Even if she is joking, there is such a thing as an inappropriate joke. I mean, a comedian can’t get up on stage and just start issuing a stream of racist jokes. Otherwise, Kramer would be in the clear.
**
C K Dexter Haven** done did Pit it, in post 95, above.
I should have worded it better. Anyway, after Bricker and Bosstone’s posts I will concede that she occaisionaly does say things someone might find genuinely funny. But it seems like finding a nugget in an ocean of bile and hatred.
Why don’t you use the existing memes against conseretvatives:
They hate children (the SCHIP nonsense)
They hate minorities
They are nazis, and want to turn America into the 4th Reich
They hate the environment
etc.
These are all grave insults to me, as a semi-conservative (depending on who I am being compared to at any given point in time).
Michael Moore, Al Franken, et al are also entertainers that use politics as their theme. On the other side we find Rush, Coulter and I am sure a few others. I don’t get upset when Moore does some of his nonsense, I only get angry when someone who SHOULD be a bit more intelligent starts quoting his movies as facts.
Coulter plays the extremes and points out some realities. It is true that the Democrats depend on minority and unmarried female votes (married women with children sway to the Republicans as I recall). Saying that if women didn’t vote, Repbublicans would rule is an interesting point. Whether it is relevant is another issue.
Taking her nonsense personally (unless she picks on you personally) is silly.
It is a bit more fine-tuned than that, though. Chris Rock can insult blacks and whites and get away with it. Lenny Bruce, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, etc. all pushed the boundaries of humour. Stephen Coulbert runs for office, Jon Stewart does interviews with real figures, but treats it as a semi-joke.
Face it - the boundaries between comedy and reporting are blurring. The difference between an editorial cartoon and the funny pages is hard to discern. The politically biased entertainer like Rush lives, and will continue to live for awhile.
I don’t have any Coulter books. I have read a few of her columns, and not really enjoyed them (other than a few good snarky bites). One bit of hers I did enjoy was her statement regarding “This Time Ann Has Gone Too Far.” She pointed out that she hears that regularly, and she has yet to hit the true “too far” point.
She knows her game, and her audience.
I think he pissed off the true-blue (or is that true-red?) conservatives when he went pure Libertarian. His level of humourous nuance also does not seem to play well in today’s culture.
I don’t really have the energy to get into this now, but the whole “You’ve got extremists on both sides. On the left you’ve got Mike Moore, on the right you’ve got Ann Coulter” meme really annoys me. I’ve never seen the level of murderous vile hatred from Moore that I’ve seen from Coulter. I’ve never seen him wish, even in jest, that people who disagree with him be killed.
There’s a level of pure nastiness in mainstream conservative rhetoric these days that just doesn’t exist on the left.
Hey, I’d heil Hitler it!
(I’ve wanted to use that one for so long!)
Reeeeeeealy.
John Stewart (I assume you’re talking about his daily show hosting, not some previous job I’m unaware of) makes jokes like:
about conservatives? Not about Bush or Cheney or Brownie or Rumsfeld but about conservatives in general? Seriously? Have you ever watched his show? Have you seen the extent to which he bends over backwards to be polite and civil to people like Rick Santorum or Lynne Cheney? Does he EVER insult Joe-Republican-in-the-street?
I gotta say, I think you’re just 100% wrong on this point, and I think it’s just one more example of assuming that because person X on the right does something, person Y who is in a similar position of prominence on the left must also do it.
All those memes are ones I recognize, yes. But show me the best-selling book by a liberal pundit whose entire message is clearly and literally one of those memes, and applies those memes to conservatives in general, not just politicians and leaders. Show me “Nazis! - How all conservatives want to turn American into the 4th Reich” by Al Franken, or “Racists! All republicans hate me because I’m black!” by Al Sharpton.
If by “plays the extremes” you mean “uses indefensibly vile and false accusations in order to sell books, thus further assaulting the already battered character of our public discourse”, then I agree with you.
Part of why I’m so irritated is that, at this point, I’m NOT irritated. Three or four years ago, the idea that someone was calling me an America-hating traitor really got my dander up. Now I almost shrug it off. Largely due to Ann Coulter, such accusations have become almost commonplace. And THAT is something that is truly outrageous.
Don Rickles has been doing it for years, to good success. Sarah Silverman has a lot of racist jokes in her act, and she’s pretty popular. There’s another comedian who’s been getting a lot of attention lately, who’s basically a female Rickles. Can’t remember her name, though. The difference between them and Michael Richards is that they tell jokes. Richards just started screaming, “He’s a nigger!” at a member of his audience. And the difference between them and Anne Coulter is that, when Don Rickles makes a joke denigrating Arabs, you don’t get the impression that he really means it. With Anne, you do.
Bwuh? Is this suppose to be the David Lynch kind of funny? Because it doesn’t make any sense.
Hastening to say the Ten Commandments aren’t, you know, carved in stone? That was pretty funny. 
See, you blame Coulter for starting this. I went through college being called a Nazi for my views. Hate speech left on my answering machine. Banners hung on campus. Public pronouncements by university administrators regarding my views. I was called a racist to my face at official functions. I was called a nazi the entire time.
These were “indefensibly vile and false accusations.”
I don’t shed ANY tears for those on the other side of the spectrum who are now getting what I got for 4 years.
Now, why is that the right gets books out and succeeds in radio while the left does not? I have no idea. The left seems to do better on comedy central on with the blogs I guess. The right might control certain mediums, while the left controls others.
I was not particularly political in college, but I was a liberal at the time and many of my friends were involved in left-wing organizations. I heard these kinds of slurs flung at conservative students all the time. They called conservatives Nazis as a matter of course, and they were not exaggerating for effect, either.
I 100% agree, and it was the reason I was not political in college. Although I agreed on many of the issues, I was disgusted by their tactics and language.
ETA: Damn…how did I get back into this? I think I thought I was in another Pit thread! I do not say any of this to defend Ann Coulter, only to defend the point that some liberals dish this stuff out just as well as Coulter does.
Exactly! They swallow her bile unquestioningly. Now you understand why I think it’s stupid to jump like Pavlovian dogs every time she opens her mouth. The only people who don’t think she’s a ridiculous human being are the people outside of your realm of influence. So quit spending time and energy refuting what she says and concentrate on, oh I don’t know, a strategy for fixing the country, or peace in the Middle East. Ann Coulter would be the LAST thing on my mind if I were a Presidential hopeful.
Why?
I mean, you didn’t like it. Presumably the people who tormented you are not the same people now being tormented. If you didn’t like it, why aren’t you upset when the same thing happens to someone else? Unless they were the ones being dicks, I don’t see why they deserve no sympathy.
Yes, there are always going to be people who listen to her no matter what. But if her slurs went unchallenged, there would be even more people who listened to her, and that would be a bad, possibly even dangerous, thing. And part of my “plan” for fixing this country is marginalizing demagogues like Coulter. Ignoring her won’t do that, it will just make her stronger.
I never did that to conservatives when I was in college. Why do I deserve to be treated like that now?
A very fair question, and I will admit it hits hard.
I learned, through the BS I went through, to ignore the strident assholes. They can learn the same.
My lack of sympathy comes because they did NOT stand up to defend me at the time. Not ONE left-winger EVER came up to me to tell me that it was BS what I was going through. The most I ever got was, “Wow that sucks. Of course, if you didn’t write that column…” or other such nonsense. They would, in effect, defend the actions by gently attacking me. In effect, I was told that I deserved it (even though it was really bad).
Now the petty, cheap, shitty part of my personality lets out a big Nelson-esque “Ha Ha” when I see the left getting the same.
I will happily sympathize with any Lefty upset by Coulter who can show (or even honestly claim) that they stood up against their fellow leftists for the SHIT that right wingers went through on college campuses back in the day. If not, then welcome to our world.
I didn’t go to your college. If I had, I certainly would not have called you a nazi. And I’d like to think (although I can’t swear to this) that I would have publically and visibly objected when other people called you a nazi. Assuming you were not, in fact, advocating the burning of books and locking gays up in concentration camps.
In any case, I will restate my point. Ann Coulter was not the first person to use hateful rhetoric. However, she was the first that I know of to write a book which became a popular bestseller, leading to her becoming at least a quasi-respected commentator, which clearly and unambiguously directed hateful rhetoric towards an entire mainstream political movement. In other words, one might say that she took the rhetoric of a college hothead (and colleges are a pretty natural place for hotheadedness, although that doesn’t mean that it’s OK for people to have been asses to you) and turned it into a mainstream bestseller.
“The left” has The Daily Show and Colbert, which are probably in the same order of magnitude of popularity of Coulter and Limbaugh. (Anyone know?). But the important distinction, which I’ve been hammering on over and over again, is that John Stewart doesn’t insult republicans in general. He is pretty damn merciless towards Bush and Bush’s cronies, but he doesn’t call republicans as a whole nazis, or claim they hate the poor, or anything of that sort. He just. Doesn’t. Do. It.