there's a really good article about coulter and her significance to the conservative movement here
Tuesday March 6, 2007 07:02 EST The right-wing cult of contrived masculinity
Excellent paste. What also could be added to the dynamic is the idea of balls being better than brains... that over-education makes you a flip flopper, "real world" experience, being a CEO or whatever, makes you a better leader of government who are all weak and over-educated, etc. etc. This also has a parallel in the other debate over the portrayal of Hip Hop culture.
word. reminds me of a pre-election Peggy Noonan inerview when she remarked how John Kerry had "forgotten how to be a man" or some shit. she then proceeded -- as she always does -- to wax poetic about the glory days of testosterone-infused American politics under Reagan, blah, blah. there is definitely a weird cult of masculinity going on among these folks. creepy.
Huh??? That was my response....I call bullshit that this person represents anything and anyone besides a fringe lunatic element of the far right.
I've never spoken to a person who likes Ann Coulter, who agrees with Ann Coulter or who would fuck Ann Coulter.
And apparently no one else here has either, yet you'd like us to believe that she represents a group of people that total approximately 50% of our population.
THAT's my response.....what kind of response were YOU looking for??
Uh I'm asking you, then, to explain why a 'fringe element' was invited to speak immediately after a high-profile republican presidential candidate at a high-profile event like Conservative Political Action Conference.
And why her homophobic comment was met with exuberant applause
Ann Coulter's Funny That Way...[/b] Monday, Mar. 05, 2007 By JOHN CLOUD
[i]Are straight people allowed to say "faggot"? Are white people allowed to say "nigger"? Generally no. Our unwritten speech codes require that those words be used only by gays and blacks, respectively (black gays can say both). Which is just as it should be: minorities can reappropriate slurs if it empowers them or even if it just humors them ??? I think it's funny when fellow gays sarcastically say "Hey faggot" to me. But it wouldn't be so funny if, say, my heterosexual boss said it. Sorry, straight people: you don't get to say "faggot." (I can still be fired for being gay in most U.S. states, so you still have the better end of the bargain.) Speech codes are one of the many social devices that keep us from all murdering each other with our bare hands in the grocery aisle. But speech codes deeply offend conservatives, which is the point Ann Coulter was making when she said this last week: "I was going to have a few comments about the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards. But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot.'" Pretty much everyone in mainstream politics, right and left, then condemned her. Coulter is very good at sparking these controversies. She does it once or twice a year, to the great benefit of her fame and book sales (you can read my fuller take on the last Coulter explosion, regarding 9/11 widows here. Coulter is heterosexual, so I suppose I should condemn her as well. But note that she was using the word "faggot" with virtual quote marks around it. Surely all of us are allowed to do that ??? just the way I used the N word in quote marks above. She didn't say "John Edwards is a faggot." She would never say that ??? not because she respects the rights of gays to full equality before the law (she doesn't) ??? but because it wouldn't be funny. Coulter wants to make people laugh more than anything; she is, as I have argued here, a right-wing ironist and comedienne as much as she is a political commentator.[/b] This is obvious if you watch her speak with the sound off ??? she is smiling or even giggling most of the time; she theatrically rolls her eyes; you can see her pause and toss her hair into a jaunty cant before delivering a punchline. We don't read her body language the way we normally do because the words she is uttering are so peremptory and shocking. If we did, we would put her in the same league as Bill Maher or Jackie Mason, not the dry policy analysts who are sometimes pitted against her on cable-news shows. I have interviewed both Coulter and Edwards in the past, and I'm pretty sure the attention her comments have drawn pleases both of them, at least a little. (Well, it pleases Ann a great deal; I wonder if she can now charge an extra $5,000 for her next speaking engagement...) Edwards got some free media, his first since the Obama-Clinton standoff began in earnest; he is also using the incident to raise money, something Coulter has noted with glee on her website. I do have one complaint with Coulter's joke: It wasn't that funny. Edwards is many things ??? a little dull, wrong on Iraq, hopelessly reductive on the economy (there are many more than two Americas). But he doesn't seem the least bit gay to me. Coulter has at least one close gay friend, and when I was reporting my profile of her, she always remembered to ask about my partner at the time. She is always trying to get me to go with her to the Halloween parade in Manhattan's West Village, which is the second gayest event in New York City after the Pride parade. So I'm not sure why she thought it would be funny to target a gay joke at Edwards. But then again she doesn't need her semiannual cadenzas of outrage to be funny: she just needs us to condemn them, louder and louder every time.
Uh I'm asking you, then, to explain why a 'fringe element' was invited to speak immediately after a high-profile republican presidential candidate at a high-profile event like Conservative Political Action Conference.
Gotcha....I didn't realize it was my "job" to respond to all the posts here......I have no idea other than she's a big name(as a result of her media attention), gets lots of press for the sole reason that she says outrageous things.
If you saw the WHOLE "speech" she made, it was nothing more than lame one-liners that apparently some people see as "comedy".
As I've said here a billion times, both of the political parties do nothing but pander to extreme segemnts of their base and neither represent the majority of our population.
Since I support neither, I'll defend neither.
But I question the BS put out there by Ms. Malkin that Coulter is "very popular" and simply asked if anyone ever met even one person who claims to like and support her??
I've never spoken to a person who likes Ann Coulter, who agrees with Ann Coulter or who would fuck Ann Coulter.
And apparently no one else here has either
well, that's because (a) you are smart guy and (b) we on the strut are not exactly a representative sample of the US population.
explain why a 'fringe element' was invited to speak immediately after a high-profile republican presidential candidate at a high-profile event like Conservative Political Action Conference. And why her homophobic comment was met with exuberant applause
exactly. truth is she is FAR from fringe. peep her soundscans.
I've never spoken to a person who likes Ann Coulter, who agrees with Ann Coulter or who would fuck Ann Coulter.
And apparently no one else here has either
well, that's because (a) you are smart guy and (b) we on the strut are not exactly a representative sample of the US population.
explain why a 'fringe element' was invited to speak immediately after a high-profile republican presidential candidate at a high-profile event like Conservative Political Action Conference. And why her homophobic comment was met with exuberant applause
exactly. truth is she is FAR from fringe. peep her soundscans.
I know this is shocking....but I actually spoke to someone once away from SS.
And I assume the rest of you do too.
Yet no one seems to have ever met a Coulter fan??
Or do you just suspect no one would admit to being a Coulter fan??
I think Guzzo's article sums it up pretty well....outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, a comedienne, although not a very funny one.
But actually representing peoples values???....no one I know.
I know this is shocking....but I actually spoke to someone once away from SS.
And I assume the rest of you do too.
hahaha I wouldn't assume that around here!
point taken though. though I think the Salon article was trying to say that even though people may not agree with everything she says, those in the conservative movement would never really disavow her completely. indeed, she continues to be invited to speak alongside Republican Presidential hopefuls after "fag" and "raghead"" slurs of the past.
The fact is that powerful institutions are more than happy to give Coulter screen/podium time. Whether or not there's a mass movement of people who love Coulter is besides the point when HER ACCESS TO MEDIA exposure is quantifiably significant.
The point of the Salon post isn't that people like Coulter - the person. They like the venom of her comments, her willingness to talk shit. I mean, I don't know many people "like" the average talk show host but they LIKE THE SHOW because it's a forum for their views.
Don't confuse personal distaste for Coulter with a repudiation of what she has to say or the function she serves within the conservative movement.
Coulter will become a has-been the moment her worth as a firebrand is exhausted (or if she slips up in some major, Foley-esque way). Until that point however, she'll exercise a disproportionate amount of power as a media figure regardless of what the grassroots actually thinks of her.
ODub, It is pretty hard to have fluid discourse on a BBS but let me throw this out there....
The ultimate goal of any politician and political party is to obtain power.
You obtain power by getting people to vote for you.
So rather than taking Coulter, and folks like her at face value, I have to try to determine why a politician and political party would purposefully and continuously alienate people that could be potential voters.
Let's look specifically at the Coulter/Edwards faggot episode.
Why would a Presidential candidate and his supporting party invite someone like Coulter, who has a track record of saying outrageously offensive things, to speak on their behalf??
1) They are stupid - This is unfortunately what most people who were offended by Coulter think. Make no mistake, politicians did not get their power by being stupid. They get it through manipulation of people's feelings and pocketbooks. Stupid people can't acheive this in a pre-planned strategized way.
2) They are incapable of disguising or hiding their bigotry - These are politicians, every move they make and every word they speak has a purpose. They know what to say and when to say it, if they didn't, their political career would have never taken off. They might make a mistake and have a slip of the tongue, but this was obviously not the case here.
3) They are trying to appeal to a specific segment of the voting public - This one, on the surface almost sounds logical. But let's face the facts, anyone who already thought, or agreed that Edwards was a "Faggot" was already going to vote Republican. There is no need to court these people.
4) It's in their best interest to keep the country divided - BINGO!!!!!!! This is the M.O. that politicians, Dems and Reps alike, have masterfully used over the last 20 years. There is only "X" amount of power to go around and by keeping the citizens divided the politicians maintain all of it. If the people of this country moved closer to middle ground and actually worked together to solve the problems we face, the PEOPLE would have power. "United we Stand, Divided we Fall" and the direction of our two parties is to move further apart, subsequently assuring they have all the power. And consequently not solving a damn thing.
This is why Barack is somewhat appealing to me. He seems to be willing to move the two parties closer together, and I think that scares the shit out of the Bush/Clinton politicos.
When people are able to look beyond the smokescreens that these parties BOTH create, sometimes in unison, these politicians will start to lose their power.
A great example of this was the fluke election that put Jesse Ventura in the Governor's seat. The morning after he won both parties were shitting their pants. People had actually thought for themselves, and that's the first step towwards the downfall of this game they play with our lives. Shortly thereafter BOTH parties did their best to "recruit" Ventura. And when that failed, they BOTH worked towards discrediting him and making sure he accomplished very little.
And as long as the Left is screaming about Coulter's faggot remarks and the Right is screaming about Maher's Assassination comments, they have us right where they want us. Pointing fingers at each other, and not at them.
4) It's in their best interest to keep the country divided - BINGO!!!!!!!
Yeah Rock - that was kind of the point that Salon piece was making (not the only point, but central to it).
Don't you think the mentality often displayed here confirms that it's working??
The Salon article of course pointed out that the RIGHT wants to keep the Country divided, but it's happening on both sides and I think the staunch supporters of the Right and the Left refuse to recognize or admit that they perpetuate the same exact thing they accuse their opponents of doing.
I've never met a person that liked Coulter but she's had several best selling books so she obviously has a public. The forum in which she made the "fag" comment was the Conservative Political Action Committee, which is a conservative lobbying group so she was speaking to the faithful and giving one of her typical shit talking speeches which she knew would go over well and it did.
I heard an author once breakdown his idea of the conservative media and people like Coulter. His thesis was that conservatives were shut out of the mainstream political discourse for so long with the ascendency of liberalism after FDR in the 1940s that they started forming their own alternative media outlets such as talk radio shows and conserverative newspapers.
American politics always goes in cycles so when conservativism came back in the 1980s with Reagan and still continues to be the dominant political discourse, the conservatives were able to add their own network, Fox, plus all kinds of TV talk shows on other networks, etc.
Besides getting these new outlets, they also took a new view of the media and its purposes. To them the media was overwhelmingly liberal and therefore biased against conservatives. The whole journalistic method of just writing about facts, to them, was a liberal cover. When they gained media ascendency therefore, they didn't believe that you needed to follow that model. Rather they were going to express their opinions openly and proudly. Hence Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, etc. etc. etc. don't really deal with reporting what just happened, rather they are mouthpieces for their conservative ideas. Fox News lets you know that they are pro-Republican, etc.
I think that the Rush/Coulter tool is used more because it's what most outrages the opposition rather than it truly representing a widely held morality(or lack thereof) of people who vote Republican??.
I think that the Rush/Coulter tool is used more because it's what most outrages the opposition rather than it truly representing a widely held morality(or lack thereof) of people who vote Republican??.
And the Left use the same gimmick.
Well I think in part that's what they have become, especially Coulter, because that's her whole schtick (I'm going to say as much outrages stuff as possible to keep my face in the news), but when they started I think they were expressing some widely held ideas by conservatives. Afterall, at first ONLY conservatives were listening to them, and not many others.
I think that the Rush/Coulter tool is used more because it's what most outrages the opposition rather than it truly representing a widely held morality(or lack thereof) of people who vote Republican??.
And the Left use the same gimmick.
Well...I don't know. Someone like AL Franken really isn't as huge an asshole as Coulter.
Well...I don't know. Someone like AL Franken really isn't as huge an asshole as Coulter.
i met al franken last year at a book signing and i gotta say... he is a really down to earth guy. nice dude! also- he is funny as hell, passionate about progressive politics and smart. i think these are some reasons people on the right hate this guy. he isn't a stiff liberal ala al gore that they can paint as out of touch with "real 'mericans".
I think that the Rush/Coulter tool is used more because it's what most outrages the opposition rather than it truly representing a widely held morality(or lack thereof) of people who vote Republican??.
And the Left use the same gimmick.
Well...I don't know. Someone like AL Franken really isn't as huge an asshole as Coulter.
yeah exactly.
Rock I appreciate your critical thinking, and your refusal to be taken in by either of the bullshit dominant political parties in this country.
but when it comes to hateful, divisive, misleading political commentary, no one's really fucking with the Republicans.
surely you must see a qualitative difference here.
Comments
Even on right wing radio talk shows in the heart of Texas the consensus is she is a foll.
Did you not read the article?
word. reminds me of a pre-election Peggy Noonan inerview when she remarked how John Kerry had "forgotten how to be a man" or some shit. she then proceeded -- as she always does -- to wax poetic about the glory days of testosterone-infused American politics under Reagan, blah, blah. there is definitely a weird cult of masculinity going on among these folks. creepy.
Yes....have you personally met an Ann Coulter fan??
I never have.
Another "talking head" assuring us that "she's popular" doesn't mean jackshit.
Rock why would I want to listen to your exception is the rule logic when you spend most of your time talking to boys half your age on the Internet.
You're 24??
Huh??? That was my response....I call bullshit that this person represents anything and anyone besides a fringe lunatic element of the far right.
I've never spoken to a person who likes Ann Coulter, who agrees with Ann Coulter or who would fuck Ann Coulter.
And apparently no one else here has either, yet you'd like us to believe that she represents a group of people that total approximately 50% of our population.
THAT's my response.....what kind of response were YOU looking for??
And why her homophobic comment was met with exuberant applause
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1596427,00.html
Ann Coulter's Funny That Way...[/b]
Monday, Mar. 05, 2007 By JOHN CLOUD
[i]Are straight people allowed to say "faggot"? Are white people allowed to say "nigger"? Generally no. Our unwritten speech codes require that those words be used only by gays and blacks, respectively (black gays can say both). Which is just as it should be: minorities can reappropriate slurs if it empowers them or even if it just humors them ??? I think it's funny when fellow gays sarcastically say "Hey faggot" to me. But it wouldn't be so funny if, say, my heterosexual boss said it. Sorry, straight people: you don't get to say "faggot." (I can still be fired for being gay in most U.S. states, so you still have the better end of the bargain.) Speech codes are one of the many social devices that keep us from all murdering each other with our bare hands in the grocery aisle.
But speech codes deeply offend conservatives, which is the point Ann Coulter was making when she said this last week: "I was going to have a few comments about the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards. But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot.'"
Pretty much everyone in mainstream politics, right and left, then condemned her. Coulter is very good at sparking these controversies. She does it once or twice a year, to the great benefit of her fame and book sales (you can read my fuller take on the last Coulter explosion, regarding 9/11 widows here.
Coulter is heterosexual, so I suppose I should condemn her as well. But note that she was using the word "faggot" with virtual quote marks around it. Surely all of us are allowed to do that ??? just the way I used the N word in quote marks above. She didn't say "John Edwards is a faggot." She would never say that ??? not because she respects the rights of gays to full equality before the law (she doesn't) ??? but because it wouldn't be funny. Coulter wants to make people laugh more than anything; she is, as I have argued here, a right-wing ironist and comedienne as much as she is a political commentator.[/b] This is obvious if you watch her speak with the sound off ??? she is smiling or even giggling most of the time; she theatrically rolls her eyes; you can see her pause and toss her hair into a jaunty cant before delivering a punchline. We don't read her body language the way we normally do because the words she is uttering are so peremptory and shocking. If we did, we would put her in the same league as Bill Maher or Jackie Mason, not the dry policy analysts who are sometimes pitted against her on cable-news shows.
I have interviewed both Coulter and Edwards in the past, and I'm pretty sure the attention her comments have drawn pleases both of them, at least a little. (Well, it pleases Ann a great deal; I wonder if she can now charge an extra $5,000 for her next speaking engagement...) Edwards got some free media, his first since the Obama-Clinton standoff began in earnest; he is also using the incident to raise money, something Coulter has noted with glee on her website.
I do have one complaint with Coulter's joke: It wasn't that funny. Edwards is many things ??? a little dull, wrong on Iraq, hopelessly reductive on the economy (there are many more than two Americas). But he doesn't seem the least bit gay to me. Coulter has at least one close gay friend, and when I was reporting my profile of her, she always remembered to ask about my partner at the time. She is always trying to get me to go with her to the Halloween parade in Manhattan's West Village, which is the second gayest event in New York City after the Pride parade. So I'm not sure why she thought it would be funny to target a gay joke at Edwards. But then again she doesn't need her semiannual cadenzas of outrage to be funny: she just needs us to condemn them, louder and louder every time.
Gotcha....I didn't realize it was my "job" to respond to all the posts here......I have no idea other than she's a big name(as a result of her media attention), gets lots of press for the sole reason that she says outrageous things.
If you saw the WHOLE "speech" she made, it was nothing more than lame one-liners that apparently some people see as "comedy".
As I've said here a billion times, both of the political parties do nothing but pander to extreme segemnts of their base and neither represent the majority of our population.
Since I support neither, I'll defend neither.
But I question the BS put out there by Ms. Malkin that Coulter is "very popular" and simply asked if anyone ever met even one person who claims to like and support her??
well, that's because (a) you are smart guy and (b) we on the strut are not exactly a representative sample of the US population.
exactly. truth is she is FAR from fringe. peep her soundscans.
I know this is shocking....but I actually spoke to someone once away from SS.
And I assume the rest of you do too.
Yet no one seems to have ever met a Coulter fan??
Or do you just suspect no one would admit to being a Coulter fan??
I think Guzzo's article sums it up pretty well....outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, a comedienne, although not a very funny one.
But actually representing peoples values???....no one I know.
hahaha I wouldn't assume that around here!
point taken though. though I think the Salon article was trying to say that even though people may not agree with everything she says, those in the conservative movement would never really disavow her completely. indeed, she continues to be invited to speak alongside Republican Presidential hopefuls after "fag" and "raghead"" slurs of the past.
I must have missed the statistics.
The fact is that powerful institutions are more than happy to give Coulter screen/podium time. Whether or not there's a mass movement of people who love Coulter is besides the point when HER ACCESS TO MEDIA exposure is quantifiably significant.
The point of the Salon post isn't that people like Coulter - the person. They like the venom of her comments, her willingness to talk shit. I mean, I don't know many people "like" the average talk show host but they LIKE THE SHOW because it's a forum for their views.
Don't confuse personal distaste for Coulter with a repudiation of what she has to say or the function she serves within the conservative movement.
Coulter will become a has-been the moment her worth as a firebrand is exhausted (or if she slips up in some major, Foley-esque way). Until that point however, she'll exercise a disproportionate amount of power as a media figure regardless of what the grassroots actually thinks of her.
It is pretty hard to have fluid discourse on a BBS but let me throw this out there....
The ultimate goal of any politician and political party is to obtain power.
You obtain power by getting people to vote for you.
So rather than taking Coulter, and folks like her at face value, I have to try to determine why a politician and political party would purposefully and continuously alienate people that could be potential voters.
Let's look specifically at the Coulter/Edwards faggot episode.
Why would a Presidential candidate and his supporting party invite someone like Coulter, who has a track record of saying outrageously offensive things, to speak on their behalf??
1) They are stupid - This is unfortunately what most people who were offended by Coulter think. Make no mistake, politicians did not get their power by being stupid. They get it through manipulation of people's feelings and pocketbooks. Stupid people can't acheive this in a pre-planned strategized way.
2) They are incapable of disguising or hiding their bigotry - These are politicians, every move they make and every word they speak has a purpose. They know what to say and when to say it, if they didn't, their political career would have never taken off. They might make a mistake and have a slip of the tongue, but this was obviously not the case here.
3) They are trying to appeal to a specific segment of the voting public - This one, on the surface almost sounds logical. But let's face the facts, anyone who already thought, or agreed that Edwards was a "Faggot" was already going to vote Republican. There is no need to court these people.
4) It's in their best interest to keep the country divided - BINGO!!!!!!! This is the M.O. that politicians, Dems and Reps alike, have masterfully used over the last 20 years. There is only "X" amount of power to go around and by keeping the citizens divided the politicians maintain all of it. If the people of this country moved closer to middle ground and actually worked together to solve the problems we face, the PEOPLE would have power. "United we Stand, Divided we Fall" and the direction of our two parties is to move further apart, subsequently assuring they have all the power. And consequently not solving a damn thing.
This is why Barack is somewhat appealing to me. He seems to be willing to move the two parties closer together, and I think that scares the shit out of the Bush/Clinton politicos.
When people are able to look beyond the smokescreens that these parties BOTH create, sometimes in unison, these politicians will start to lose their power.
A great example of this was the fluke election that put Jesse Ventura in the Governor's seat. The morning after he won both parties were shitting their pants. People had actually thought for themselves, and that's the first step towwards the downfall of this game they play with our lives. Shortly thereafter BOTH parties did their best to "recruit" Ventura. And when that failed, they BOTH worked towards discrediting him and making sure he accomplished very little.
And as long as the Left is screaming about Coulter's faggot remarks and the Right is screaming about Maher's Assassination comments, they have us right where they want us. Pointing fingers at each other, and not at them.
Yeah Rock - that was kind of the point that Salon piece was making (not the only point, but central to it).
Don't you think the mentality often displayed here confirms that it's working??
The Salon article of course pointed out that the RIGHT wants to keep the Country divided, but it's happening on both sides and I think the staunch supporters of the Right and the Left refuse to recognize or admit that they perpetuate the same exact thing they accuse their opponents of doing.
I've never met a person that liked Coulter but she's had several best selling books so she obviously has a public. The forum in which she made the "fag" comment was the Conservative Political Action Committee, which is a conservative lobbying group so she was speaking to the faithful and giving one of her typical shit talking speeches which she knew would go over well and it did.
I heard an author once breakdown his idea of the conservative media and people like Coulter. His thesis was that conservatives were shut out of the mainstream political discourse for so long with the ascendency of liberalism after FDR in the 1940s that they started forming their own alternative media outlets such as talk radio shows and conserverative newspapers.
American politics always goes in cycles so when conservativism came back in the 1980s with Reagan and still continues to be the dominant political discourse, the conservatives were able to add their own network, Fox, plus all kinds of TV talk shows on other networks, etc.
Besides getting these new outlets, they also took a new view of the media and its purposes. To them the media was overwhelmingly liberal and therefore biased against conservatives. The whole journalistic method of just writing about facts, to them, was a liberal cover. When they gained media ascendency therefore, they didn't believe that you needed to follow that model. Rather they were going to express their opinions openly and proudly. Hence Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, etc. etc. etc. don't really deal with reporting what just happened, rather they are mouthpieces for their conservative ideas. Fox News lets you know that they are pro-Republican, etc.
And the Left use the same gimmick.
Well I think in part that's what they have become, especially Coulter, because that's her whole schtick (I'm going to say as much outrages stuff as possible to keep my face in the news), but when they started I think they were expressing some widely held ideas by conservatives. Afterall, at first ONLY conservatives were listening to them, and not many others.
Well...I don't know. Someone like AL Franken really isn't as huge an asshole as Coulter.
yeah exactly.
Rock I appreciate your critical thinking, and your refusal to be taken in by either of the bullshit dominant political parties in this country.
but when it comes to hateful, divisive, misleading political commentary, no one's really fucking with the Republicans.
surely you must see a qualitative difference here.