Gene Lyons Sums Coulter Up

I saw this article and thought it was worth a read, particularly for its criticism of media types soft-balling Coulter.

Copyright 2002 Little Rock Newspapers, Inc.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
August 28, 2002, Wednesday

New face on old slurs
Gene Lyons

If Ann Coulter were a relief pitcher, she'd be in big trouble. Instead, she's a Republican attack-blonde, the author of the No. 1 non-fiction book on the New York Times' best-seller list and a ubiquitous presence on TV talk shows.

So you're not supposed to take offense when Coulter spouts politicized bigotry that makes ex-Atlanta Brave John Rocker's foolish remarks about queers, weirdoes and foreigners in New York sound benign by comparison. Nor to point out that much of the so-called evidence of liberal sins in her book Slander is simply made up, 780 footnotes and all.

Apparently, the glib Connecticut ectomorph has taken to believing her own, well, "propaganda" is the only word I can get in the newspaper. Or maybe she's just a comedy act, as a recent column by one Melik Kayan in The Wall Street Journal hinted. How else could Coulter go on national TV, call NBC's perky Today Show hostess Katie Couric "the affable Eva Braun" of American liberalism, then bleat about liberal name-calling?

Eva Braun was Hitler's mistress, so when Coulter calls Couric, in effect, a Nazi slut, it's what Kayan calls "tongue-in-cheek agitprop." Where's everybody's sense of humor?

The occasion of the Journal apologia was Coulter's telling the New York Observer--whose interviewer informed readers that he had a "friend" who would enjoy vigorous copulation with the bony pundit--that "my only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

Some of these boys, incidentally, sound like they're wearing their bow ties too tight. I still recall my amazement at learning that Tory men thought Margaret Thatcher a hottie. "The eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe" was how the late English novelist Anthony Powell described her to me. Evidently, the Iron Lady conjured steamy memories of prep school spankings.

On TV, Coulter conveys all the feminine warmth of a water moccasin, if you can imagine a pit viper with silicone implants. Kayan, though, feverishly pictures her walking a metaphorical tightrope, "her long-limbed signature silhouette poised precariously aloft, riverine blonde locks riffled by the breeze and legs coltishly pirouetting."

This isn't the first time Coulter has fantasized about killing liberals. Speaking at a recent conservative gathering, she opined, "We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors."

Coulter deliberately courts over-reaction. But anybody with a mean mouth can play her game, as I've tried to show. More insidious is how she mimics the outward form of real journalism without its content, how lazy and/or cowardly establishment types let her get away with it and the truly ugly subtext to her supposedly harmless joking.

Everywhere Coulter goes, she boasts about those 780 footnotes, which give her rants the appearance of substance. Reviewers for publications as various as The New York Times, National Review and the Los Angeles Times have praised her "massive amounts of footnoted evidence." None bothered to check the facts behind even her most absurd claims, like the bitter pronouncement that "[L]iberals have absolutely no contact with the society they decry from their Park Avenue redoubts."

Coulter's "proof" is that the New York Times, almost alone among American newspapers, failed to report the death of NASCAR hero Dale Earnhardt on its front page. Also that the story which did belatedly appear mocked "[t]acky people . . . mourning Dale Earnhardt all over the South!"

Bob Somerby of dailyhowler.com proved that Coulter's claim was simply made up. The Times did run a front-page account of Earnhardt's death by sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. Two days later, it ran an evocative account of grieving fans in Earnhardt's home town of Mooresville, N.C. The author was Rick Bragg, the gifted native of Piedmont, Ala., who covers the South for the newspaper. For that matter, Times editor Howell Raines is an Alabamian.

Somerby and others have exposed numerous similar howlers throughout Coulter's deeply dishonest work. His witty demolition job is must reading. Writing in The Washington Post, one conscientious conservative, Christopher Caldwell, describes Slander as "a piece of political hackwork. The deeper into her subject she gets, the more she resorts to the tools of calumny and propaganda she professes to critique."

Indeed, it's not too much to say that the "liberal" sins Coulter caricatures--atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason--are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them. That she blames no ethnic group makes it only marginally less offensive.

Equally damaging is her book's intellectual fraudulence. Nave readers have little defense against a book using pseudo-scholarly documentation to tart up ancient slurs.

Conservatives constantly decry decaying cultural standards. Where are they now?

Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

©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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