Coulter, Couric, and Context

I've just finished listening to the Katie Couric, Ann Coulter Today Show interview for the first time (it aired on June 26, 2002) and I'm quite amazed at her gall. Two points, first, she states that the main thesis of her book (Slander) is to argue that the liberal media always portrays conservatives as either stupid or crazy.

Complaining about liberal slander takes real chutzpah because this is exactly what Coulter herself does in her too-appropriately named Slander. She spends more than two hundred pages calling liberals "savagely cruel bigots"(p. 205) who "hate society" (p. 27) and deserve to be "boiled" in oil (p. 197). And that's the nice stuff.

Couric doesn't call her on this point, instead focussing on a section of the book where Coulter misquotes Couric on a biography of Ronald Reagan. It's a relatively minor point but it clearly has annoyed Couric to be taken out of context by Coulter, and its useful to show that Coulter does exactly the thing she complains about the media doing: takes things out of context. (That she's often right about the contextlessness of the vast media wasteland does not justify her own contempt for context.)

Take this Coulter quote from the interview:

"Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments. And when every one of your arguments is characterized as an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters it's a little hard to have any sort of productive debate. I mean I have no problem with invective, obviously, but the name of my book isn't invective, it's slander."

Liberals calling names? Like "bigots," "evil," "stupid," "bitter," or "terrorist"? Oh my, how horrible. And where is the accuracy of claiming that "every one of your arguments is characterized as an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters"? Has anyone EVER accused Coulter of wanting to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters? I imagine that somewhere, somewhen, some leftist probably has accused a conservative of wanting to bring back slavery, but this is hardly mainstream liberal dogma. Oh, Coulter is just using invective. She's exaggerating. But then she shouldn't complain when she's attacked in the same inaccurate way. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Later in the interview, Couric asks Coulter what the big liberal lies are that are used against conservatives. Coulter replies:

"It's really all the same lie, that conservatives are either stupid or scarily weird and therefore you don't have to deal with their ideas."

Which sums up Coulter's own attitudes towards liberals pretty well. (See Evil or just stupid?.)

Next Couric zeros in on Coulter's infamous " We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity " quote, implying that Coulter herself might actually be scarily weird. Coulter defends herself by claiming she was taken out of context.

"That's a somewhat dishonest quote, I was referring to the people in the previous sentence of that column, cheering and dancing in the streets right now, and in fact this, um, the way that was so widely misquoted is an example of what I describe in my book, um, which is the constant mischaracterization...How about dealing with our ideas?"

First, this is a pretty lame defense. A sentence like that, even taken out of context, pretty much speaks for itself. And given the context of Coulter's proven track record of attitudes and ideas, it fits perfectly. But let's be fair, let's take the full surrounding text and give it some analysis.

The September 13 essay was Coulter's first reaction to September 11, and the whole piece leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. To begin with, I'm not the first one to note it spends a little too much time patting Ann Coulter on her own back. Sure, it opens with praise of Barbara Olson (wife of Bush's solicitor general Ted Olson) who died aboard one of the hijacked planes. Olson--and the other passengers--certainly deserve our sympathy, but Coulter's focus seems less on how nice Olson may have been and more on how nice it was that she and her husband read Ann Coulter's column. "She generously praised one of my recent columns and told me I had really found my niche. Ted, she said, had taken to reading my columns aloud to her over breakfast." In an essay which is supposed to be about other people's suffering, this is an unseemly intrusion.

Then Coulter switches to targeting the terrorists, a more worthwhile goal. But who are exactly the terrorists?

"This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. Those responsible include anyone anywhere in the world who smiled in response to the annihilation of patriots like Barbara Olson."

So some poor Palestinian--who's been deluded into thinking that just because America supplies Israel with money and weapons that means America opposes Palestinian independence--smiles, and in Coulter's mind he becomes a terrorist. A trifle extreme. What should we do with those smiling Arabs? Shoot them all? (And let's be clear here, smiling at innocent people's death is an obscenity, but it is neither as common as some jingoists suggest nor is it anything like the moral equivalent of committing a terrorist act.)

Finally, Coulter concludes with her solution to the terrorist threat. I'll include both her final paragraphs, just so I can't be accused of decontextualizing her.

Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

So, according to Coulter she wasn't referring to invading the countries of all Muslims, just to the ones belong to those "cheering and dancing in the streets." And which countries are these? Pakistan, our ally? Saudi Arabia--where most of the terrorists came from--our ally? Are these the countries we are supposed to invade and convert to Christianity? How does putting things into "context" make Coulter's words any less bizarre? Imagine how the Muslim world would react if we actually attempted Coulter's mass conversion strategy. We'd see global war for decades, with American interests in the Middle East under constant threat. And in the process of making all this happen, Coulter doesn't give a damn how many innocent civilians die. Just as those 19 hijackers didn't give a damn about the innocents who perished in the World Trade Center. By all means, let us fight terrorism. As a New Yorker I desperately want to see those who planned the attacks punished. But let's not adopt the bestial methods and morality of our opponents. We're better than that. Well, some of us are.

The problem with Katie Couric's interview was indeed lack of context. But the context she left out was Coulter's own reckless and twisted views. The more one reads Coulter, the more one is thankful she will never have any real power. Of course, there are plenty of fanatics who think in the same way as she does who are already in power. In Islamabad, in Riyadh, and in Tehran.

©2002 Carl Skutsch. All rights reserved.
All opinions expressed herein are those of the author unless otherwise noted
(and it goes without saying that they make more sense than Coulter's opinions.)

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