Bipartistan Coulterism

Who's meaner, conservatives or liberals?

Cathy Young from the October 2003 issue

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More recently, after the Supreme Court ruling upholding affirmative action, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said this about Clarence Thomas' dissenting opinion: "The dissent is a clinical study of a man who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received." Thomas, of course, has been the target of exceptionally nasty rhetoric from his critics; in 1994, on the PBS show To the Contrary, Julianne Malveaux remarked, "I hope that his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease."

When it comes to mean-spirited rhetoric, both left and right are better at seeing the speck in the other's eye than the log in their own. This sets off a vicious cycle, in which each side feels justified in hurling vicious slurs because the other camp is even worse.

In a recent, cautious critique of Coulter, conservative writer David Horowitz declared that he enjoyed her attacks on liberals because he felt they were well-deserved: "No one wields the verbal knife more ruthlessly than so-called liberal pundits like Joe Conason, to cite but one example....If people Joe Conason admired were the objects of acid Coulterisms, so much the better." A 2002 Wall Street Journal piece lauded Coulter as the right's answer to Lenny Bruce, Louis Farrakhan, and Angela Davis. Meanwhile, liberals talk about the need to develop programming to counter invective-filled right-wing talk radio.

This endless shouting match -- "You're mean!" "No, you're mean! And since you're being mean we'll be even meaner!" -- can be entertaining at times. But it drowns out serious arguments.