes and other musings. If you are an avid fan of Coulter this is still worth reading for the commentaries, new chapters and the unreleased columns that were turned down by the likes of Cigar Aficionado and Good Housekeeping among others.
The book is broken up in to several chapters. The first part, which is all new material and goes to the title of the book, is her suggestions for arguing with liberals. It's funny if you know not to take her too seriously. The assumption she is making is that all liberals are emotionally overwrought folks who can't handle civilized debate and have no logic to back up their points. One can only assume, since this is a collection of columns, she needed some new material to start with, a silly opening such as this works as well as anything else.
The second chapter deals with terrorism and 9/11. It contains the column, This is War! which was written on 9/12/01 and features the line most often associated with Coulter, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity." At this point a line like this should not shock anyone terribly when Ann Coulter is saying it. If you know who she is, you know what she stands for. To this day, she is still standing by this philosophy, "now more than ever." She's caustic and over the top, that's why she sells. If she were rational and thoughtful, she wouldn't be in the entertainment industry.
The rest of the book deals with airports post 9/11, the Democratic primary and the candidates therein, Hollywood celebrities, the liberal/progressive agenda, Elian Gonzalez and (oddly enough) a brief history of the Confederate Battle Flag.
There are however, large portions of this book dedicated to tearing apart the New York Times and the Clinton's. She writes several columns making the case that a left-wing bias is present in both the editorial pages as well as the hard news pages of the Time. She also spends at least half of the book dissecting the Clinton presidency. Two things you are reminded of when reading this book: Ann Coulter began her career as a lawyer and she hates Bill Clinton for what that's worth.
Overall, I enjoyed the book probably as much as those of you on the liberal side of the fence enjoyed Al Franken's book. However, Ann Coulter is not whom I go to for hard political analysis and neither should you. Coulter is someone you go to for fun and laughs that are slightly more above the level of dick and fart jokes. Like so many media distractions Ann Coulter is just a guilty pleasure to be enjoyed and not be treated as some general of hate mongers. She's just a columnist, not Joseph Goebbels.
2 comments:
You're right - at least Goebbels offers hindsight for where his ideology leads. Coulter at least has the benefit of just being a spouter of fascism and not yet a general of it.
I agree with your assessment of Coulter, although I might give her a little more credit than you do. I feel she is way above the level of "fart and dick jokes". I also love the 90's WCW reference. I was a wrasslin' geek, and loved the WCW. Nitro kicked Raw's ass!
It's also good, as you said, to see a fellow conservative. We are vastly outnumbered on here, it seems. Luckly, as this last election illustrated, we have a majority where it counts.
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