Is it just me or is Ann Coulter slipping?
I’m used to her making proclamations that have no basis in fact. Her greatest hits include only the finest screeching hyperbole from the conservative sphere - All liberals are trying to destroy America; The only way out of crisis in the Middle East is to destroy the countries and convert everyone to Christianity because it worked so well when we tried it during the crusades; things would have been better if Timothy McVeigh had just blown up the
New York Times. In fact, it’s hard not to use Coulter’s name in a sentence and not include the word “vitriol” at least once. I’m pretty sure that it’s a requirement, actually.
So I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised at her latest attempt to smear the American opinion against a liberal, but this time, it just seems like she struck a bit low. Coulter went on CNBC’s
The Big Idea yesterday and said that Bill Clinton is gay. Her evidence? Her self-reported memorization of the Starr Report and his “rampant promiscuity.”
Coulter always goes for a below the belt hit, but this is different. For the first time, she doesn’t sound like a harpy. She sounds like a 10th grader. Add that to her statements about the widows of September 11th enjoying their husbands’ deaths and it all just seems to me to paint a picture of that poor girl in geography class who couldn’t get anyone to like her.
It goes without saying that I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with anything Ann Coulter has said. I might be persuaded to side with her if she offered a particularly well-prepared argument that the sky is blue, but it would take some doing. And while I’ve often thought she was off base, hysterical, and frankly a piss-poor writer, I’ve never really thought that she wasn’t a player in the political field. Now, I’m beginning to second-guess myself. When one of the major voices of your movement resorts to the name-calling antics of an elementary school playground, you have to wonder how much shelf life your movement has left.
Could she really not think of a better insult to Clinton? He’s a philanderer, sure. A narcissist, definitely. Arguably, something of a socio-path in the clinical definition of the term. But resorting to questioning his sexual orientation just seems beyond the pale for me. Its something that children do, and while politicians often act like children, they at least do so from behind the veneer of adulthood. They come off as adults being childish, whereas Coulter just came off as a child trying her hardest to stay that way.
Modern right-wingers have no problem laying any blame they can find on Clinton. He’s been blamed for as much that’s gone wrong with the country after he left office as he was while he still resided in it. President Bush has insinuated that it was Clinton’s fault that 9/11 even happened because if only he had gone after Osama bin Laden (which, in point of fact, he did and the Republican-controlled congress called it “wagging the dog”) none of this would have happened. Clinton himself made his sex life fair game for the public debate, but this sort of insult is frankly beneath even Coulter herself.
Which all makes me wonder why it is that she said it. She can manage a better insult. She’s done it a thousand times over. In an interview with Time magazine last year, she said herself that she will keep an error in her book that’s funny over a truth that isn’t because she believes that this tactic does more to bring people around to her way of thinking. And while I agree her books and articles are far more entertainment than they are serious tomes, they still manage to at least take aim at those who are a serious threat to her and her party. Clinton can do nothing to the Republican Party that Ann Coulter will be able to address. Her venue is the public eye, not the cloistered halls of Washington movers and shakers.
My only solution is that Coulter is dried up. Even as new events emerge and Democrats continue to make fools of themselves trying to discuss those events on the world stage, she can’t manage a verbal barb that bests what you’d find in the girls’ bathroom at a high school prom. I’d say that’s too bad, but when your book titles include
Godless: The Church of Liberalism,
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, and
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, I’d paraphrase and say the fault, dear Ann, lies not in the stars but in ourselves. Also? Consider a different editor. There are just too many colons up there in those titles.
