Of course, if you’re reading this site you probably already know that. But in case you needed a refresher, look at this article of September 18th: Ann Coulter: Here’s a traitor!
She’s taking advantage of all the possible aspects of the column that she can. For example:
- She takes full advantage of the ignorance of her readers. Most people, it’s sad to say, are not only ignorant, but also ignorant of their ignorance. They’d rather act all self-righteous than pause to Google Pinochet and see why Coulter calls him “the great Agusto Pinochet” (which is unbelievably offensive)
- Most people also have poor training in logic. When she writes sarcastically
When Gen. Pinochet staged his coup against a Marxist strongman, the U.S. did not stop him ?as if Latin American generals were incapable of doing coups on their own
she expects us to simply follow her to the (disproven) conclusion that the CIA wasn’t involved, at least in covert operations.
- She expects her readers to be so simpleminded as to confuse a call to recognize that heartlessly undertaken actions abroad will likely be responded to by heartlessness abroad, with, “We deserved it,” which is not at all the same thing. Which many intelligent Americans have pointed out already. Which Ms. Coulter doesn’t seem to care much about.
- She ridicules what are not leftwing but rather quite mainstream publications, and yet she herself was dropped, for being too extreme, from a comparatively rightwing forum, National Review Online. That she still has a following, it seems to me, must have more to do with her “short skirts and long blond hair” and her apparently exciting rhetoric than with anything she’s actually saying. I think
- One cannot actually respond to a column. Ms. Coulter need not actually face criticism beyond heaping insults on those with whom she disagrees; nor need she actually explain things like calling Pinochet “great” when someone points out that he was responsible for many gross violations of internationally-recognized basic human rights. All she needs to do is make sure that her invective is coiled tight and springs forth each time she writes a column… a kind of solipsistic politics of hate, it could be called.
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It’s little wonder nobody wants her speaking for them, not the mainstream right and not the libertarians. I just wonder if she will ever figure this out for herself.
Or what any of us can do for those whom she has already poisoned.
PS: Ms. Coulter, you probably will never read this, but if you do: solipsistic means “off in one’s own world, unconnected to reality.” You know, like your columns.