Anne Coulter, Fruitcake

[RBS]

I FINALLY had a chance to see this woman speak on CNN tonight.

What's all the hullabaloo about? She's obviously an attention-seeking nutjob, who if she believes what she's saying about Joe McCarthy being a great American patriot is a grade A flake.

If she doesn't really believe it, then she's a manipulative, media-loving opportunist. And anorexic, too!

[moneyp]

That little fruitcake. That little fruitcake. I said she's a fruitcake.

[Chris A]

She is all those things...and more!

[Tanager]

Looking at Ann Coulter makes me think she needs to eat a few fruitcakes, drink a sixer, and gobble down a few steaks. Sorry, Scott.

[Ron Thorne]

No need for an apology, Tanager. I laughed my ass off at your suggestions, all good ones. Well, figuratively.

This thread should prove to be most entertaining.

Just seeing Ann Coulter makes we wanna hurl, then when she opens her self-important mouth ...

Oh yeah, and she's the Anti-Viagra with two legs. That's it ... Little Annie Anti-Viagra. That has a nice ring to it.



"Yeah, I'm smart and hot! What about it?"

[Uli]

Me too tonite saw her for the first time on CNN. A fruitcake & nutcase. And she sed she is not extreme.

[Monte Smith]

It's unfortunate when The Opposition has all the facts at their disposal. Ann's political enemies have been able to refute her recent book point by point by yelling, "Fruitcake." That gives them the upper hand both from a philosophical and historical point of view.

[moneyp]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
It's unfortunate when The Opposition has all the facts at their disposal.

But Monte, she *is* a fruitcake!

The Opposition Will Be Capitalised!

[Monte Smith]

Oh. Oh. I get it. This is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If I say the wrong thing, the others will attack me. Yes, yes. Ann Coulter is a fruitcake. Yes, that is a strong argument worthy of the progressive principles we all claim. Yes. Yes, Katherine Harris wears too much make up. Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. Judge, lest thy arguments be judged.

[RainyDay]

God forgive me for slamming another woman on her looks but Coulter looks like an anorectic stand-in for Roy Rogers' horse Trigger. And she makes about as much sense when she paws the ground and whinnies.

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by RainyDay
God forgive me for slamming another woman on her looks but....

Relax RD. It only counts as a foul when Republicans do it. Put that in the same column with sexual harrassment and burning a cross.

[Ron Thorne]

Forget Hollywood references, Monte. Do you categorically deny that, despite your political leanings, "Ann Coulter is a fruitcake", "Katherine Harris wears too much make up" or that "Rush Limbaugh is/was a big fat idiot"?

Huh?

[Monte Smith]

Huh? I deny that these are examples of intelligent criticism, Ron.

Was it two weeks ago that I was reading a jaw-droppingly ignorant article by James Traub in the NYT Magazine to the effect that Democrats were a failure of a party because they were too nice to counter Republican pettiness and that their arguments were too subtle to be expressed in mere diatribe?

Bwa ha hah. Thanks for supporting my reading that James Traub was blind to the actual "intellectual" life of his political comrades, the petty unselfknowin' bastages.

[Ron Thorne]

Who said anything about "intelligence"?

Granted, the terms "fruitcake", "too much makeup" and "big fat idiot" hardly rise to the Republican take on "intelligence". But, then ...

[BFrank]

I don't care enough about this woman to read the article, but since there's a thread, I thought I would toss it in. It's from yesterday's NY Times.



July 20, 2003
Blond Lightning on the Far Right
By DAVID CARR

A loud, friendly argument was preoccupying a table at Bella Blu on the Upper East Side. Over pasta and a fair amount of white wine, the group of seven was shouting down someone who suggested that the Bush administration lacked a clear plan to wage peace in Iraq. It was the kind of self-satisfied, opinionated crowd that validates Manhattan life and provokes antipathy from the rest of the country.

The startlingly thin, pretty woman at the end of the table listened, but contented herself with a plate of lobster ravioli for most of the dinner, smiling quietly when a particularly tangy bit of rhetoric landed on the table. When dinner was finished, she ordered dessert and abruptly switched seats. And while she dug into her chocolate soufflé, Ann Coulter served up the red meat, reprising her day job as a paid banshee.

"Liberals don't care what is going on over there," she said, showing a fine set of teeth. "They want us to lose, they want our opponents to triumph, and they want Bush out of the White House."

After a five-minute filibuster, she leaned back in her chair, her work done. Ms. Coulter, 39, needs to husband her resources. Since "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism" (Crown Forum) was published at the end of last month, she has given 160 television, radio and newspaper interviews.

With a television face and a politician's instincts, Ms. Coulter has made a career out of career-ending statments. ("We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," she wrote of Muslims on the National Review Web site after Sept. 11 in a column that prompted her departure.) "Treason" is no less inflammatory. In it, Ms. Coulter reaches back into history to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the ultimate tar baby of American politics, and hugs him like a teddy bear. Senator McCarthy, she has come to believe, is a misunderstood patriot who saved the country from itself.

The unvarnished id of American conservatism, Ms. Coulter has long been a target of anyone to the left of Patrick J. Buchanan, but the wholesale indictment in "Treason" of Democrats as traitors has drawn withering fire even from fellow outriders on the right. David Horowitz, a Coulter ally who picked up her column for FrontPageMagazine.com after it was dumped by the National Review Online, assailed the book on his site, saying it "compromised her case and undermined her attempt to correct a record that desperately needs correction." Writing in The Sunday Times of London, Andrew Sullivan suggested that she "plays directly into the hands of the left by defending the tactics of Joe McCarthy." And Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal suggested, "The senator — who knew something about the art of outrage merchandising — would have understood the latest of his public advocates."

"I love all these conversions on the road to Damascus," Ms. Coulter shot back. "Many of these people never supported me anyway."

She is used to being disowned by former allies. She has been fired by MSNBC more times than George Steinbrenner canned Billy Martin, and she has come to grips with life as a single girl, personally and professionally, endlessly peddling her Lethally Blond franchise to a reluctant media that finds her reprehensible, but not resistible.

"I was hired and fired, I don't know, four or five times," she said, sitting in Bryant Park on Thursday. "They had an idea they wanted one liberal, one conservative, one moderate. And then every time I'd say something conservative, they would tell me that was over the top. I love that phraseology. I was like a dog listening to a high-pitched noise. `Over the top. Bad dog, bad dog.' "

Ms. Coulter cultivates antipathy with the prowess of Martha Stewart in an herb garden. Hatred moves units, and Ms. Coulter has the best-selling books to prove it. Her previous book, "Slander," spent weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and "Treason," a tendentious trip through American political history, is ranked No. 2 on the best-seller list today. Her sway with a narrow band of people who nonetheless number in the millions means she cannot be ignored.

"She has emerged as the top conservative voice of a new generation, and she has the sales to back it up," said Matt Drudge, the impresario behind the DrudgeReport on the Web. "And just because she is disguising it in a "Sex and the City" persona doesn't mean she is not an important political figure."

As a full-time book flogger, Ms. Coulter rivals in ubiquity Drew Barrymore's run-up to the "Charlie's Angels" sequel. At times, she almost cops to being a self-drawn cartoon.

She arrived for an interview on "Scarborough Country" on MSNBC last week swinging a pink Betsey Johnson shopping bag. Inside was a gift for a reporter, a Barbielike Ann Coulter action figure, which is in development. "When they're finished with it, it will talk," she said. Of course it will.

The possibility of adventure hangs near when Ms. Coulter appears on mainstream television, and Diane Sawyer looked nervous at the end of last month to see Ms. Coulter seated beside her. On "Today" last year to promote "Slander," Ms. Coulter tangled with Katie Couric, a television personality she had christened in her book as "the affable Eva Braun of morning television." Ms. Couric introduced her guest as a "right-wing telebimbo," and things went downhill from there. The segment ended just about when Ms. Couric, America's sweetheart, seemed ready to leap from her chair and choke Ms. Coulter, America's other woman.

Ms. Sawyer all but used a tongs to pick up "Treason" and struggled for something polite to say about the author, finally concluding, "She is, of course, so successful."

Ms. Coulter batted aside the compliment and corrected Ms. Sawyer's introduction, pointing out that she had mixed up the subtitles of the two books. "This book is about treachery," she said. "The last book was about lies," she added, leaving out "Duh," but implying it with a laugh.

The interview ended with Ms. Sawyer observing that Ms. Coulter would be slugging it out on the best-seller lists with Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton. "She has a three-to-one pound advantage over me," Ms. Coulter pointed out. Ms. Sawyer looked as if her head might fly off. (Ms. Coulter later said that she was mostly referring to Ms. Clinton's hefty book.)

For many of the country's elites — the kind who dine on hand-turned pastas on the Upper East Side — Ms. Coulter seems to be a puppet short a few strings: fun to watch, but in danger of tipping over. Out in those middle places that cable news addresses, however, she is a visionary and truth-teller, as well as a babe.

Ms. Coulter's beauty is not cuddly and accessible. A quick look at the cover of "Treason," with her black dress an etched hourglass against a white background, suggests she has the fat content of a can of Diet Coke.

Yet her looks are undoubtedly part of her draw. "Good Lord, lookin' good, Ann," wrote one appreciative visitor to her Web site, which includes 25 pictures of Ms. Coulter accessorized, for example, by a gun and Ronald Reagan.

Although she is frequently tagged as being a sex object for older men on talk radio, her publicists say her appearances on campus produce the most rabid response. At an appearance at Six Flags in New Jersey, she was swarmed by admirers who circled the table where she was interviewed and hung around for hours.

But though she often extols the virtues of places like Kansas City and claims to love the hoi polloi, she seems to like them best at the other end of the television set. Take her taste in ski hills. "Vail was going more family-oriented," she complained, recalling a time when she avoided Aspen because it was full of celebrities from Los Angeles. "I'm sitting enjoying my margarita in the hot tub, and these kids rolled this enormous snowball, like bigger than my entire body, heaved it in the hot tub. And I stormed up to our room and I told my skiing partner: `O.K., that's it. No more Vail. We're going to Aspen.' Who am I kidding? I love superficial L.A. people."

In many ways, she is what she impales: a child of privilege from New Canaan, Conn., with a better understanding of polo than the subtleties of professional wrestling. Bob Guccione Jr., the owner of the now-defunct Gear magazine and son of a porn magnate, dated her for a time.

"I don't believe that the politics are real," Mr. Guccione said. "It is a product. If she was reasoned and balanced, she knows no one would care. By being completely outrageous, she has created a broad spectrum of people who follow her."

"She is out on a limb and bouncing up and down," he added. "I think she knows it's going to snap, but I don't think she cares in the least."

The gadfly who gives voice to the people in flyover land lives more like Carrie Bradshaw than Carry Nation. She drinks, she smokes and dates energetically. And she has friends, many of whom do not share Ms. Coulter's taste for McCarthyist bon mots. Ms. Coulter has friends who work in unions, friends whom she has kept dear since high school and friends who do what she does, like Bill Maher, but use their airtime to suggest that she and her fellow travelers are a threat to the Republic.

She indicated in one profile that she was friendly with the comedian Al Franken, but Mr. Franken does not share the warm feeling.

"I consider her to be a political person who gets her value added from deception and invective," he said, noting that he is writing a book that will do some deconstruction on Ms. Coulter and fellow conservatives called "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

David Brock, a former friend and recovering conservative, said a profession of inimical opinions leads to "an inflated view of self, alongside a secret or not-so-secret desire to invite scorn and persecution."

"I think that she has made a mistake with this book," he added. "Where do you go next? Holocaust denier? Slavery defender?"

Although she chose to lease an apartment in Miami this year to be close both to the beach and Mr. Drudge, who is among her best friends, she keeps an apartment in Manhattan with an address "more classified than Dick Cheney's location" because she has had trouble with overzealous fans.

New York holds a certain perverse appeal for Ms. Coulter. Full of the kind of overeducated sons and daughters of privilege she deplores and a mayor whom she sees as a crusader against civil liberties, it is an ideal place for her particular kind of target practice.

"If you have a fabulous amount of wealth and you can do anything you want and what you really long to do is have control over other people, that's really not a good sign," she said. "I'm waiting for Michael Bloomberg to insist on exercise once a day for all New Yorkers. You must abandon cars, ride bikes to work and have a warm glass of milk before retiring at night."

[Ron Thorne]

Thanks, BFrank ... I think.

[Chris A]

So, Monte, are we to understand that you agree with the Coulter woman regarding Joe McCarthy? Given your seeming inability to distinguish between fact and fantasy, it would not surprise me to learn that you see McCarthy as an honorable man (ditto his creepy assistant, Roy Cohen), but I would like to hear it from you.

[BFrank]

No prob, Ron.

Your photo was better. Although, I'm not sure which one is scarier.

[Salvador Dali Lama]

from what I've read, which was a handful of her editorials about a year ago, she's just a hateful bitch.

she seems to embody everything bad about the left, but on the right. ie. reactionary horseshit, name-calling instead of fact-citing, the same slander (a pun? i guess.) that she accuses democrats of.

and rather than the old "well, its ugly but its got to be done" slant on war that most republicans I've talked to espouse, she seems to just be down for some straight up war mongering.

maybe I'm wrong, but these are the impressions I get.

its cool she shat on katie couric though. That beesh is awful.

[john williams]

[Ron Thorne]

Originally posted by Salvador Dali Lama
from what I've read, which was a handful of her editorials about a year ago, she's just a hateful bitch.

she seems to embody everything bad about the left, but on the right. ie. reactionary horseshit, name-calling instead of fact-citing, the same slander (a pun? i guess.) that she accuses democrats of.

and rather than the old "well, its ugly but its got to be done" slant on war that most republicans I've talked to espouse, she seems to just be down for some straight up war mongering.

maybe I'm wrong, but these are the impressions I get.

its cool she shat on katie couric though. That beesh is awful.

Wow, I'm at an interesting perspective,

Originally posted by bluenoter
Ron--It certainly is!
And now to savor this thread.

You're very welcome, bn! It was my pleasure.

Yes, I used Photoshop, though it was very brief. I simply reduced the size to 400 X 300 pixels, as required.

[Uli]

Originally posted by Monte Smith
It's unfortunate when The Opposition has all the facts at their disposal. Ann's political enemies have been able to refute her recent book point by point by yelling, "Fruitcake." That gives them the upper hand both from a philosophical and historical point of view.

bwahaha. the internet is too funny!

[Ron Thorne]

Thank you!

[hornplayer]

Originally posted by RainyDay
God forgive me for slamming another woman on her looks but Coulter looks like an anorectic stand-in for Roy Rogers' horse Trigger. And she makes about as much sense when she paws the ground and whinnies.

ROTFLMAO!!!

Monte: are you wishing for a return of Joe McCarthy??? Republican is one thing... Fascist is another. Entirely.

[Clay Fink]

"Liberals don't care what is going on over there," she said, showing a fine set of teeth. "They want us to lose, they want our opponents to triumph, and they want Bush out of the White House."

What's so bad about that?

[Monte Smith]

What is McCarthyism? If it is throwing low blows at your opposite political numbers and depending more on bile and menace than thoughtful argument, I'm afraid McCarthyism is a phenomenon we have with us always. So nobody has to "wish" for its return. The right may have given the practice its eponym, but the left have always been deft practitioners of the art. This thread is a good enough example of people reaching lazily for the bluntest instruments at hand with which to beat a person they disagree with.

If we are talking about historical McCarthyism, I doubt we are much in danger from that. Historically, McCarthy has an impolitic figure who pointed out that there were Soviet agents and communists in the Truman administration when there were, in point of fact, Soviet agents and communists in the Truman administration. Does that make McCarthy and his creepy asst, Roy Cohn (you were close, Chris A.), an "honorable" man? No, it just makes McCarthy more right than the popular history paints him. The popular history or the flattering moral fairy tale of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Popular history, after all, often has McCarthy responsible for hunting communists in Hollywood at the behest of HUAC.

I suppose my weak presentation of some perspective on this issue will get me branded a McCarthyite. Please, don't anybody shake a cigarette at me and ask me am I now or have I ever been a defender of Joe McCarthy. I think the surface equalty of calling your foe a communist and calling your foe a McCarthyite is too apparent. But happy huntin'.

[Tanager]

Any fans of Coulter would do well to read:

Spinsanity on Coulter's book _Treason_

And no, this isn't some liberal shill site - they are happy to skewer blowhards across the spectrum.

[Chris A]

Monte, we have not seen you condemn Coulter for her embrace of America's pre-eminent witch hunter.

[RBS]

Calling Anne Coulter a fruitcake is a bit removed from McCarthy spewing forth about Communists everywhere.

And she is a fruitcake. A nutty one.

Lou Dobbs, showing a nice amount of restraint, almost started to laugh when she started raging (and I do mean raging) about McCarthy being a patriot and how the "liberals" housed Communists. This is a woman who lives on the edge of insanity and psychosis.

And if you want to go straight to "facts...." well, I'm at work, and don't have the time right now, but her "facts" are easily dispensed with.

FRUITCAKE!

[Chris A]

Showing remarkable restraint, Katie Couric called Coulter a "right-wing telebimbo."

One of this woman's greatest early promoters was Jerry Rivers (Geraldo), which says a lot, IMO. Both are tabloid creatures of no substance.