Coulter A Rebours

On the way home from an errand today, I tuned into WLRN, the local NPR outlet here in South Florida, to hear several listeners call into the liberal talk show host make snide remarks about Ann Coulter [after the weird host made an unsolicited comment about an interviewees book outselling "Godless" in San Francisco.

Don't get me wrong. I've read some of Ann's books and am impressed by the range of her learning and the sharpness of her polemics, but her tendency to cut not only to the quick but deeper does turn me off.

But on the other hand, I do like her for the enemies she has made, the snide supercilious we-know-better twerps like the NPR host of the Miami call-in show. And the nasty Jay Leno, whose normally slapstick sort of jovial charm evaporates when he makes a comment about Coulter. She brings out the worst in him, the bulbous bigot hiding behind the big-jawed smile.

So I'm pleased to link Elspeth Reeve in The New Republic give the flip side of Coulter's obnoxious references, the fact that they contain truths that liberals, layered and swathed in multiple levels of hypocrisy, can't bear to confront. Elspeth knows how to write, as in this bit about DC:

Washington, where always-waiting-to-talk types need to be bitch slapped out of their robotic-pundit routines, and where political conversations often pivot back to appearances.

You go, girl! And the snide little remarks about Coulter's looks that dirty-old-man Al Franken types can't avoid when they inadvertantly reveal their masturbatory fantasies while attempting to put down Ann's appearance:

That is why I love Ann Coulter. Coulter shocks and offends, but underneath her offensiveness is a grain of truth that people cope with by critiquing her hair. Americans like comfort: comfort food, comfort shoes, comfort pundits to reinforce everything we already believe. Ann Coulter is not comfort. I love that she pisses people off. I love her outsized confidence, rare in females who've gone through puberty, which means she doesn't turn into a pile of stuttering mush when an interview turns to her body. I love the way her face flickers devilishly for just a second when an interviewer wraps his own noose--the joy tinged with a bit of sadness, as if to say, Oh what fun this is, but do you have to make it so easy?

The truth is that most conservatives adopt the David Brooks suppliant conciliatory liberal-mode, but conservative-thought approach to public interviews. Brooks is constantly having to listen to whiners like Mark Shields display hypocritical anger at, say, George Allen's remarks while defending Joe Biden for offending the same ethnic group. Is Brooks afraid the NYT will take his bully pulpit away if he swings for the fences? Or the way Coulter replied to an unctuous supercilious condescending BBC agitpreppie:

"No, I think you can save all the would-you-like-to-withdraw questions, but you could quote me accurately. I didn't write about the 9/11 widows. I wrote about four widows cutting campaign commercials for John Kerry and using the fact that their husbands died on 9/11 to prevent anyone from responding," she said. The thing is ... it's kind of true. A little. It is a little absurd to hold up a person as an expert judge of the 9/11 Commission Report, for example, just because she lost a loved one. Liberals do tend to do that kind of thing, and it makes us look like weenies.

Yes, liberals are a bunch of cheap shot snipe-and-hide cowards. They know they pay no penalty for attacking Coulter, because the mainstream media is resoundingly and totally in the tank for the leftist agenda, favored by over ninety per cent of national reporters in the 2000 election, when they admitted voting for girlie-man Gore. But secretly, the lusty hypocrites whank to her photos and even in public, they let their zipper down a bit as they make their snarky little asides---the kind Maureen Dowd made at Katherine Harris back in 2000 claiming she'd had several facelifts [but that was Maureen projecting the work she herself had had done].

Coulter is a pretty woman who holds up a mirror showing us the ugliest parts of ourselves. She makes nice liberals think bad thoughts--particularly about whether they would have sex with her. Which is why we often fight back dirty, talking about her looks. Andrew Sullivan called her "a drag-queen-fascist-impersonator." The New York Times said she's "a blonde who knows her way around a black cocktail dress." Last week at TNR Online, her arguments were described as "about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention."

Good for Elspeth. The small-caliber cheap-shot artists on the MSM firing range can't bring down the 235,000 books she's sold for "Godless," so they have to do a Sullivan---and we know he's not latent in letting his wild side run amok---and then scatter before she has a chance to respond. But face to face, she nails them to the wall every time. Elspeth ends up giving the naughty, but nice Coulter a final salute after quoting Chris Mathews making a dork out of himself in public:

I only shudder that I, too, might not pass the Chris Matthews test. All wrapped up in liberals' snarky comments about her hair is a wellspring of latent guilt for judging her by her hair. Even after all those gender studies classes in college, even after having known/befriended/dated/been That Girl who Doesn't Shave Her Pits, after pretending to like Ani DiFranco, liberals still can't get over her hair. I love Ann Coulter because, in her, I see a loudmouth on the assembly line, fighting not to be squished and whittled and boxed into the shape Washington seems to think fits a girl just right.

Yep, those liberal feminists who can't bring themselves to scold Hezbollah or chador-wearing walking tents still get exercised over Ann's hair, proving they are just as superficial and fickle and shallow as men have always said they were. I just can't wait for them to attack Elspeth for uttering the truth about their phoniness.