"Today, Ann Coulter is just political white noise." And I don't feel sorry for her!

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COMMENTS: 
*  Wish i could save readers trouble by posting this above the article: the article is difficult to track - read the last four paragraphs first, then circle back to the top. It makes more sense then.  [Ed.: last four paragraphs included after major snippage below]
*  ... This is the problem with Ann Coulter and it is not a liberal or conservative thing. Ann Coulter is a serial liar and has always been one.  Her problem now is that she has devolved into nothing more than a caricature of herself. Republicans, Democrats, and the country would be better served if Ann just faded away. 
*  Coulter has always represented that strain of American conservatism whose "ideology" consisted of whatever would outrage liberals and was otherwise devoid of actual policy content.  Coulter's appeal to her right-wing fans -- like Sarah Palin's -- seems to be fading along with her looks.
    *  Coulter had looks? I always had the urge to feed her oats.
*  Just another vile republican cashing in on other peoples ignorance and hatred.
    *   Cashing in? Account overdrawn. Check bounced. NSF. 
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Ann Coulter has fallen from grace — and the reason why is terrifying

The right-wing hate-monger has fallen on hard times. This should be a cause for celebration -- but it's far from it

By Heather Digby Parton, June 29, 2015

Ten years ago, Ann Coulter was featured on the cover of Time magazine with an article entitled “Ms. Right.” At the time she was a very big presence in the political media but the article pushed her into the realm of popular culture; thus, she became more than just a political bomb thrower. She’d always had the looks and the confidence, and now she had the imprimatur of the mainstream media. Coulter became a full-fledged star.

The article caused a tremendous stir. After all, Coulter was among the most flamboyant of the newer, edgier breed of right-wing provocateurs. In 2000, she had won the Media Research Center-presented “Conservative Journalist of the Year” award, and the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute gave her its annual conservative leadership award “for her unfailing dedication to truth, freedom and conservative values and for being an exemplar, in word and deed, of what a true leader is.” It seemed as if she and her incendiary polemics were everywhere, from daily personal appearances on television, her weekly newspaper columns and a series of books that were extremely popular among right-wingers.

From 1998 to 2005, when the magazine cover appeared, she had published a series of books — “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton,” “Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right,” “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism,” and a collection of her columns, called “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter” — all of which were very successful. The theme of these books is obvious from the titles. She was famous for her cleverness in hating and baiting liberals. And in those heady days of conservative apotheosis, with sex scandals, stolen elections, terrorist attacks, unnecessary wars and liberalism on the run as never before, Coulter was the most deliciously vicious of all the haters. Among her famous quotes of the era were:

• The “backbone of the Democratic Party” is a “typical fat, implacable welfare recipient.”
• “My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that’s because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism.”
• “If you don’t hate Clinton and the people who labored to keep him in office, you don’t love your country.”
• “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”
• “Congress could pass a law tomorrow requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries leave… We should require passports to fly domestically. Passports can be forged, but they can also be checked with the home country in case of any suspicious-looking swarthy males.”

And one of her most memorable (to me at least) was this one:

“We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors,”

Coulter later clarified what she meant;

“When I said we should ‘execute’ John Walker Lindh, I mis-spoke. What I meant to say was ‘We should burn John Walker Lindh alive and televise it on prime-time network TV’. My apologies for any misunderstanding that might have occurred.”

If that reminds you of certain fundamentalists operating today in the Middle East, you wouldn’t be alone.

[major snippage]

It’s not as if Coulter is the only right-wing political pundit who is making this case. Talk-radio hosts such as Laura Ingraham are pushing nativism hard as well. But Coulter’s style is much uglier even than theirs. For example, she spends a lot of time in the book trying to prove that Mexicans are prone to child rape.

Lowrey thinks Coulter is pretty much an act that’s gone sour in the age of polarization and she may be right. She compares her to Donald Trump (who Coulter extols for his “immigrants are rapists” comments, which she believes he got from her) and there is a certain kind of scary-clown aspect to both of them. But I think it’s something else — she just isn’t all that shocking anymore. And the reason is that, after all these years — through which she and her fellow right-wing bomb throwers have been poisoning the discourse and polluting our politics with the most egregious dehumanization of just about everyone on the planet who doesn’t look and sound like them — nobody is listening anymore.

Today, Ann Coulter is just political white noise. Sure, she’ll sell her books to the small group of people who can’t get enough of her bilious humor and hatred but her days of being a mainstream pop culture phenomenon are over. Everybody’s heard it all before. There’s almost a whiff of noxious nostalgia about it now.


The question is whether or not there’s anyone left in the Republican Party who can crawl out from under the pile of offal that people like Coulter have buried them under and say something new to America. For the first time in nearly two decades they are ignoring her provocations. Whatever else happens that’s very good news.
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