Sauce for the goose

Adam noted that I seemed particularly venomous to Michael Moore, when there were plenty of idiots on the Right, like Ann Coulter, who also deserved a verbal drubbing; he suggested he’d like to see me do a similar point-by-point dissection of things she’d written. I replied back to him that I don’t read Ann Coulter (who I’ve certainly heard, through the grapevine, is an idiot), and he was “kind” enough to forward a link to a site with some particularly egregious Coulter quotes.

I prefer taking items in context, but, to be honest, some of the things here are difficult to understand, context or no.

So, in the interest of fairness …

We start off with a quote from Coulter’s NRO column on 13 September 2001.

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.

The site complains about “the nice contrast between blonde Suzy Chapstick and, by implication, her swarthy Muslim fellow passengers,” but I do think there’s room for debate on the whole issue of profiling concerning possible terrorists.

The column, though, concludes with:

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.

That’s a pretty famous Coulterism, and understandably, since it’s both a reprehensible sentiment and historically absurd.

First off, it is true that only fifty-odd years ago, we were much more willing to associate the populace with the regime. We weren’t just fighting Hitler, we were fighting the Germans, the Krauts, the Hun.

But by the same token, it was difficult to fight any other way. We bombed everything we could in WWII because, well, the technology didn’t allow for much anything else. We waged war on the Germans, but focused (usually) on bombing industrial sites, which often spilled over into the surrounding cities.

It’s not clear to me that trying to kill as many — well, it seems that Coulter is talking about Muslims in general — Muslims is really going to do much of anything except kill a whole lot of people. That doesn’t, to say the least, seem a very Christian thing to do.

As to the idea of forcible conversion to Christianity — that doesn’t seem Christian, either.

Unless there’s some context I cannot imagine, even if Coulter never said anything else the least bit questionable, she’d deserve a rep as a nut.

Unfortunately for her, there’s this quote from an address to CPAC in January 2002.

When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker 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.

Yeah, ’cause that’s a really effective way to prove the truth of your beliefs — intimidate through threat of death those who disagree. This is part and parcel of the same sentiment involved in the previous tripe.

Now, I could argue in favor of executing John Walker Lindh for punishment for what he did. And I could even see an argument that it might keep some outright traitors in line — maybe. Capital punishment’s deterrent effect is pretty dubious. But the equation between college liberals and traitors is an obnoxious one; even given that some college liberals are obnoxious, some of them turn into pretty nice and mature adults, nevertheless.

The site goes on to another Coulter quote from 7/03:

Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.

The site owner wonders why he didn’t get the menu about laughing at fellow Americans. I’d disagree with Coulter more about the general blanketing of liberals as cushioning terrorists, frankly. There are certainly some (by no means all, or even, probably, both, but some of the more vocal) liberals who do pooh-pooh concepts of patriotism, of identifying some folks as “the enemy,” and who see the love of country as jingoistic twaddle and a huge barrier to a transnational utopia.

The essay goes on:

The New York Times ran a Tom Tomorrow cartoon sneering about Americans who believe with ‘unwavering faith in an invisible omniscient deity who favors those born in the middle of the North American land mass.’ This is how liberals conceive of America: an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America.

The site comments:

[The cartoon] just pointing out that it’s a bit arrogant to see ourselves as being the center of the moral universe. The idea that God favors the United States over all other countries is a little bit bizarre (just as is the idea that He favors Saudi Arabia). Too many people believe fanatically that they have God on their side, this is what motivated those damn terrorists. The bitter irony may be lost on some pundits.

Well, Coulter’s comments are a bit goofy, given that the whole “America is an undifferentiated land mass in the middle of North America” bit is the least of the commentary in the cartoon. It does, it’s true, have a bit of a sneering attitude (in that one panel) toward folks who think that God is particularly fond of the values and freedoms in the US. That attitude is theologically suspect, but equally suspect is the idea that one is doing what God wants (which is different from thinking that God is on your side) means that there’s no difference between the 9/11 terrorists and, say, George Bush.

On Enron, Coulter writes:

The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, “Head for the hills!” the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn’t make you a hero.

The site author comments:

So Enron is not so bad because the employees would have been criminals if they had had the chance? I’m so glad Coulter isn’t an elitist with contempt for regular workers.

Actually, that’s not Coulter’s point at all. She’s discussing whether the employees of Enron were victimized by the Big Bosses cashing out in advance when they saw their bubble bursting. Because much of the value of the stock was recent, and was bubble, she doesn’t think the Enron employes are the victims here. She’s certainly thinks the management of Enron was inept, the business concept flawed, and the Big Bosses are quite possibly criminals — but, as she notes out, that doesn’t make heroes of everyone caught in the fall-out.

The next quotes from Coulter show that she can give good sound-bite and that she doesn’t live in Kansas. Since neither is a particular sin, I’ll go past them, except to note that I think the site author is kind of reaching here.

The next is a transcript from a Fox News interview with her in 6/01:

COULTER: I take the biblical idea. God gave us the earth.
PETER FENN (Democratic strategist): Oh, OK.
COULTER: We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees.
FENN: This is a great idea.
COULTER: God says, “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”
FENN: Terrific. We’re Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth’s resources…
COULTER: Yes! Yes.
FENN: … as fast as we possibly can.
COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians.

Aside from Coulter having a rather idyllic view of the Indians (who were just as capable as any other people of exploiting, sometimes to breaking, their local environment), I can only hope that Coulter is exagerrating for the point of getting a rise out of Fenn, because it’s clear to most Christians (I believe) that our “dominion” is a stewardship. We may differ as to how that stewardship should be handled, but the idea that God somehow has given us a permission to trash the joint is rather bizarre.

The next set of quotes is from another interview with Coulter.

Her father represented Phelps Dodge Corporation, the mining and manufacturing giant, and while negotiating with the unions, he presided over the largest union decertification ever.
“It was a stupid time,” Ms. Coulter said. “The idea that this seems to fit into–which is absolutely not true–is this idea of the WASP’s in Connecticut swatting down workers with their polo mallets. To the contrary, my father was not to the manor born, and has had quite a bit of sympathy with the working man. One of those cases was the copper mines in Arizona. I’ve worked in one of those mines, as has my brother, as summer jobs. They get very high wages, they get all their health care taken care of, and it’s an open-pit mine, so you’re working on the side of a mountain.”

Aside from making it clear that, like her Dad, you can be “of the people” and still screw them, Coulter’s comment about the bucolic splendor of working in an open-pit mine strikes me as more than a bit bizarre (and makes me wonder in what capacity she worked during that summer job).

“I love Texas Republicans!” she said. “They’re these beautiful women, they’re so great-looking, they’re completely loaded. They’re dripping in this gorgeous jewelry, they’re really funny and sarcastic and smart. Americans are so cool, and they’re such parochial idiots here in New York.”

The site writer suggests, “Yes, those cool rich Texas Republicans dripping with jewelry. Salt of the earth regular Americans.” Which just shows the contempt he has for rich, Texas Republicans, but doesn’t say much about Coulter. There’s no accounting for tastes, of course.

“Cheney is my ideal man. Because he’s solid. He’s funny. He’s very handsome. He was a football player. People don’t think about him as the glamour type because he’s a serious person, he wears glasses, he’s lost his hair. But he’s a very handsome man. And you cannot imagine him losing his temper, which I find extremely sexy. Men who get upset and lose their tempers and claim to be sensitive males: talk about girly boys. No, there’s a reason hurricanes are named after women and homosexual men, it’s one of our little methods of social control. We’re supposed to fly off the handle.”

The site author doesn’t share Coulter’s passion for Cheney, but that’s certainly his (and her) prerogative. I’m less sanguine about her generalization about women and gay men (though the site author sees fit only to criticize the latter, for some reason).

The next Coulter quote is also highly criticized by the site author, and with justiifcation.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

Looking at the transcript, I can only give Coulter the benefit of the doubt enough to think that she really doesn’t mean it. That only means that she’s apallingly and obnoxiously insensitive. And stupid, too.

I’ll pass over some quotes showing Coulter running hot and cold over the Kennedy family — it’s rhetorical blather, but not worse than a lot of other stuff I’ve read in the op-ed pages (of all stripes), and not really the contradiction that the site author gleefully claims it is.

The last Coulter quote is from a column (?) titled “My Name is Adolf,” dated 11 September 2002:

It’s always so comforting when Muslims cite the precise verse from the Quran that tells them killing is wrong. Don’t all empathetic human beings understand that instinctively? What if they lost their Quran that day and couldn’t remember?”

My, how delightfully idiotic. Does the same apply to Christians who quote the Golden Rule, the Beatitudes, or other words of Christ (let alone know the citation)? I somehow doubt it.

So, my summation on Ann Coulter? I don’t know. My ignorance is to whether she’s just an obnoxious blow-hard, spouting twaddle for the masses to boost her book sales, or whether she’s actually a dangerous lunatic who actually believes the things she says. And, to bring the theme back arounnd to the beginning, I feel the same way about Michael Moore (though I’m more likely to believe the former than the latter about Moore).

Nor do I feel much need to go out of my way to track down further things she’s written; I feel the same way about Moore, though he seems to pop up more often in my reading than Coulter, for whatever reason.

There, how’s that, Adam?