Bred for Circuses

Conservatives and Republicans can win few arguments honestly on the merits; most of their policies are awful for the vast majority of Americans and benefit only a select few, typically the rich and powerful. Conservative positions tend to be unpopular, too. Rather than change their policies, conservatives choose to lie constantly and shamelessly, and to stoke the worst impulses of their base. Key to these dynamics is ignoring matters of truth and fact, as well as any serious discussion of greater principles about how our country should work. Instead, they try to reduce everything to my team against your team, us against them. The Republican Party is aided in this by a large block of rabid, authoritarian conservatives and a propaganda network eager to feed the faithful the latest two minutes hate, 24/7. Outsized media personas play a critical role in this strategy. ("Conservative" and "Republican" are pretty interchangeable in this post, but for more on that, see the first link above.)

Conservatives and Republicans are also aided, however, by shallow political coverage by mainstream media outlets that far too often withhold essential context from their audiences by refusing to fact check or call out lies, by pretending policy doesn't matter, by pretending both major American political parties are basically the same and both sides are equally to blame for our political problems, and that any deeper look is pointless and/or partisan. Shallow coverage is cheaper to produce and avoids offending some viewers (while aggravating others), and is also seen as neutral and savvy by some reporters. Unfortunately, it's lousy for informing citizens and thus bad for democracy. Propaganda typically demonizes the perceived opposition unfairly, whereas shallow political coverage is loath to call out even clear wrongdoing or hypocrisy by one party. Thus both lying and gutlessness reduce the national political discourse to superficial, bad sports coverage of two competing political teams and to treating important matters as mere entertainment, a sitcom, a circus.

We've seen all these dynamics play out in the impeachment hearings on Donald Trump, related press conferences and media coverage of all of it. During the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, several observers noted that Republicans seemed less interested in making coherent arguments or convincing the general populace of their cause than creating video clips for Fox News to run for the conservative base. After the hearings moved from the intelligence committee chaired by Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) to the judiciary committee, Republicans pulled the stunt of putting Schiff on a milk carton poster, saying he was missing because he rejected their call to appear as a witness. (Republicans also asked to call the anonymous whistleblower yet again.) Schiff rejected the request, instead pointing to the intelligence committee's 300-page report and the evidence it covered, and added:

There is nothing to testify about. I think if the President or his allies in the Senate persist it means they are not serious about what they are doing. What would I offer in terms of testimony, that I heard Dr. [Fiona] Hill in open hearing say such and such? That is not pertinent. The only reason for them to go through with this is to mollify the President and that is not a good reason to try to call a member of Congress as a witness.

Trump has repeatedly, angrily expressed a desire to prosecute Schiff for paraphrasing him, but has run into the small problems that that's not illegal and Trump is not a dictator. Judiciary chair Jerold Nadler (D-NY) unsurprisingly sided with Schiff about testifying, and in his letter to Republicans, Nadler cited the "independent evidence" for the conclusions of the report and issues initially raised by the whistleblower. Nadler also reiterated for the umpteenth time concerns about witness intimidation and threats of retaliation by Trump and other conservatives against the whistleblower. As for the report itself, Professor Heather Cox Richardson, who's delivered excellent analysis on the impeachment hearings and related stories, offered up a nice summary on 12/3/19:

The big news today was that the House Intelligence Committee released its report on its investigation into the Ukraine scandal that is at the heart of the impeachment case against Trump. Although the report was long, it had two very clear points: the facts against Trump prove that he solicited a bribe—wording designed to show that the scandal meets the Constitution’s threshold for impeachment—and that Trump obstructed justice in his attempts to stonewall Congress and intimidate witnesses. Obstruction of justice is a crime; it is what took Nixon down in 1974.

The report lays out that the Ukraine scandal is at heart an attempt to rig the 2020 election and destroy our democracy with the help of a foreign country. It points out that this is a pattern for Trump, who benefited from Russian aid in 2016 and who has openly called for help from China as well as Ukraine before the upcoming election. The report notes that Trump’s call with Zelensky took place the day after Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified in public, apparently convincing Trump he was no longer in danger of being nabbed for working with Russia in 2016, and was willing to try a similar scheme again.

The report also notes that the Founders worried about precisely this behavior, and that if it is not checked, democracy is over. The House Intelligence Committee report is a remarkably clear, concise, and powerful document.

For their part, the White House ignored all the facts and relied instead on disinformation. . . .

These are grave matters, but Republicans do not want to discuss the facts and principles driving all serious discussions of impeachment. Likewise, Republicans showed little interest that intelligence committee ranking member Devin Nunes (R-CA), who led the Trump defense in the first set of impeachment hearings, allegedly was part of the Ukraine scandal himself to some degree. As of late November, Republicans had offered at least 22 excuses for Trump (or by another count, 64), many of them contradictory. This blunderbuss technique is a reliable sign of bullshitting and bad faith. Similarly, the Republicans' competing impeachment report "is a series of red herrings." (As of this writing, the House has impeached Trump, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has vowed to coordinate with the White House during any trial in the Senate, further suggestion that the fix is in and the Republican-majority Senate will not convict Trump, regardless of the merits of the charges.) Meanwhile, Trump's unhinged letter to Nancy Pelosi frames the entire impeachment process as driven by a personal vendetta against Trump, not the serious matter of upholding core principles of the U.S. Constitution that it is. Trump's conceit is that Schiff, Pelosi, and every single person who's said something critical of him, given factual evidence harmful to him or moved to curtail his power simply dislikes him personally versus, say, being motivated to uphold the rule of law and think of the good of the country and other higher principles. Trump and the Republicans cannot win an honest, substantive discussion. So they need to reduce everything to: Their guy doesn't like our guy. Just because he's our guy. Fight for our guy. Fight for the team. Attack the enemy.

These dynamics are not remotely new, even if they've become more prevalent not just in politician's arguments but in the political coverage itself. Back in 2006, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg discussed the theatricality of political commentary, even comparing the choice of political talk show figures to sitcom casting. This was back when Ann Coulter was arguably at the nadir of her awfulness, selling shock value and viciousness, and getting plenty of coverage from mainstream media outlets in addition to her usual support from Fox News and other conservative entities. What Nunberg describes as political "smut" overlaps with behavior we might now call trolling, and Coulter was one of the most successful practitioners at the time:

Take Ann Coulter's recent description of the 9/11 widows as self-obsessed witches who were enjoying their husbands' deaths. As calumnies go, it doesn't have a patch on the things people were saying in the 1864 election, when the Democrats called Lincoln a leering buffoon, and Horace Greeley accused the Democrats of stealing the votes of dead Union soldiers. But it's only in the current age that remarks like those could turn someone into a media celebrity who's invited to appear on Jay Leno and the Today Show to repeat her choicest remarks for the delectation or outrage of their viewers.

Coulter's celebrity is a good measure of what has become of political discussion. You'd scarcely describe her as a political thinker, no more than you'd describe Simon Cowell as an critic of the arts. But like Cowell, she has an unerring gift for media theatrics. It isn't just her penchant for making snarky or outrageous remarks. Plenty of people do that without being invited onto the Today Show, and in fact Coulter doesn't get a lot of national attention for her run-of-the-mill ruminations about giving rat poison to Justice Stevens or fragging John Murtha. But the remark about the 9/11 widows was irresistible for its brazen and gratuitous tastelessness and the obvious pleasure Coulter took in consternation she created.

Is Coulter is sincere about the things she says? That's a silly question, like asking whether schoolchildren are sincere in the taunts they throw at each other across the school yard. But that doesn't make her a satirist, as her defenders like to claim -- usually with the implication that her literal-minded liberal critics don't get the joke.

Satire depicts things as grotesque in order to make them seem ridiculous -- what Stephen Colbert does in his Bill O'Reilly persona or Christopher Buckley does with the pointed caricatures of Thank You For Smoking. But Coulter isn't actually sending anybody up -- not herself, certainly, and not the targets of her remarks. Her fans may enjoy hearing her talk about poisoning Justice Stevens or say that it's a pity Timothy McVeigh didn't park his truck next to the New York Times building. But that's not because the remarks make either Stevens or New York Times seem particularly ridiculous. It's because Coulter seems to be able to get away with unbridled aggression by presenting it as mere mischief, leaving her critics looking prim and humorless. ("Perhaps her book should have been called 'Heartless,'" said Hillary Clinton after Coulter's remarks about the widows, inviting the response, "Oh lighten up, girl.")

That rhetorical maneuver doesn't really have a name, but it's a close relative of what we think of as smut. In the strict sense, of course, smut is the leering innuendo that veils sexual aggression. But in a broader sense, smut can be any kind of malice that pretends to be mere naughtiness. It might be a leering vulgarity, a racial epithet, or simply a venomous insult -- what makes it smut is that it's tricked out as humor, so that if anyone claims to be offended you can answer indignantly, "Can't you take a joke?"

In that broad sense, smut can sometimes be innocuous fun. It's a staple of sitcoms, in what you could think of as a Wooo! moment. That's the moment when a character who's comically malicious or catty (think Betty White, Rhea Perlman, Joseph Marcell) makes a remark that's just offensive or risqué enough to brush the limits of taste, and the studio audience reacts by saying "Woooo!!"

The political talk shows traffic in these moments, too -- not surprising, considering how much those shows owe to the classic sitcom. When you think of the most successful practitioners of the genre, whether Coulter, O'Reilly, or James Carville, there isn't a one of them who couldn't be the model for a recurring character on Cheers or Drew Carey -- the waspish virago, the bombastic blowhard, the sly yokel.

And as on the sitcoms, the drama of the political talk show is character-driven rather than plot-driven. Watching O'Reilly or Hannity and Colmes, you can't help recalling the bickering on All in the Family, where politics was always just a pretext for the clash of personalities. It doesn't matter whether the ostensible issue is the massacre at Haditha or an increase in wild bachelorette parties; it's going to be reduced to grist for the eternal squabble between liberals and conservatives -- not as adherents of opposing political philosophies, but more as distinctive political genders. ("Who are these parents who allow their kids to sleep with Michael Jackson?," Alan Colmes asked a couple of years back, and Sean Hannity answered, "Liberals.")

Coulter and Trump share a great deal in terms of a bullying style, but also in their knack for nabbing mainstream coverage and validation, in large part by crafting a character to sell, a media persona. (Coulter thankfully gets less attention these days. Incidentally, Coulter has criticized Trump for not building a border wall and not being harsh enough on immigration, but says she will vote for him anyway. My most in-depth post on Coulter is this one, although some links are broken.) Coulter, like many conservative political commentators, has always been light on substance or outright rejects it. Instead, the key selling point for such figures has always been viciousness and 'owning the libs,' to the delight of their audience. Coulter is now a less popular conservative belligerent than, say, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Mark Levin, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Tomi Lahren and perennial ragemonger Rush Limbaugh (among others), but currently, they're all eclipsed by the biggest conservative troll of them all, Donald Trump.

As we've covered before, Trump's main selling point to the conservative base is spite; he promises to hurt the people they fear and dislike. He's a bigot, and racism and bigotry form a key part of his appeal to his fans. The recording of him bragging about sexual assault did not sink his presidential campaign and at least 25 women have accused him of sexual misconduct. Trump constantly lies; as of October 2019, he'd told at least 13,435 false or misleading claims over 993 days. In 2016 shortly after being elected, Trump paid $25 million to settle fraud cases against Trump University, a business that one of its own employees described as "a fraudulent scheme." Trump also recently paid a $2 million settlement for using charity funds supposedly going to military veterans for personal use instead, including buying a portrait of himself. (Grifting runs in the family; son Eric Trump's charity misused funds meant to go to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which predominantly serves kids with cancer.) Imagine the conservative outrage if Barack Obama or really any Democrat had done a fraction of this, yet most of them give Trump a pass.

Trump's image as a successful businessman is an utter fiction constructed by Trump himself, aided by his late father and by fawning media coverage. He's not a business genius, or even a competent businessman – he just plays one on TV. As The New York Times reported in 2016:

[Trump's] casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders. . . .

All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.

In 2018, The New York Times further reported that rather than being largely a self-made man, Trump inherited at least $413 million from his father, and his entire family has enriched itself with possibly illegal schemes. In 2019, the Times reported that Trump lost over a billion dollars over a decade, losing more money than any other individual in the United States in that time period while simultaneously selling himself as a great dealmaker. Trump's retorts to these reports were unconvincing; as The New Yorker's John Cassidy put it, Trump stands revealed as the biggest loser. Trump's dealings with Deutsche Bank further undermine any claims of actual business acumen versus his ability to scam lenders. Trump may not actually be a billionaire and almost certainly has less money than he pretends, but nonetheless, he'd have more money if he had simply invested in the stock market than attempted all his deals. (As people have joked, Trump has lost money selling booze, steaks and gambling to Americans. Who does that?)

Conservatives sure love their macho daddy figures, from those fake cowboys, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, to that fake, successful businessman, Donald Trump. The book The Art of the Deal played a critical role in selling the myth of Trump, but its deeply regretful ghostwriter Tony Schwartz has explained how he made Trump appear far more thoughtful, competent and ethical than he actually is. The Art of the Deal in turn helped Trump get an even larger vehicle for mythmaking, the NBC TV show, The Apprentice. As The New Yorker article "How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump As an Icon of American Success" explains:

"The Apprentice" portrayed Trump not as a skeezy hustler who huddles with local mobsters but as a plutocrat with impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth—a titan who always seemed to be climbing out of helicopters or into limousines. “Most of us knew he was a fake," [producer Jonathon] Braun told me. "He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king." Bill Pruitt, another producer, recalled, "We walked through the offices and saw chipped furniture. We saw a crumbling empire at every turn. Our job was to make it seem otherwise."

(For more on the mythic Trump created on The Apprentice, see The New Yorker again, The New York Times, Fortune and People's piece on Fisher Stevens' documentary on Trump, The Confidence Man.)

Donald Trump is probably one of the worst businessmen in human history and also possibly the most successful con man. His image as a great businessman and dealmaker is a complete fraud. About the only authentic things about him are his vanity, bigotry, greed, proud ignorance and spite. Yet the conservative base loves him and congressional Republicans loyally defend him despite any misgivings.

Mainstream media outlets have often struggled to cover Trump, as well as conservative and Republican perfidy in general. In contrast to some of the excellent investigative journalism mentioned above, daily news coverage of political clashes often descends to a "he said, she said" level. For example, Dan Froomkin's piece criticizing a New York Times article on impeachment is aptly titled, "In the war on truth, the press can't be an innocent bystander." Fact-checking and calling out liars is essential, but often doesn't occur. Likewise, as we've mentioned before, "coverage on the 2016 presidential race almost entirely ignored policy issues and focused on shallow issues with false balance." Such coverage decisions help candidates with bad positions, slim policy portfolios or a habit of lying. False equivalencies and "both siderism" also remain persistent scourges to good journalism, but rather than delve into that here, I'll once again link past posts by digby, driftglass, alicublog, Balloon Juice, LGM and my own archives.

Consider entertainment programming – and news sold as entertainment – and the picture grows even worse. NBC created The Apprentice and played a central role in creating the myth of Trump that enabled him not only to run for president but win. NBC also let Trump host Saturday Night Live even after cutting ties with him over bigoted comments. And NBC and other mainstream outlets have long validated Trump and earlier toxic figures such as Ann Coulter. Trump received more than $5.9 billion of free media coverage during the election, over twice the amount received by Hillary Clinton. In 2016, then-CBS chairman Les Moonves made some infamous remarks about the "circus":

Donald Trump’s candidacy might not be making America great, CBS Chairman Les Moonves said Monday, but it’s great for his company.

"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco, according to The Hollywood Reporter — perfectly distilling what media critics have long suspected was motivating the round-the-clock coverage of Trump's presidential bid.

"Most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates," Moonves said, noting, "[t]here's a lot of money in the marketplace."

The 2016 campaign is a "circus," he remarked, but "Donald's place in this election is a good thing."

Moonves' later claim that he was joking was unconvincing. Trump was a horrible candidate who frequently behaved vilely, but he was a showman, so CBS, NBC, and other outlets gave Trump tons of coverage, some negative, but not really that critical, and certainly not substantive, given their scant discussion of policy. They rejected sound editorial judgment and shamefully if predictably chose short-term profits over a sense of civic duty to meaningfully inform their audiences, especially because they thought Clinton would win and their behavior could not affect the election. But it most certainly did.

Worse than the mainstream outlets, though, are propaganda outlets, most notably Fox News. Fox News has always scored poorly in terms of factual accuracy, but it's moved beyond being a conservative news outlet to being outright propaganda, comfortable to flat-out lie. The same is true of Republicans in government, and the two work closely together. See, for example, Jane Mayer in The New Yorker on "The Making of the Fox News White House" and Greg Sargent in The Washington Post on how "McConnell’s awful Hannity interview shows power of Fox News’s disinformation." In a similar vein, The Post reported, "A Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the FBI investigation of President Trump’s 2016 campaign rebutted conservatives’ accusations that top FBI officials were driven by political bias to illegally spy on Trump advisers but also found broad and “serious performance failures” requiring major changes." Attorney General William Barr, a Republican party loyalist, has undercut his own department and directly contradicted key findings of the report, as covered in Sargent's piece, "William Barr’s deceptions are more dangerous than you think" and Wonkette's "Just When You Thought You Couldn't Respect Bill Barr Any Less." Wired covered Barr and much more in "Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security." Digby's commented on similar dynamics in "The Nonsense Ecosystem" (adopting a phrase from Daniel Dale) and many other posts. Fox News and the entire right-wing media ecosystem pose a serious and growing problem to democracy. As several people have noted, if Nixon had had Fox News, he might not have been impeached.

Authoritarian conservatism plays a pivotal role in making the propaganda work; Fox News and similar outlets cater to an audience eager to hate their scapegoats du jour. In 2016, then-candidate Trump bragged that "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." He considered it praise for his supporters' loyalty; it was instead an accurate and chilling description of unquestioning obedience and authoritarianism (and Trump's megalomania). One of Trump's lawyers has actually argued in court that as president, Trump could indeed shoot someone in 5th Avenue and get away with it (shades of Bush lawyer John Yoo). The transcript of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Zelensky is damning, especially with the added context that has been provided by later reporting and the impeachment hearings. Yet Trump and his allies have shouted to "READ THE TRANSCRIPT!" as if it exonerates him. Trump even held a rally where supporters were wearing t-shirts (presumably distributed by Trump's team) saying "READ THE TRANSCRIPT!" Naturally, as The Daily Show discovered in a great segment covering a later rally, most Trump supporters have not read the transcript and were not familiar with the key takeaways, even though some said – without irony or self-awareness – that reading the transcript, not being a sheep and being an independent thinker were all important. They simply believe what they're told, and do so gladly it's from the right authority figures, whether that's Trump himself, Fox News talking heads or other conservative figures. It's completely Orwellian; they will eagerly believe that black is white and insist that their chosen political team is always in the right. (Who are you going to believe, Trump and Fox News or your lying eyes?)

Trump was clearly unfit for office before the election and has provided overwhelming evidence of his unfitness since. The misdeeds for which he's being impeached may not even be the worst things he's done (and who knows what else will come out), but they're certainly sufficient grounds for removing him from office. The conservative base, Republican voters and congressional Republicans simply do not care. Nearly 90% of self-described Republicans voted for Trump in 2016, and assuming he's still in office by the time of the 2020 election, similar percentages will likely vote for him again, despite any disapproval they express. As of this writing, Trump has been impeached but the articles of impeachment have not been sent to the Senate. The Democratic presidential candidate for 2020 has not been chosen and the presidential election has not occurred. Despite some uncertainties about the year(s) ahead, we can make some reasonable predictions, among them that conservatives and Republicans will not behave honorably and it would be folly to expect otherwise.

Conservatives tend to be bullies with power and whiners without it. They've constructed alternative realities with alternative facts, where they can believe what they want and feel simultaneously persecuted (and thus righteously aggrieved) and superior. Some religious conservatives (ostensibly Christian) will even cite ancient Roman persecution of Christians, that they were thrown to lions in the arena. There's some truth but mostly myth to that tale, but regardless, some religious conservatives will apocalyptically invoke the image as a future reality should "socialism" take hold (via a Bernie Sanders presidency, for instance). The truth is that conservatives thrill for combat with their chosen foes, and that they'd just choose new scapegoats if they ever succeeded in eliminating the old ones. They don't believe in treating others as they would like be treated, and certainly don't believe in turning the other cheek. They are pro-spectacle, anti-substance, pro-circus; authoritarian conservatives are particularly bred for circuses. They don't truly object to the idea of throwing people to the lions; they just want the power to choose the victims.

(Cross-posted at Hullabaloo.)

This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse

Ann Coulter will campaign for Hillary Clinton if John McCain is the Republican nominee:



Hyperbole? Yes. A few salient points? Shockingly — yes.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Ann Coulter's Remarks on Jews

Not content to advocate for banning women from voting, Ann Coulter's just said that "We just want Jews to be perfected"... by converting to Christianity.

Oh, but there's much more. Hey, she's been a bigot to virtually every other group already! Why not spread the hatred?



(There may be better copies of this interview up later, but this one covers the key lines I've heard reported so far. Please note that there are commercials in the middle you can scroll through.)

I dissected Ann Coulter at length in an earlier post, "The Aryan Minstrel Show." It should be no surprise to anyone that Coulter is a bigot and homophobe, or at least plays one on TV, since much of it's an act for her. However, most conservatives have dismissed any outrage over her various remarks or have even cheered her on. Although others have led the charge, the current attacks by the right-wing on the Frost family are the epitome of Coulter — nasty, shameless, personal attacks with a conscious avoidance of substance.

Coulter is not entertaining, except to movement conservatives and paid hacks, but the public reaction to her latest remarks could prove to be quite entertaining. Most conservatives were fine with her calling Bill Clinton gay, Al Gore a "total fag," and John Edwards a "faggot." They were fine with her smearing military veterans who didn't agree with her (just as with Limbaugh's "phony soldiers" comment). Most were fine with her smearing the 9/11 widows, and some applauded her when she called Arabs "ragheads." Hell, conservatives took her statement about Muslims, that "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," and put it on T-shirts. That statement was six years ago. So her bigotry is not exactly breaking news.

On the right, it's considered fair game to slander liberals, and among movement conservatives, it's encouraged to demonize Muslims. But anti-Semitism is another matter altogether. As racist as much of the far right is, in public they normally speak in code, because they know it's frowned upon. While many Christian evangelicals may feel as Coulter does in this clip, most of them are smart enough not to say it aloud. Coulter has normally been pretty savvy about calculating her level of obnoxiousness. But here, she was playing to a Christian fundamentalist crowd and forgot both her immediate and larger audience. Some of her staunchest allies just had their heritage and religion besmirched. How will they respond?

Some conservatives will indeed condemn Coulter, and rightly so. Some will make excuses, and it'll be interesting to see who does what (Hannity's support is a given). Coulter will continue to defend herself and claim she was taken out of context. I would be shocked if she apologized, because her entire persona is based on not apologizing for even her most outrageous provocations. With Rush Limbaugh's phony soldiers remark and the Michelle Malkin-led crusade against the Frosts, it's suddenly a most fascinating period to observe movement conservatives. They've always been a hateful, vicious, petty lot, but suddenly it's on full public display.

Anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry are serious matters. Meanwhile, Coulter has never deserved a serious platform to spew her bile. Several newspapers have dropped her column over the past two years due to the public's growing disgust or simple fatigue. If Coulter's latest outrage costs her and further shrinks her platform, then surely all America has benefited.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

The Aryan Minstrel Show

I. The Aryan Minstrel Show

Such smiling rogues as these
Like rats oft bite the holy cords atwain
Which are too intrinse t’unloose; smooth every passion
That in the natures of their lords rebel,
Being oil to fire, snow to the colder moods;
Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters,
Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.

— Kent, about Oswald, in King Lear, 2.2, 70-77

Comedians take many forms. There’s the crass insult comic, the observational humourist, the reflective raconteur, and the incisive satirist. Perhaps the most sublime is the Shakespearean fool, who can tell truth to power in the form of a joke, imparting wisdom while still avoiding a beating (most of the time).

Many conservatives find Ann Coulter amusing. Most liberals (and many moderates) view her as a vile hatemonger. Regardless, she’s no fool. In King Lear’s terms, she’s instead a knave, sucking up to a dishonest ruling class. In modern terms, she’s no idiot since her act as right-wing attack dog makes her ever richer. The persona of deliberate provocateur she’s created could potentially work on stage at a comedy club (at least a right-wing one), but while Coulter and her fans think she’s funny, she consistently claims she wants to be taken seriously and not merely as an entertainer. She plays the role of “public intellectual” on TV. But this is just part of the act. Hers is a performance art of hatred, a vaudeville act built of bile. She is the modern, Aryan version of a minstrel performer.

Comedy possesses a very strong anti-establishment tradition of mocking those perceived to be in power. There’s something unseemly to most people, for instance, in mocking the poor simply because they’re poor. In comedy, women are more likely to triumph over men, children over adults, employees over bosses, mice over cats, and so on. There’s a long tradition in many cultures for some sort of “lord of misrule” that allows for the release of social tensions. In contrast, the minstrel performer reverses this comedic tradition and mocks those not in power. Alan Colmes recently suggested to Coulter that he had misjudged her, “I realize this is all comedic satire and that you're actually a liberal who's doing this to mock and parody the way conservatives think.” Coulter once again insisted she was serious and defended a few of her most outrageous statements. In Coulter’s minstrel show, she does not employ black face (or white face!) and rather than she herself playing some cartoonish version of a liberal, she instead plays, as Colmes suggests, what in civilized society would be the ugly caricature of a rabid conservative. Her performances nonetheless employ the same minstrel show techniques, throwing out a relentless array of insulting stereotypes to amuse her target audience and infuriate her critics. While the Shakespearean fool surreptitiously slips the king some important truth and ideally makes him think, the minstrel performer merely assures the audience of its superiority and reinforces long-standing prejudices. The battle lines are drawn and immutable. One can no more have a productive discussion with Coulter on politics than the NAACP could hold a conference on race relations at a KKK rally.

II. Calculated Provocation and Marketing Bile

Back in early February, Ann Coulter was a featured speaker at The Conservative Political Action Conference, one of the most important conservative gatherings of the year. She did not disappoint the faithful, stating "I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’" Rather than gasps and boos, her rhetoric drew applause. A few prominent conservatives had the decency to condemn her afterwards, however reluctantly, while others conservatives remained silent, debated how bad her words really were, or blamed it all on the liberals. Why was condemning her a difficult decision at all? Don’t such words automatically prohibit someone from appearing on any media platforms in the civilized world until an apology is offered? But complaining that Ann Coulter has coarsened the public discourse is a bit like complaining that the Exxon Valdez oil spill spoiled the view. As Cenk Unyger points out through a series of Coulter’s most inflammatory comments, “In a World Where Ann Coulter has Credibility, Credibility Has No Meaning.”

Many writers have observed that if Coulter said about any minority group what she says about liberals, she would be overwhelmingly shunned. For her devoted fans, that’s a key selling point. They welcome every outrageous thing she says because they just know it will infuriate liberals. She may indeed say publicly what they’re thinking, but it’s that adolescent “piss-off-your-parents” angle that’s her chief appeal. It’s the thrill of the trangressive act, the excitement of combat, and the joyful release of finding and assaulting a scapegoat. This is precisely why she always tries to inflate the rhetoric and one-up other conservative “vaude-villains.” When junior hatemonger Melanie Morgan said she “would have no problem with [New York Times editor Bill Keller] being sent to the gas chamber,” Ann Coulter felt the need to do her one better and suggest a firing squad (she also approved of sending the New York Times anthrax). It's sort of a tag team version of the two-minute hate. (All of this is in perfect line with her earlier statement, sure to comfort victims’ families in Oklahoma, that her "only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.") When pressed on her ludicrous charge that Bill Clinton, the very man she’s long derided for being a “horny hick” with Monica Lewinsky and other women, was actually gay, rather than apologizing Coulter escalated matters by saying Al Gore was “a total fag.” True to form, Chris Matthews and the audience, in a familiar pattern, laughed rather than condemning her and Matthews even welcomed her back (only other performers responded to her appropriately.) Her goal is not to be thought-provoking, but only to provoke (and slip in a new sound bite to keep the spotlight on herself). The New Republic’s Michelle Cottle describes the underlying dynamic of Coulter’s shtick:

So what's an angry, frightened populace to do with all that pent-up desire to name-call and finger-point? Easy: Channel it at folks in the opposing political camp. For hard-right wing-nuts this means attributing every filthy characteristic imaginable to Democrats/Liberals/the left, ascribing venal motives to their every action, and blaming them for every misfortune to have befallen your beloved country over the past half century. Under the new rules of the game, you still can't deride Mexicans--but it's perfectly acceptable to deride liberals for pushing policies that allow Mexicans somehow to screw up your life. Ditto blacks, Asians, Eskimos, Episcopalians, and lesbians named Jackie. As a bonus, partyism can be rationalized as a more thoughtful brand of bigotry--since theoretically your hatred is an expression of political philosophy: You don't loathe liberals (or conservatives) for who they are but what they do. As practiced, of course, the phenomenon increasingly goes well beyond hating the sin into the realm of hating the sinner.

Viewed this way, Ann Coulter performs a valuable public service with her minstrel show. She offers her fans catharsis for their constipated rage. She’s the ex-lax of conservative punditry.

Speaking in September 2002 about selling the war in Iraq, then White House Chief of Staff Andy Card famously said, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Similarly, Ann Coulter is savvy calculating when to roll out her latest outrage. Back in late December 2005, when she had no book to sell, she offered Matt Lauer her usual baseless swipes at liberals but still managed, at moments, to resemble a human being. Contrast this with one of her most infamous statements to date as she promoted her latest, err, effort, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Sitting down with Lauer again, she petulantly, stridently defended a section of her book that deals with the 9/11 widows known as the “Jersey Girls.” Lauer read from the book:

"These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process." And this part is the part I really need to talk to you about: "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much."

Lauer did press her, but he was at an inherent disadvantage, because unlike Coulter, as a media host he is compelled to play by guidelines of civilized discourse. Still, as Peter Daou pointed out , Lauer should have said,

“There are two possible explanations for your statement. Either you believe it, in which case you're deranged. You don't believe it but said it for shock value, in which case you don't belong within a thousand miles of this network. Choose one.” (Daou’s most comprehensive Coulter post is well worth the read.)

Sadly, Coulter and her ilk are rarely challenged that forcefully, directly, and fairly. Certainly it never occurred in her flurry of subsequent appearances, on Tucker Carlson, Hannity & Colmes (where she claimed Jesus would approve of her attacks on liberals!) and finally on Jay Leno. Tellingly, having stirred up controversy to promote her book on the Today show, and after fanning the flames for a week, she toned it down for Leno. Conservative reaction to Coulter was again mixed. Some denounced her, while others defended her. Most went the route of Mary Matalin (always good at blaming the victim or claiming victim status) and said something to the effect of Matalin’s “I take her larger point.” (See, for example, O’Reilly and Cavuto.) If Matalin were honest and responsible, she’d say something like:

”Ann Coulter made a valid point in that it's very hard to debate someone that's been the victim of a tragedy. If you challenge them, you can wind up looking like a monster, regardless of the validity of your argument.

"However, what she said was artless at best and frankly, reprehensible. Saying that a widow is happy at her husband's death defies common sense and oversteps the bounds of all decency.

"This was not an off-the-cuff remark. She wrote this down. She thought of it beforehand. She had an editor look over this. And not only did she defend it on TV, even after she's been directly challenged on this, repeatedly, she still refuses to back down or apologize. Until she does so, I can't have any respect for her."

Of course, Coulter never apologized, and still will not, despite repeated opportunities to do so. An apology — admitting to being wrong — would make her appear weak to her rabid fans. It’s anathema to pundits, but especially to conservative commentators. Admitting error is one step removed from Dolchstosslegende and treachery for those who worship in a cult of authoritarian personality, namely social conservatives, social regressives, the neocons, and other belligerati. However, with Coulter the stakes are much higher. If she ever apologized, the mask would crack. She would break character and the suspension of disbelief. Her minstrel show is as fake as pro wrestling and her fights with supposed liberals similarly designed solely for entertainment (albeit for only half the national audience). Habitual liars and professional hacks will continue to lie even in the face of overwhelming evidence proving them wrong, but they always try to bluff their way through regardless. If Coulter acknowledged it was an act, the illusion would be shattered and her central appeal destroyed.

III. The “Scholarship” of Demagoguery

Many commentators (such as Al Franken and David Brock) have observed that Coulter’s core complaint about the 9/11 widows is that she can’t engage them in personal attacks — despite the fact that she does anyway! In a fair, moderated debate based on substance, a smart high student would eviscerate Coulter because all she has is ad hominem arguments. Coulter complains “we can’t respond” to victims, but of course any civilized person can. All that’s required is to say, “With all due respect to Mrs. Smith’s loss, I have to disagree with her on this policy point because...” However, this would require Coulter to observe, if not normal human compassion, at least basic civility, to refrain from demonizing others in time-honored propagandist tradition, and to actually possess a substantive argument. Of course, it’s easy to see how Coulter would quickly be on shaky ground if she was forced to argue, “A moderate, bipartisan committee engaging in a full and frank investigation of 9/11 would be bad for the country because...” Given Coulter's own modus operandi and history of politicizing 9/11, she's essentially arguing for the right to attack others while simultaneously excluding her targets from the dialogue. Not only does she coarsen the public discourse, she wants to control the terms of engagement and prevent anyone else from elevating the public discourse. She's an enfant terrible actively trying to squelch adult discussion in an audacious powerplay of shameless hypocrisy. On the few occasions Coulter has been challenged her response is to change the subject, offer another attack, flip her hair even more often, or literally shriek. In sharp contrast, the Jersey Girls, formally responding to Coulter’s attack, addressed her vileness in just a few sentences and then moved on to adult matters.

The biggest travesty of Coulter’s appearances is the compliments she receives about being smart or her book being well-researched. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even without the multiple charges of plagiarism, or her inflated and suspect legal acumen, Coulter defines slapdash, shoddy pseudo-scholarship. She’s sloppy with citation no doubt in part due to laziness. But additionally, she belongs to an ideological camp who feel no need for consistency or coherence of thought. An argument exists only to score points or draw blood and thus needs no real support. “Facts,” as dubious as they may be, are merely rounds of square shot to be feed into the machine gun aimed at heathen liberals.

If one tries to read the one hundred hastily-penned paragraphs that comprise the first chapter of Godless and rebut it point by point, it quickly becomes an exercise in masochism — it's just not worth the trouble (one brave soul undertook this for a previous Coulter book, Slander). Coulter said as much when she told Jay Leno, to deflect his question about her using the word "broads" versus "women," "If we're getting to that level of parsing my language, there will be no end to this." Coulter often employs a "blunderbuss" debate technique – namely, she rapidly shoots out a wide variety of outrageous statements, and if not all of them are rebutted, she will smugly declare herself the victor (not that she ever acknowledges error or defeat, anyway). She's repeatedly crowed that no liberal seems to have taken offense at her deliberately insulting title, Godless. But whether it's her title or one of its many variations in her book, how does one respond to such an obviously ludicrous claim as “liberals are godless”? “No, they’re not”? Coulter will just respond, “yes they are.” The starting point is not an adult conversation, and Coulter will fight against elevating it. It’s no coincidence that many a commentator has compared Coulter's rhetoric to schoolyard taunts. In a fair fight Coulter has no chance, but when it comes to mud-slinging she and her ilk typically have the edge. When one person is trying to play fair and the other isn’t, the dirty fighter has the advantage. The media as a whole is so afraid of being accused of liberal bias it will not play referee, fact-check, or book anyone on with Coulter who will dare call bullshit. Several researchers have shown that Coulter uses footnotes solely for the purpose of appearing scholarly, and many if not all of them do not support the assertions she makes. In fact, one researcher redacted all of Coulter’s unsupported assertions in chapter 2 of her book Slander and the result was a handful of sentences amidst pages of near solid-black. She’s repeated the same pattern with all her books, including her most recent one, Godless. While Coulter can fairly be called a liar for her intentional distortions, it’s more accurate to say she’s what Harry Frankfurt calls a bullshitter, because the truth of her assertions is completely irrelevant to her. But as Joe Conason puts it, “The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be,” thus making her task much easier.

It's no surprise Coulter simply cannot support her assertions in person either, since little to no thought has gone into them. She will demonize liberals in a style of straw man rhetoric taken to the level of boogeyman. But she cannot name a single godless liberal to Alan Colmes, nor to Donnie Deutsch, nor explain why Darwin is wrong to Jeremy Paxman, nor with Chris Matthews can she name a single liberal leader who is actually a traitor. She will make a broad, insulting statement, and then attempts to use her very inability to point to a single example — as proof of her veracity! It's a faith-based punditocracy for Coulter.

One of her typical "I'm rubber-you're glue" gambits occurred when Matthews, in one of his periodic lucid interviews, actually challenged Coulter on the core statements of her then-recent book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. It’s an interview that warrants a significant look. Matthews starts by pushing Coulter on her charges that Presidents Truman and Kennedy were traitors, then presses her further on her use of the term “treason” since it is, of course, a capital offense:

MATTHEWS: Well, should they be prosecuted? Should anybody in the [Democratic] party be prosecuted either today, or should have been prosecuted in the past? I mean, it’s a criminal charge of treason. Should anybody be charged with it?

COULTER: I wish it were that easy a problem, but that trivializes the point...

MATTHEWS: No, it’s a crime.

Coulter trivializes "treason" and "terrorist," in slapping these labels on liberals, then claims Matthews is trivializing her overheated hyperbole when he asks her to back it up. Matthews relentlessly presses Coulter on a central hypocrisy of her book, thus exposing her rank partisanship:

MATTHEWS: Were the Republicans willing to oppose World War II before Pearl Harbor right? And they vigorously opposed getting involved in the war in Europe.

COULTER: As I describe in my book, they were wrong and I have to describe this...

MATTHEWS: The Republicans were wrong?

COULTER: Yes, they were.

MATTHEWS: Were they traitors?

COULTER: No. They came around...

MATTHEWS: But when liberals oppose wars, they are treasonists.

Leaving aside Matthews' odd favoring of the word "treasonist" over "traitor," Coulter simply cannot defend herself. It’s fine to accuse Harry Truman and JFK of treason in a book for her fans, who will lap it up, but Matthews will have none of it:

COULTER: I’ll give you my thesis again. My thesis is, that the entire Democratic Party cannot be trusted with the defense of the nation.

MATTHEWS: Start with a name, please.

COULTER: It is not to start trying a few individuals. I wouldn’t...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK. We’re not getting anywhere here because you don’t want to give me any names.

COULTER: That is because I am talking about the Democratic Party. That is the name I am trying to give you.

MATTHEWS: Okay. Half the American people, roughly, in most elections averaged over the last 50 years have voted Democrat, let’s face it, for president. Those people who vote for Democratic candidates for president after hearing their case with regard to foreign policy, why would they vote for someone who you say is a traitor?

COULTER: Because this story has not been told, because I have what has been systemically excluded from history books in high school and college, and that is why I wrote this book, to prove to Democrats, as Joe McCarthy said...

MATTHEWS: But half the people in the U.S. Army are probably Democrats. You say they vote for Democrats out of treasonable reasons?

COULTER: I am saying, as Joe McCarthy said, the loyal Democrats of this party no longer-or of this country no longer have a party. This is a party that cannot defend America, that loses wars, that loses continents to communism-that nay say Ronald Reagan’s response to the Soviet Union, and then they keep turning around and say, oh, it was inevitable. No one lost China. Anyone would have lost Vietnam...

It’s hilarious that Matthews asks Coulter to 'name names' and she can’t, especially since her book praises Joe McCarthy! She also lies about her own thesis! To close the interview, Matthews asks her another passage that implied that Arabs smell bad (not the only time she's made such a statement). Coulter is cowardly enough to not explain her statement, but honest enough to state its purpose:

MATTHEWS: ...”The principal difference between fifth columnists and the cold war versus the war on terrorism is that you could sit next to a communist in a subway without asphyxiating.” What does that mean? I just want to know. What does that mean? I want to know.

(CROSSTALK)

COULTER: It means what it says. The second difference is, that in far more time the enemy that we’re up against now has killed far fewer people.

MATTHEWS: So, but the enemy smells. Is that your knock against Arabs? I mean, that’s your point here. You sit next to them and you are asphyxiated while sitting next to them.

COULTER: I’m just drawing the differences between the old war and the currents war.

MATTHEWS: Is that a way to win friends in the Arab and Islamic world by saying they stink.

COULTER: I think it is a way to get people...

MATTHEWS: Is that deep?

COULTER: ... to read my book, so I thank you.

As repulsive as Coulter’s bigotry is, that’s relatively easy to spot. It’s her simultaneous assertion and disavowal of her own thesis that’s so characteristic of the “public intellectual” Coulter, what she so typically gets away with, and the heart of why she is a complete fraud. In the Matthews interview, after being hammered on her use of “treason” and “traitor,” she says “My thesis is, that the entire Democratic Party cannot be trusted with the defense of the nation.” That’s still a tenuous assertion, but at least it’s in the realm of reality. However, she only offers it as a concession and distraction to Matthews. It is not her thesis, which is, “liberals are traitors.” Here’s the first paragraph of Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism :

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love American, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence. The Left’s obsession with the crimes of the West and their Rousseauian respect for Third World savages all flow from this subversive goal. If anyone has the gaucherie to point out the left's nearly unblemished record of rooting against American, liberals turn around and scream "McCarthyism!

Lest one somehow think this is an isolated incident, Amazon allows one to read most of the first section (when its "look inside" function is working), and here’s a few of Right Wing News’ “Best Quotes From Ann Coulter's 'Treason'”

"While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security." -- Ann Coulter, P. 203

"Only a war that serves no conceivable national interest gets the New York Time's endorsement. Liberals warm to the idea of American mothers weeping for their sons, but only if their deaths will not make America any safer." -- Ann Coulter, P. 212

"The portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't cowering in fear during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis." -- Ann Coulter, P. 10

Ah, where would prime hyperbole be without some mention of Nazis? (Salon’s Joe Conason performs an excellent dissection of the lies and distortions of Treason.) Every Coulter “thesis” is essentially the same: liberals are bad, conservatives are good. Only the details change. Still, Matthews’ grilling confirms several factors. One is that, for Coulter, any politician’s position is superfluous. Only his or her partisan standing matters, and that and only that determines a position’s validity. More importantly, with Matthews, Coulter’s trademark pattern emerges. When questioned on her latest outrage du jour, she typically claims she stands by everything she’s written or said. However, in the rare event she is challenged on the substance of her assertions, she refuses to support them and will change the subject, make another quip, or, as with Matthews, change her thesis and hope no one notices. When Deutsch and Matthews refuse to accept her central, ludicrous assertions, she is thrown completely off her game. Coulter wishes to get full credit for saying “outrageous” things, but simultaneously fights against being held accountable for them. It’s a cowardly display.

Sadly, Matthews does not always grill Coulter as he did on Treason. And while Alan Colmes has challenged Coulter on occasion, he’s not allowed to go far off script; Hannity, the commercial breaks or Colmes’ paycheck will always save her. In a courtroom, proving someone definitively wrong is a virtue, but on talk shows, convention holds that would be — rude. Ultimately, the viewer should be allowed to decide for him or her self, but most viewers fairly expect networks to uphold some basic commitment to accuracy that allows for informed decision-making. If a guest’s preposterous statements or demagoguery are left unchallenged, the host abdicates an important responsibility and does the viewers a grave disservice. Unfortunately, while Coulter gives her opponents lots of rope to hang herself with, it rarely happens. Even Matthews and Deutsch butter Coulter up with nauseating compliments and never, for instance, directly state, “So your entire thesis has no basis in reality.” When Coulter makes a preposterous claim, such as her reply to Colmes that Jesus would indeed approve of her hateful rhetoric, everything should grind to a halt. She should be grilled on such a statement until she confesses it’s idiotic (although her preferred tactic these days is make an even more outrageous statement). Either it’s hyperbole, in which case she’s being irresponsible, or it’s a serious assertion, in which case she’s insane. The key method for dealing with overheated conservative rhetoric is to be a bulldog about a specific statement and force conservatives to either put up or shut up (as Bernie Ward demonstrates here). Every interview with Coulter should contain some variation on Peter Daou’s suggested response:

“There are two possible explanations for your statement. Either you believe it, in which case you're deranged. You don't believe it but said it for shock value, in which case you don't belong within a thousand miles of this network. Choose one.”

IV. Pay No Attention to the Bigot Behind the Curtain

Coulter's statements fail under the slightest scrutiny, but she also possess no internal consistency. Her hypocrisy is so vast it’s hard to chart. She claims liberals are “godless” and poses for her book cover wearing a low-cut top and a cross. Yet she is unknown at the church she claims to attend. Her brand of Christianity, such as it is, is odd if not unrecognizable. And, as the fictional, satirical Mrs. Betty Bowers muses, “After all, who wants to be lectured about not being Christian enough by an almost-50 year-old boozehound in a black leather miniskirt who has never been married? Count me as having a healthy skepticism over whether Miss Coulter has saved herself for marriage. Or anything, for that matter.”

Coulter exhorts liberals for hating the military, but it’s clear she only respects the military who agree with her views. She refused to believe that Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who she had previously lionized, opposed the Iraq war and read Noam Chomsky. She insisted that Democratic Congressman and military veteran John Murtha was “the reason soldiers invented ‘fragging.’” In 1997, she told disabled Vietnam veteran Bobby Muller, a peace activist, "People like you caused us to lose that war." For that, she was fired by MSNBC. (Apparently her Murtha comment now passes for civilized, insightful analysis.) Even though Coulter shrieks about liberals giving aid and comfort to the enemy, after 9/11, she infamously wrote "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Such xenophobic, imperialistic, anti-Muslim rhetoric surely gave Osama bin Laden more ammunition for his propaganda machine than anything any liberal has ever said. National Review editor Rich Lowry, to his credit, dropped Coulter after she wrote that column and she also aggressively defended it (as she has repeatedly done). Alas, rather than condemn Coulter, other conservatives chose to put her statement on T-shirts.

No sane, intelligent person who follows the news can pretend not to have a grasp of Coulter’s act by now. Her comments are occasionally so appalling that even some of her buddies at Fox News feel comfortable condemning her (even if they admire her somewhat), while other stalwarts such as the laughable David Horowitz will try to defend her but can’t even keep a straight face. But even when some Republicans and conservatives condemn Coulter, it’s mostly due not to disagreement, but only because they see one of her specific excrescences as bad public relations and harmful to their cause. As Digby points out, conservatives have been more than happy to let Coulter’s vile rants stand unchallenged when it suits them, and as Taylor March argues, Ann Coulter is the Republican Party. Some have labeled Ann Coulter as analogous to Michael Moore, but any objective survey of the punditocracy and blogosphere must conclude that hate speech and fantasies of violence are overwhelmingly the purview of the right. It’s mainstream for conservatives in a way it just isn’t for the left. Hilariously, Ann Coulter took offense to Bill O’Reilly’s suggestion that she was the right’s version of mild-mannered, fact-checking Al Franken. There is no liberal figure analogous to Ann Coulter, none. She is their minstrel show and theirs alone, even if she’s foisted on the rest of us.

Professor Geoffrey Nunberg compares Coulter’s shtick on political shows to the casting dynamics of sitcoms, sagely observing that “the drama of the political talk show is character-driven rather than plot-driven.” He also notes:

Coulter's celebrity is a good measure of what has become of political discussion. You'd scarcely describe her as a political thinker, no more than you'd describe Simon Cowell as an critic of the arts. But like Cowell, she has an unerring gift for media theatrics. It isn't just her penchant for making snarky or outrageous remarks. Plenty of people do that without being invited onto the Today Show, and in fact Coulter doesn't get a lot of national attention for her run-of-the-mill ruminations about giving rat poison to Justice Stevens or fragging John Murtha. But the remark about the 9/11 widows was irresistible for its brazen and gratuitous tastelessness and the obvious pleasure Coulter took in consternation she created.

Is Coulter is sincere about the things she says? That's a silly question, like asking whether schoolchildren are sincere in the taunts they throw at each other across the school yard. But that doesn't make her a satirist, as her defenders like to claim -- usually with the implication that her literal-minded liberal critics don't get the joke.

Satire depicts things as grotesque in order to make them seem ridiculous -- what Stephen Colbert does in his Bill O'Reilly persona or Christopher Buckley does with the pointed caricatures of Thank You For Smoking. But Coulter isn't actually sending anybody up -- not herself, certainly, and not the targets of her remarks. Her fans may enjoy hearing her talk about poisoning Justice Stevens or say that it's a pity Timothy McVeigh didn't park his truck next to the New York Times building. But that's not because the remarks make either Stevens or New York Times seem particularly ridiculous. It's because Coulter seems to be able to get away with unbridled aggression by presenting it as mere mischief, leaving her critics looking prim and humorless. ("Perhaps her book should have been called 'Heartless,'" said Hillary Clinton after Coulter's remarks about the widows, inviting the response, "Oh lighten up, girl.")

[...]

It's that underlying comic framework that creates the opportunity for political smut. However rude or offensive a remark might sound in the abstract, it's all in the spirit of entertainment. And as Coulter and other adepts of the genre understand, the ultimate effect is to aggravate the affront, not alleviate it. You not only get to offer an insult, but to discredit the anger or outrage it evokes as prim political correctness: "My, we're touchy, aren't we?"

The grand irony of Coulter is that she depends on the tolerance of others to preach intolerance. Were the media truly liberal, she would not be allowed a platform. The minstrel show long went out of fashion, but her brand of minstrelsy positively thrives. The “shed heat, not light” model of political discourse so famously skewered by Jon Stewart can help ratings, and above and beyond any liberal or conservative bias, media corporations possess a commercial bias. Also at work is the media’s love for a simplistic, reductive, "he said-she said" storyline that appeases conservatives by appearing balanced and obviates such time-consuming activities as fact-checking or making a judgment.

V. Media Platforms: Who Needs Talent When You Have a Good Promoter?

Ann Coulter of course has the right to say just about anything she wants, and it’s demagogues such as her that most sorely test the very same essential First Amendment rights she’d ferociously strip from others such as The New York Times. The question is, since she has no value whatsoever except as a provocateur, why the hell do the rest of us have to be subjected to her?

A common argument on liberal blogs is that liberals should just ignore Coulter. It’s a respectable position. However, it’s not really possible except on an individual level, and to cede the field to her and her ilk is dangerous. Once upon a time, for instance, ”liberal” was not a dirty word. Words and language matter, and we ignore abuse of them at our peril. Coulter only gets away with her shtick because she’s allowed to by the media outlets where she appears, and they grant her a legitimacy she simply does not deserve. She was just a crackpot and not particularly dangerous back when she was merely a “cable network sideshow,” as Joe Conason puts it, but now she’s a “full-fledged media star.” Even if her book sales are inflated through bulk purchases by organizations such as NewsMax, who will then offer her $28 book for only $5, she does well on bestseller lists (although interestingly, so do Al Franken and other liberals). Liberals are not buying her books, except perhaps to review them. Coulter is the screeching face of a significant portion of the modern Republican party.

Fox News will of course rarely call her on anything, but if she was contained there, with sanctions in place and a no-air-time zone enforced by other networks, it might be all right. However, legitimate outlets such as NBC and its associated networks continue to give her a platform! Dateline NBC will advertise a show on pornography by promoting salacious details while simultaneously pretending to condemn the content. Similarly, NBC and other outlets have promoted Coulter’s latest outrages with a “Don’t Miss What She Said This Time!” approach. Since her horrendous comments about the 9/11 widows — condemned by NBC news anchor Brian Williams — NBC’s associated networks have nonetheless had her on six or seven times! As Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz observed [emphasis mine]:

But are news outlets being shameless in giving Coulter a platform for her inflammatory rhetoric, knowing it will boost ratings and circulation?

"She made news," says "Today" Executive Producer Jim Bell. "I think our audience is smart enough to figure it out and reach their own opinions. It's not our job to censor people." Besides, Bell says, "she's good television."

[...]

Coulter, who made the rounds at Fox, CNN and MSNBC last week, remains unabashed, telling Time: "I'd say my 'name calling' has been a smashing success." So when the staff of "Today" or any other program books Coulter, they know exactly what they're getting: a woman whose vituperation they can decry even as they milk it for market share.

Of course, since even bad publicity is still publicity, this column, too, will probably make the Coulter cash register ring a few more times.

Still, perhaps the most appalling promotion of Ann Coulter came from two pieces in Time magazine. As Eric Boehlert reports in his book Lapdogs (excerpt here):

The Time love-fest began in the April 18, 2005 issue when the weekly, compiling its list of the world’s most influential people, found room alongside past and present international leaders Ariel Sharon, Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama to include Coulter, a cable TV pundit. Time’s James Carney, who five months later was promoted to the magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief, did the honors, typing up the Coulter valentine, headlined "Gleefully Making the Left Squirm":

"In her books, Coulter can be erudite and persuasive, as when she exposes the left’s chronic softness on communism. But her signature is her gleeful willingness to taunt liberals and Democrats, to say out loud what some other conservatives dare only think–that Bill Clinton is a "horny hick," for example, and his wife "pond scum." It’s what makes Coulter irresistible and influential, whether you like it or not."

As Boehlert points out, if a liberal said the same about a conservative, it simply would not fly. What does this say about Carney and Time? However, worse still was the puff piece cover story she received from Time the following week. Time simply refused to fact-check Coulter and trumpeted her as a “public intellectual.” The piece’s author, Jack Cloud, actually wrote:

"Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words "Ann Coulter lies," you will drown in results. But I didn’t find many outright Coulter errors."

As Boehlert points out:

In order to print that, Time had to ignore not only the corrections Coulter’s own publisher had to make in subsequent editions of her books, but also the tens of thousands of words posted at blogs such as the Daily Howler, Spinsanity, Mediawhoresonline, American Prospect’s Tapped, and Scoobie Davis Online, just to name a few, that carefully chronicled the blatant misstatements by Coulter.

Indeed, The Daily Howler and Howard Kurtz, among others, dissected or critiqued the Time article in short order.

This matters a great deal because while serious news junkies may make fun of much of the coverage in Time and Newsweek, both magazines are widely-read and typically represent the conventional wisdom of the Beltway’s chattering class. Errors in these two newsweeklies will cause greater harm to the public understanding than will an error in an erudite journal (meanwhile, bad arguments in neoconservative publications such as The Weekly Standard cause greater harm to administration policy!). The average American simply does not expect a bigot and liar to be accorded such respect. NBC and Time pursue a short-term commercial gain by booking sideshow acts such as Coulter, but also sacrifice trust by doing so, because lending Coulter undeserved credibility damages their own. Evidently, they believe appealing to Coulter’s fans outweighs the harm it does to both their brand and the public discourse (as if the corporate heads give a damn about the latter!).

And this faux legitimacy causes real damage. Blogger Hume’s Ghost relates a key story on this point[emphasis mine]:

Not too long ago a friend of mine told me she was trying to become more politically informed. To do so, she continued, she had begun reading Ann Coulter's How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Think about that for a moment. This was an individual who did not know much about politics, was a non-ideological independent and the first person she could think of to learn more about politics from was a hate-mongering hack. This should have never happened, because Coulter should have been exposed for the vile, bigoted, intellectually bankrupt propagandist that she is by journalists a long time ago. In this regard, my friend was failed by a mainstream media which is more interested in using Coulter as a figure to drive up ratings than they are in doing their jobs of promoting a responsible national discourse.

So yes, Ann Coulter needs to be condemned every time she says something foul. Prominent conservatives need to be condemned every time they fail to condemn Republican spokeswoman Ann Coulter for something foul. And media platforms that allow her to spew hatred need to be condemned until they stop giving her legitimacy and air time.

VI. The Future of Minstrelsy

There are essentially five responses to Coulter. Number one, ignoring her, is perfectly respectable but really only works for individuals. She’s far too ubiquitous to avoid. Number two is outright mockery, and may be the most effective and (ironically) fair approach. David Letterman, Robin Williams, and many an editorial cartoonist has employed this approach, and true satirists such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can often deliver scathing critiques while simultaneously making an audience laugh. Number three is scolding her for her tone and excessive rhetoric. Brian Williams and many a politician or public figure used this tact in response to her tasteless 9/11 widows statements (Keith Olbermann uses this approach as well, although laced with plenty of mockery and critiquing as well). Number four is to directly challenge Coulter on the substance of her statements, as in a serious debate, interview or book review. Joe Conason’s review of Treason was superb in this respect, Al Franken debunks her on the air all the time, and many a columnist or blogger has done the same. The problem is, much of this work will only reach those who are already clued in to Coulter’s game. She is, above all, a creature of television, spewing venomous sound bites, and there she is rarely substantially challenged. She’ll earn a perfunctory “tough” question, but will wriggle free in protean fashion because seldom will anyone pin her down. This is the most severe deficiency in the mainstream media’s treatment of Coulter, except perhaps for number five. Number five is to deny Coulter a media platform from whence to disgorge her hatred. It’s encouraging that newspapers continue to drop her column. But she still gets a free pass from too many news organizations. As with cigarettes, the children of America would be much better off if they didn’t have to see Ann Coulter on television.

Most accounts of the minstrel show report that the form started to die around 1910 but didn’t really disappear in America until the 1950s. Apparently, there was no audience anymore for it, due to changing tastes or outright shame at watching such a spectacle. With Coulter, it’s quite possible that she’ll merely be supplanted by some other figure who plies more of the same in search of the same notoriety and profit. Or, as Michelle Cottie predicts, many more Coulters may spawn as other types of bigotry become further socially unacceptable. It would be naive to believe that Coulter and her ilk will ever completely vanish. But hope remains that conscience, taste, and a common sense of decency may eventually push them to some venue in the boondocks and off center stage.