High Noon for Coulter
Dorothy Rabinowitz is enough of an independent-minded thinker that I don't think her pan of Ann Coulter's Treason can be considered abandonment by the right. But it's got to sting the Golden Geyser of Truth (or as Rabinowitz prefers, "the Maureen Dowd of the conservatives") to be getting so much resistance from her own side. (Not that it's going to hurt the book, which I expect will outsell the Holy Bible.)
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
And BTW, it’s quite a stretch to call Coulter a right-wing Maureen Dowd. Dowd has taken an ironic view of everything, including the Clintonoids. Coulter, on the other hand, saves all her sarcasm for one side, treating her own with uncritical cheerleading.
“So there are populist types on the Left who reject the elitism of Hillary, Barbra and Rosie.”
but does cockburn also reject the crack-pot reflexive anti-americanism of dowd, chomsky and moore?
“I don’t get it, isn’t it wrong if you are Libertarian to go to public museums?”
Nah, not unless it’s also wrong to drive on public roads, make use of subsidized water and electricity, use the Internet (a product of Pentagon research), call the fire department when your house is burning, listen to NPR, use FDA approved drugs, etc. etc. And avoiding all those things, even if it were possible, wouldn’t change the extent to which the state permeates our lives. If you can recoup some of the value of the taxes you pay by enjoying some state-subsidize museum that’s going to stay open anyway, I say what the hell.
Hey Newbie, do some research and you won’t ask such foolish questions.
classing maureen dowd, an occasionaly offensive but largely mainstream editorialist, with noam chomsky is like classing george bush with hitler.
…or classing Coulter with hitler.
“…or classing Coulter with hitler.”
Only because Coulter has more balls.
I think Coulter should be classed with Moore; in how they cast their arguments they are mirror images of one another (in the flesh of course one is a stick while the other is a pile of blubber).
What if they mated?
What Coulter does is essentially WWF Wrestling, the main difference being that the WWF is much more entertaining.
Outsell the Holy Bible? She can’t even outsell Hillary.
And yes, there are plenty of people on the Left who trash Dowd, Moore, and so on. In fact, the Left is rather much better at eating its young than the Right. I hardly think one pan of Coulter by a B-list conservative commentator represents any kind of sudden ideological free-for-all.
croesus you are absolutely right. they share especially a frantic, intolerant self righteouness that they inflict on their learly uncomfortable hosts whenever given a chance to do so (mr bush, you are a BAD, BAD man!)
“And yes, there are plenty of people on the Left who trash Dowd, Moore, and so on”
such as…..??????
” I hardly think one pan of Coulter by a B-list conservative commentator represents any kind of sudden ideological free-for-all.”
read any blogs lately (other than this one)
Such as? Well, how about that whole theater at the Academy Awards that booed Moore, for starters? Hollywood’s not exactly known to be a bastion of conservatives; you think those boos came only from a raucously loud James Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
As far as the blogs … now you’re not even talking B-list. You’re talking C- and D-list. I’ve got nothing against bloggers (I read them myself), but they’re hardly the influence shapers that, say, Limbaugh and Hannity and O’Reilly are. When folks like that start piling on, then I’ll concede a trend. But I’ll also note that attacking Ann Coulter is hardly going after the biggest game in the jungle.
conclusion: bloggers are less influential than the crowd at the oscars. sorry andrew sullivan, but it is true.
your whole argument is flawed anyway: the right wing corporate zionist media dubbed the boos in afterwards. most people were applauding the courageous stand of Mr. Moore.
scott,
You’re way off. The thesis of Coulter’s Holocaust book will be that Hitler was a liberal, and the Final Solution philosophically and functionally indistinguishable from Single Payer Health Care.
It’s expected to be very popular among libertarians.
nice troll joe
Fred–Dorothy Rabinowitz won a pulitzer for her excellent work on the fictious Amirault child abuse prosecutions. She single-handedly changed the debate on the subject and freed innocent people.she might not be your cuppa, but she’s for real. As a reporter, I only hope to do so well.
She also happenes to be right on panning Coulter. As a neo-con-libertarian fusion, I am fully prepared to feed this woman to the wolves.
“In fact, the Left is rather much better at eating its young than the Right.”
This is too funny. The phrase “no enemies on the left” is still very much an operative philosophy. I mean, c’mon, Trent Lott gets out of line, and he loses a leadership position. Robert Byrd, a former Klansman, uses the n-word and suffers no consequences. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton engage in the most blatant race-baiting and extortion and are repudiated by . . . no one on the left. Mo Dowd engages in the most egregious abuse of quoted materials, and the NYT doesn’t even run a correction. Michael Moore, let us not forget, WON an Oscar for his falsified documentary, notwithstanding the boos. Where, pray tell, is the high-profile editorial on a left-leaning editorial page repudiating Moore, comparable to the WSJ editorial published today?
All in all, I think the left half of the spectrum engages in much more disciplined damage control than the right half of the spectrum. Feel free to post counterexamples, if you can.
Cockburn has attacked Michael Moore many times. John Zerzan wrote a scathing indictment of Chomsky. And since when is Dowd a radical leftist?
The weirdest thing about the whole Ann Coulter debate is how it’s always taken as a given that she’s some sort of gorgeous vixen. Sullivan himself writes today that “few would dispute she’s a babe.”
Well, actually … I would. (And, yes, I’m a heterosexual male with regular, active hormones.) Do people honestly find her that attractive? I’m not gonna spend this post picking faults with her physical appearance, but I am curious why this odd meme (“Ann Coulter is a babe”) exists in the first place.
Is it simply because she has long blonde hair? Does that just automatically generate some pavlovic response? LONG. BLONDE. HAIR. MUST. BE. BEAUTIFUL.
“LONG. BLONDE. HAIR. MUST. BE. BEAUTIFUL.”
it’s called blond distortion. bet she is even more luscious through beer goggles.
RE: Hmmm
Agreed. When it comes to right wing fantasy chicks, give me Michelle Malkin. I’d even agree with her odious opinions on immigration if she’d let me near her.
Long blonde hair is beautiful, just ask Greg Allman.
Has Maureen Dowd recommended killing anyone lately? Expressed disappointment that there weren’t more victims of any terrorist attacks?
Mr. Hmm is not alone.
“…the WWF is much more entertaining…”
well maybe more than Ann, but I’d almost rather watch a Michael J. Fox sitcom than watch the WWF.
Eureka. I finally understand Reason as a proving ground for Alex P. Keaton um,… archetypes. Thanks DF.
I am sure Ann Coulter’s next book, the one that shows how the Holocaust never took ploace, will sell even better….
funny how those on the evil conformist Right-wing conspirircy can condemn of their own while those on the freethinking, nonconformist Left give Chomsky, Down and Moore a free pass.
We need to round up ALL the lefties and nail ’em to the wall.
Who is Down?
BTW, I went to DC for the Fourth; its my first post 9/11 visit, and I have to say that I found the lack of access to be disconcerting. Oh, and I also forgot how expensive it is to eat in the Smithsonian Museums. 🙂
hey Croesus!
which access, or lack thereof, did you find disconcerting? getting in to see yer rep is tougher now. but what else?
and wasn’t it, like, really hot and humid there? (like the rest of the summer)
btw, check out the liberte site with Mme Herold — at least the postings here. you’ll love ’em.
happy fourth.
drf
Down = Dowd (typo)
Scott should get some kind of medal for violating Godwin’s law in the very first post.
Thanks, Jesse. I’d been trying to Google that piece since Coulter’s name came up earlier in the blog.
And such comments aren’t just sour grapes. Laura Ingraham is almost as shrill and obnoxious, but she looks GOOD.
Cro,
Gawdawful modernist urban planning dictated that private commercial businessness couldn’t be located near the Mall because they were too messy. Just lots of big institutional buildings. Hence, gov’t monopoly on eateries. Low quality and high prices? You don’t say…
MacMillan Plan = Lots of clean lines on a plan.
The Smithsonian Museums are free and open to the public.
Yes, the Museums are free; I spent about ten hours in the West Wing of the National Gallery, and I got to take as many pictures w/my digital camera as I wanted to. However, the food is not free. BTW, the reuben I had was very good; but it really wasn’t worth $10. Of course, I think they are really charging me for the tour as well as the food when they charge such high prices for food.
Joe,
Washington DC was planned by a Frenchman in the 18th century; l’Enfant was his name. The Capitol Building was placed on Jenkins Hill by l’Enfant to make it an imposing structure that could be seen from a long distance (much like the Roman Senate on Capitoline Hill (sp?) could be seen from a distance). The rest of the city was planned to be a city of empire; its wide avenues evoked those imperial Rome for example. Though the “downtown” area of DC now resembles more of something along the lines of a modern city, the “mall” area along with the monuments still holds the imprint of l’Enfant’s design.
David,
Well, when I lived in DC, in 1999-2000, doing research at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, you could walk right up to and along the sides of the Capitol even after it was closed; hell, I remember having a snowball fight on the West Lawn at mindight with some fellow researchers in February of 2000. Now the entire east of the building is closed off to public access, and along the West side you can only get to the bottom of the stairs. All of this kills the granduer which it evoked in the past; its aesthetic qualities have been drowned. Anyway, I can remember having similar access to it ever since my first visit to DC in 1987, and it simply saddens me that such access has been choked off.
BTW, by far the best place to is near the Mall and is relatively cheap is Union Station downstairs in the food court. The fact that the building is beautiful doesn’t hurt either. Plus in the summertime after eating you can cross the street and lay out in the park.
best place to eat near the Mall
I meant to say the north side of the Capitol building is closed off entirely; the west and east lawns on the south side are open, but you can’t get up the stairs.
>>Plus in the summertime after eating you can cross the street and lay out in the park.
if you don’t mind the smell of the bums
seriously, I love DC for architecture, history, etc but it has a serious bum problem
Cro,
L’Enfant did the first plan in the 1800s. A second plan, called the MacMillan Plan, was produced around 1920. It came out of the City Beautiful movement, which was basically an attempt to recreate cities according to the model of the White City from the Chicago World’s Fair. The MacMillan Plan is the reason why the Mall is lined with big stone buildings with one tenant each (mostly the federal government) instead of the mixed use commercial buildings and row houses that are Washington’s “natural” urban tissue.
I imagine Ann Coulter has a sure cure for the treasonous bums, too.
why are you calling bums treasonous? you right-wing fuck
I rarely see homeless people in D.C.; and I saw none in the parks that are around Union Station. In fact, I seem to run into homeless people more around the outside of the Metro stations; which makes sense, lots of people with cash to get onto the trains go through those stations.
joe,
Well, that’s interesting. Yes, I know about the City Beautiful movement; didn’t know it had an impact on D.C. A friend of mine did his dissertation on City Beautiful movement and writers associated with it.
Some quotes from Alex Cockburn (actually a close paraphrase from memory): “Getting the mainstream left to accept new ideas is like standing at the gates of a French town in the 1300s with spots on your face and saying ‘let me in’.” Re the Kossovo war: “I can easily imagine Hillary using bombs as a social engineering tool.”
Cockburn has also condemned the mainstream left’s casual dismissal of right-wing outrage over Waco and Ruby Ridge, and argued that they sacrificed a golden opportunity to form a left-right libertarian coalition against the jackboots. For so arguing, he has been dismissed by the Dees/Berlet cottage industry as a “militia dupe.”
So there are populist types on the Left who reject the elitism of Hillary, Barbra and Rosie.
I don’t get it, isn’t it wrong if you are Libertarian to go to public museums? I am trying to understand Libertarian principles by visiting Reason (a free website I might add) but am confounded by what, seems to me, amounts to a bunch of freeloaders.
Am I wrong in my assessment?
If you are talking blonde, right-wing hyperbabes, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick of the polling Co. always topped my list.
She is now known as Mrs. Conway, and therefore is off the lust list.
Kevin
http://www.pollingcompany.com/biography.asp?FormMode=Show&ID=1
Thanks, Redeye. For a while there, I was afraid I was exaggerating.
And McCarthy’s dishonest and self serving wolf-crying only hampered America’s efforts to detect genuine Soviet agents.
McCarthy SchmcCarthy – he was just the Kennedy’s lackey.
The woman looks like Marilyn Manson, albeit with less makeup. Perhaps she IS Marilyn Manson, living a double life.