Anne thrax needs an asslift.
Matthew X
profrv at nex.net.au
Sat Sep 7 11:29:20 PDT 2002
Is Human Uzi Ann Coulter 38 or 40 years old? And when she insists that
she's the former, is she telling a fib?
The right-wing media scourge who has been getting plenty of ink for her
best-selling book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right"
frequently scorches hapless reporters who dare write that she's no longer
in her thirties. Newsday's Aileen Jacobson who was planning to rely on
numerous published accounts, including People magazine's, that Coulter is
40 let her subject argue her into using the younger age in a recent
profile. "Media accounts that she's 40 are wrong, she maintains," Jacobson
wrote. But yesterday Jacobson told us: "I do believe that she is 40."
London Telegraph writer Toby Harnden, meanwhile, wrote in his July 19
piece: "An air of mystery surrounds Coulter's age. She says she is 38 but
her publicist puts her at 40. After the interview, she sends me an e-mail:
'I think you should go with one of the incorrect younger ages.' "
Ann Coulter: 38 and holding firm? (Dayna Smith - The Washington Post/File
Photo)
Our own investigation revealed that:
* Coulter's Connecticut driver's license lists her birth as December 1961.
* Her D.C. driver's license, acquired many years later, says she was born
in December 1963.
* The birth date on file at the New Canaan, Conn., voter registration
office is Dec. 8, 1961.
In an effort to clear up all this confusion, a member of The Post's crack
research team phoned the New Canaan registrar of voters, who chuckled,
checked his records and reported that Coulter registered to vote in 1980,
when presumably she was the legal minimum voting age of 18. That would make
her 40 today.
But when we reached Coulter, she predictably stuck to her guns. "It's like
the difference in being thrown off the 13th floor or the roof," she
e-mailed us. "So the upside is, I'm two years younger than at least some
newspapers have said I am, but the downside is, I'm still 38. Yikes!"
My only regret with Osama bin Laden is that he did not manage to kill every
member of the Wall Street Journal editorial staff."
"In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate
about [George W. Bush's stolen presidency].... Otherwise there would be
debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate.
MORE ABOUT...
Eric Alterman
Media Analysis
"We need to execute people like Ann Coulter in order to physically
intimidate conservatives, by making them realize that they can be killed
too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors."
First things first: Mr. Ashcroft, if you're there, I do not mean any of the
statements above to be taken literally. I do not mean them at all. None of
them. OK? What I do mean is to point out the incredible hypocrisy of those
on the right, the center and the "liberal media" who defend the lunatic
ravings of Ann Coulter, whether because she is "kidding" or because "the
left does the same thing." (For those who have been lucky enough to have
missed the Coultergeist of the past few months, the author of the summer's
number-one bestselling nonfiction book in America has--in language
identical to that above--expressed her regret that Timothy McVeigh did not
blow up the New York Times building, mused aloud whether Bill Clinton
should have been impeached or murdered, and called for the execution of
John Walker Lindh in order to intimidate liberals.)
It's degrading to have to write about Coulter again. As a pundit, she is
about on a par with Charles Manson, better suited to a lifelong stay in the
Connecticut Home for the Criminally Insane than for the host's seat on
Crossfire. Her books are filled with lies, slander and phony footnotes that
are themselves lies and slanders. Her very existence as a public figure is
an insult to our collective intelligence. I should really be writing about
the campaign by neocon chickenhawks to intimidate Howell Raines and the New
York Times on Iraq. But fortunately, John Judis and Nick Confessore have
taken responsibility for that, leaving me to the less ominous but more
baffling phenomenon of the bestselling Barbie-doll terrorist-apologist, who
continues to be celebrated by the very media she terms "retarded" and
guilty of "mass murder" while calling for their mass extinction by the
likes of her ideological comrade Timothy McVeigh.
Make no mistake. Coulter may routinely call for the murder of liberals, of
Arabs, of journalists, of the President, among many others. She may compare
adorable Katie Couric to Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and joke about
blowing up the Times building. But instead of ignoring, laughing at or,
perhaps most usefully, sedating her, we find Coulter's blond locks and bony
ass celebrated by talk-show bookers and gossip columnists--even a genuine
book reviewer--from coast to proverbial coast.
Do I exaggerate? While promoting her hysterical screed against
"liberals"--a category so large she occasionally includes, I kid you not,
Andrew Sullivan--this malevolent Twiggy with Tourette's was booked on
Today, Crossfire (as guest and guest host), Hardball, The Big Story With
John Gibson and countless other cable and radio programs. She was lovingly
profiled in Newsday, the New York Observer and the New York Times Sunday
Style section. She was the Boston Globe's honored guest at the White House
correspondents dinner. Her incitements to murder and terrorism have been
cheered and defended in the Wall Street Journal and National Review Online.
(The latter did so, moreover, despite her having termed its editors "girly
boys" and behaving, in the words of the website's editor, Jonah Goldberg,
"with a total lack of professionalism, friendship, and loyalty.") And her
publisher, Crown, says it has no plans to correct her lies in future
editions. Why should they care? Is anyone holding them accountable?
The slanderous nonsense she puts between hard covers, moreover, is selling
not only to the caveman crowd, it's also receiving praise in such
respectable outlets as the liberal LA Times Book Review and being quoted as
constitutional gospel by alleged intellectual George Will on ABC's This
Week. This despite the fact that Coulter's accusations have been as
effectively discredited as Hitler's diaries. (The last time I checked, the
folks at Tapped, the American Prospect's weblog, had compiled so many of
these falsities it took them nearly 3,000 words to enumerate them. Coulter
has also been ripped to shreds by dailyhowler.com, spinsanity.com,
mediawhoresonline.com, Scoobie Davis Online and by Joe Conason in Salon.
The most comprehensive compilation can supposedly be found at
slannder.homestead.com. I cannot bring myself to actually wade into it.)
So what's the deal? Is looking like an anorexic Farrah Fawcett and wearing
skirts so short they lack the dignity and reserve of Monica Lewinsky's
thong enough to insure the embrace of the national entertainment state no
matter what you say, just so long as your murderous bile is directed at
"liberals"? Would it have worked for Saddam if he wore a size 6? I really
don't know. Naïve optimist that I am, when I first picked up Coulter's book
in galleys in the late spring, I felt pretty certain we were done with her.
I mean, how even to engage someone who terms Christie Todd Whitman a
"birdbrain" (page 51) and a "dimwit" (page 53); Jim Jeffords a "half-wit"
(page 50); and Gloria Steinem a "deeply ridiculous figure" (page 37) who
"had to sleep" with a rich liberal to fund Ms. magazine (page 38)--all of
which makes her "a termagant" (page 39)? Coulter's done far worse since, of
course, and yet, like one of those Mothralike creatures that feed on
bullets and squashed Japanese villagers, the monster continues to grow,
debasing everyone and everything in its wake. Coulter jokes about McVeigh
blowing up the Times, and the Wall Street Journal--which was blown up by
terrorists on September 11--rushes to her defense. Their man, Daniel Pearl,
was murdered by terrorists in Pakistan. Have they no shame? At long last,
have they no sense of decency left?
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