Actually, he is far less of an ideological hack than Limbaugh (but somewhat more of one than Franken). Moore at least pays some attention to fact-checking (he had a team of lawyers fact-check Fahrenheit 9/11 before releasing it). Limbaugh acts as if facts belong to some alternate universe. Still better than Coulter, who acts as if facts are an utterly unfamiliar and irrelevant concept.
I know what your point is. I was explaining why your analogy doesn’t work. You have to first assume that she is hateful before you evaluate her words. That is how it would work with the KKK Grand Wizard in the analogy you offered.
Has the dailogue coarsened over the years? Absolutely. Does she now add to it? Yes. Especially when she goes too far, like she did by claiming the the 9/11 widows were happy that their husbands died (or something to that effect). But even then her larger point was 100% correct and needed to be made. Does her style outweigh the good she brings? I don’t think so. YMMV.
I do agree that it is often difficult to see humor when a point you strongly disagree with is being made. And I do agree that she doesn’t have an equivalent on the left. But neither does Michael Moore. I’m not sure that’s all that important.
“Hate” is far too strong a word, but nonsense it is not by any means.
I’ve read most of this thread, so I could have missed it, but the conversation seems to have moved on, so was it ever determined if Coulter is being humorous or being serious? Or more accurately, if her audience, the ones who keep buying her books and keeping her name in the bestseller lists and ratings high, consider her funny or serious? I’d offer a litmus test on the question which seems rather obvious to me, but I didn’t see brought up.
If, as some have claimed, Ann Coulter is a humorist, then it should be obvious in her audience’s reaction. Do they laugh? Do they laugh like Jon Stewart, or Steven Colbert, or Al Franken, or even Rush Limbaugh’s audiences laugh? Do they laugh like Denis Miller’s audience used to laugh? When you see someone with an Ann Coulter book, do they have a grin on their face? Do they laugh, chuckle, or show signs of amusement?
It seems to me the general defense of Ann’s statements are that they aren’t meant to be taken at face value, they’re jokes. Sophisticated jokes, but jokes nonetheless. People laugh at jokes, even sophisticated ones.
I’ve never seen an audience react to her, so I’d be relying on anyone who has. Does she make people laugh or nod along in agreement? Whichever she does more would seem to indicate how she is received by her audience, and therefore the type of influence she wields.
Enjoy,
Steven
Hang on, let me take a step back here. Your original quote was “Bottom line: Coulter is funny”. I took that to mean, perhaps incorrectly, that you were neither agreeing or disagreeing with claims such as “Coulter’s writings make the country worse”. But you consider them immaterial, as long as you found her writing humorous.
Before I go on, I might as well ask whether that is, in fact, what you meant by that snippet?
Funny is good for you. Poison is bad for you. She is not funny. Q.E.D.
At this point, I fear the real difference between left & right is the difference in sensibility between Franken & Limbaugh.
If the ideological leader of your party has been for twenty years an insult comic, your party is now an insult-comic-ist party. I recognize that there are some old-fashioned conservatives with respect & manners left in this country, but a lot of them have been trained into despising news sources not approved by the Party as untrustworthy, while accepting the lies from Party-approved outlets. To the hard base, anyone with the sense to look at both sides is disloyal, & a moderate is “impure,” so as bad as a “liberal.” And the hard base influences the soft base. Is it really a good idea for the left to adopt this kind of fascistic approach?
As for Coulter, her appeal is as a skinny blonde in a short skirt who says the sort of mean things the dittoheads say about the other side. She’s Limbaugh with sex appeal; what’s the mystery?
I would argue against the statement that either Rush or Coulter are the ideological leaders of the Republican Party / The Right / Conservatives. Rush may have been part of the Republican revolution, helping Newt take over Congress, but his influence has waned. Coulter has never, to my knowledge, held the same level of influence that Rush did in his heyday.
It is true that the extremists of the party have these issues, but judging all conservatives by that measure is no more fair than judging the Left / Democrats / Liberals by MoveOn.org / Soros / Huffington / Kos. I am not saying that it is not done, just that reasoned debate (and places that attempt to dispell ignorance) should not jump on that bandwagon.
I think when someone like Coulter says, “It’s just a joke,” it’s a bit like David Copperfield saying, “There are no wires.” OK, bad analogy, but the point is, why would you believe her?
Racists feel constricted & repressed by polite society, so they say racist things as “jokes,” as a form of dissent; much as satirists try to say dissenting things through metaphor & comedy in states without free speech.
The thing is, we do have free speech, so she doesn’t have to hide her racism under metaphor & wit. She just says this crap, which a lot of people think but know is unpopular (though they don’t understand why); then she says, “Oh, that’s a joke,” & her fans say, “Oh, it’s a joke.” But it’s not really.
Al Franken fills his books with statements and anecdotes which, it is entirely clear from context, are not meant to be taken seriously at all, but are include purely for humorous or ironic effect; mixed with statements that, it is equally clear, are intended as serious or real assertions or narrations of actual events. Coulter does not do the former; she works jokes and hyperbole into her writing, but it is clear she means everything to be taken seriously. The idea that she is doing “parody” of conservatism like Stephen Colbert is not even worth considering.
I am a conservationist, thus I am conservative in a sense. I left the GOP, in part, because of the futility of fighting a party whose rhetorical leaders (Rush, NR, etc.) had no comprehension of environmental realities, & would pander to those who hate environmentalists. And while it’s true that not all GOP are racists, the white supremacists favor the GOP over the Dems. There are no GOP in the Congressional Black Caucus; there was at most one at a time for most of the last twenty years. I do draw a distinction between the kind of law-&-order cultural conservative I was raised (closer to Teddy Roosevelt, or Bill Richardson) & a capital-C movement “Conservative” (not actually conservative, but actually subtly fascist).
Perhaps I should have not edited my original response. But it seemed so painfully obvious that I, or anyone, would believe that someone being funny would be ALL that matters; that regardless of the damage done that their humor would make it okay. Kind of ridiculous, don’t you think? Given the rest of that post and my subsequent ones, what precisely aren’t you getting about my position on Coulter? I’m happy to clarify, but I can’t see what you’d be confused by if you take in all that I’ve written.
It is unclear from this whether it is Franken or Limbaugh (or both) whom you are characterizing as an “insult comic.” (And I agree with Algher: Both, as well as Coulter, are high-profile ideological propagandists for their parties, but none of them are “ideological leaders.” That distinction belongs to (some) elected officials, party officials, more serious political journalists/commentators, think-tankers and academics.)
And this helps show why Rush / Coulter / etc. are not the ideological leaders of the Republican party. The party itself is fractured among many different sets of people.
Re: your comments on race and Republicans:
While there are white supremacists in the Republican party, they are also in the Democrat party as well. The Congressional Black Caucus is an arm of the Democrats as well - that is why JC Watts did not join. He saw no reason to have his name associated with that group. If you want to see racism in the Democrats (aside from Byrd, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton), you can see how they feel about the Cubans in Florida.
The Republicans have several core groups that have banded together, but do not necessarily get along:
Christian Right / Social Conservatives
Capitalists
Big Business (not really - they switch sides regularly)
Free Market idealogues
Libertarians
The fascist meme, by the way, is just as insulting as traitor to me.
By the latter, are you referring to this?
Funniest line in this thread.
Well, then I’m not sure where we disagree.
(1) I claim that Coulter’s writing style does damage to America, and in fact, unnecessary damage, because her precise points (assuming there are any) could be made without doing that damage.
(2) I suspect that she deliberately chose that writing style in order to be provocative and sell books, without concern for any damage it does. To be a tad over-dramatic, I would describe her actions as selfish bordering on evil
(3) I thus am disturbed when generally well-meaning and intelligent conservatives, among whom I would like to count most conservative members of the SDMB, talk about her in a “oh, sure, she goes a bit far but she makes me laugh so it’s all good” kind of way, as I worry that that person has read enough of her works to actually start believing on some level, even if simply through sheer repetition, that I (a liberal) hate America and am a traitor.
It used to be possible in America to disagree with someone and still respect their intelligence, intentions, and patriotism. One of the greatest moments in American (and, I’d argue, world) history was when Jefferson became president, after Adams, and there was a totally peaceful transfer of power from one party to an opposing party. And these people could respect each other and realize that both could be patriots (although I have a niggling memory that they hated each others’ guts, although I forget the details). My point is, that is how our country should be. I might go so far as to say that that is how our country NEEDS to be in order to function and sruvive. Now, Ann Coulter didn’t single-handedly destroy this, but she, more than any other person of her prominence, absolutely unashamedly trashes the intelligence, character and patriotism of huge swaths of the population. That I can not forgive.
Actually, I’ve rethought it. I don’t think the hard right of the GOP is fascist, exactly. Fascists accept economic corporatism whereas the GOP is vaguely AynRandian. The far right are not fascists, they’re anti-intellectual libertarian nationalists. So they’re better than fascists in some ways, arguably worse in others.
Eh? It used to be so, but after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act (declaring at the time, “We [the Democrats] have just lost the South for a generation.”), and after Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy, most white supremacist Dems migrated to the Republican Party (in some cases, by way of Wallace’s short-lived American Independent Party).
That has nothing to do with racism. Most Cuban-Americans are white – not even mullato or mestizo, but as white as Spaniards. (There are other races in Cuba, but it was mainly those of the white upper class who fled to Miami after the Revolution.) Miami Cuban-Americans have historically supported the Republican Party because they perceive it as being more reliably hostile to Castro, and any anti-Cuban feeling on the Dems’ part is purely and simply a reaction to that. (Tampa Cuban-Americans, also mostly white, are a different matter – they came in an earlier wave of migration, in the 1890s, and are far less obsessed with Castro and far more likely to vote Dem, and the party welcomes them without reservation.)
Not that quote, I’m unfamiliar with it. But that’s interesting. No, I was referring to the cult of personality, the attempt to build an ideologically pure New Right & Grand Old Party, & the hatred of the Other as manifested both in Coulter’s work & the desire of lumpenprole GOPpers to shoot the dreaded wetbacks as they come in.