Ann Coulter: Libertarians Are Pussies
Last night's episode of Stossel was filmed at the International Students for Liberty Conference, held last weekend in Washington, D.C.
It's a great show (and there's another episode to come that was also shot at the ISFLC), filled with genuinely interesting segments featuring Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), former Reason scribe Radley Balko (now at Huffington Post), and more (Gary Johnson, David Boaz, John Bolton, and Dennis Kucinich!). Watch more here.
The segment with Ann Coulter is above; click to watch. I enjoy Ann Coulter's rants, perhaps especially when she is trying to antagonize libertarians. In the above click, she does so most emphatically around the 1.55-minute mark, when she calls libertarians pussies (there's a long bleep there, thanks to the worrywarts at Fox Business). Oddly, La Coulter's slagging is occasioned not by libertarians' non-interventionist chops but by…our stance on the drug war.
"Libertarians and pot!" says an exasperated Coulter. "This is why people think libertarians are pussies. We're living in a country that is 70 percent socialist. The government is taking 60 percent of your money. They're taking care of your health care, of your pensions, they're telling you who you can hire, what the regulations are gonna be…and you want to suck to your little liberal friends and say, 'Oh, we want to legalize pot. You know, if you were a little more manly, you'd tell the liberals what your position on employment discrimination is."
Coulter has a long history of impugning the manhood of real and imagined ideological opponents. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, National Review stopped carrying her column after she advocated the deportation of all Arabic aliens in America and more; she responded by calling the NRO crew "girly-boys."
It may not have the rhetorical power of "I'm Spartacus!" but I'm happy to declare "I'm a pussy!" That is, if being in favor of pot legalization, a restrained foreign policy, marriage equality, non-mandatory health care, voluntary association in the workplace, open borders, and other libertarian positions means being a pussy.
And you, gentle readers of whatever sex and whatever disposition: Are you pussies, too? Here's hoping.
Related: Last year, I debated Coulter at a dinner hosted by Colorado's great Independence Institute. Transcript here (also includes Matt Welch chewing the rag with Jonah Goldberg at an AEI forum).
