37 thoughts on “Anne Coulter, Conservative?”

  1. Is there a particular column of hers that’s rankled fitzhugh?
    Apart from her complete indifference to forced race-replacement immigration, Ann always struck me as being as conservative as, for example, your average Turnabout addict. But I don’t read her columns regularly—haven’t seen one in quite some time. Does fitzhugh have in mind a specific statement of hers or particular column she wrote?

    I sort of give her a pass on the forced race-replacement issue because women in general can’t perceive those entities which the male brain sees as races and countries. Women have no idea what a country is (much less how one works), or what a race might be: not a clue. I’m less inclined to give someone like Joe Sobran a pass, because he’s not a woman. Sobran’s is another case—together with Buckley’s—where I suspect Catholicism’s refusal to clarify a Christian right of communities to racial/ethnic/cultural self-preservation (and yes, I did include racial in that) is leading intelligent men astray.

    • Average Turnabout Addict
      I think that your average Turnabout Addict is in a different intellectual category to the simplicities of Anne Coulter and her Populist Nostrums.

      The American Conservative Tradition properly understood does not include in its metaphysical armory the idea that all ‘Liberals’ are traitors. The Liberal Tradition is a legitimate part of the American experience. Its world view is wrong. But it does not amount to treason!

      • Legitimate righteous indignation isn’t bitchiness.
        The particular way in which Ann Coulter uses sarcasm and hyperbole isn’t every conservative’s cup of tea. Unless I’m mistaken I believe I’ve seen Steve Sailer and Lawrence Auster, to cite just two examples, say they weren’t big fans of hers; there are of course other conservatives who aren’t, some even strongly disliking her. I have a feeling Fitzhugh’s comments here put him in this same “conservative-but-don’t-like-Ann” category, presumably for the same reasons. Because these conservatives don’t necessarily have the same somewhat negative or irritated reaction to hyperbolic sarcasm from other pundits there may be something about Ann in particular that rubs them the wrong way.

        I haven’t seen the specific comment of Ann’s referred to here, to the effect that all liberalism amounts to treason, but reading fitzhugh’s words one says to oneself, “Can’t he see she’s being sarcastic? OK, OK, perhaps bitterly sarcastic, yes—but don’t liberals deserve our bitterness? I mean, isn’t it obvious that if you got Ann in a serious conversation she’d be perfectly able, thank you very much, to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s with the best of them? But reading her columns is partly sort of ‘pay-back time’ for the left’s ramming their brazen outrageous crap down our throats 24/7. I mean, can’t we get a little oxygen to breathe now and again?”

        I think part of if is some conservatives think Ann’s bitchy and can’t stand “bitchy” women. But legitimate righteous indignation isn’t bitchiness. The other side pushes, and pushes, and pushes. They never stop. Fitzhugh is surprised that some decent folk are finally pushed into taking a few liberties with their sarcasm? What’s so wrong? Ann’s columns aren’t meant to be legal treatises.

        I love Ann Coulter. Apart from her blindness to the immigration crisis (which I sort of excuse in an otherwise perfectly conservative woman…) I find her to be exactly my cup of tea.

        • Ditto to Mr. Scrooby
          Ditto to Fred’s post. He covers all the bases. Ann is a brave woman. I cannot think of a single conservative that can handle herself so well on TV.

          • ann coulter
            It should be the duty of every thinking conservative to elevate the content of our debates with a respect for order and civility. Populist excess, in the long run, damages the cause of a durable and meaningful conservative response. When will we remember that to be an American Conservative is to be reflective, constant, and well mannered.

      • Liberalism–now and then
        “The Liberal Tradition is a legitimate part of the American experience. Its world view is wrong. But it does not amount to treason!”

        I wouldn’t say it’s treason either. But liberalism, in its current incarnation, is a kind of intellectual and spiritual disease. Your basic Democratic Party activist full-monty liberal today is a kind of freak. And would be regarded as such by the liberals who founded this nation. They hate God, they especially hate Jesus, they hate and fear ordinary people, they have a soft spot in their hearts for dictators and tyrants, they simultaneously believe it’s OK to murder unborn babies but wrong to execute murderers, etc. etc. As P.J. O’Rourke observed somewhere, it is no small accomplishment to arrive at such a screwed-up state.

        • Dictators & Tyrants
          I believe American support for dictators and tyrants tends to be bi-partisan. Wasn’t Marcos a good friend of Regean? Didn’t we install the Shah in Iran? Who knows how many dictators and petty thugs we set up in Central and South America. Oh yea, and I recall us sending a lot of weapons to our former friend Saddam. You need to rein in your stereotypes a little Seth.

          • OK on dictators — but what about the rest of what Seth wrote?
            “[…] American support for dictators and tyrants tends to be bi-partisan. […] You need to rein in your stereotypes a little, Seth.” (— Myst. Str., today, 4:55 PM)

            Well, maybe—but only rein in the part about dictators and tyrants, Seth. Every other word you wrote was the absolute God’s honest truth. You wrote,

            “But liberalism in its current incarnation is a kind of intellectual and spiritual disease. Your basic Democratic-Party-activist full-monty liberal today is a kind of freak and would be regarded as such by the liberals who founded this nation. They hate God, they especially hate Jesus, they hate and fear ordinary people, […] they simultaneously believe it’s OK to murder unborn babies but wrong to execute murderers, etc. etc. As P.J. O’Rourke observed somewhere, it is no small accomplishment to arrive at such a screwed-up state.”

            Don’t change one single word of that, Seth.

          • Dictators and Tyrants
            Actually, Mr. Scrooby, Seth doesn’t have to back off his assertion about dictators a great deal, either. MS is pulling the old “moral equivalence” trick out of the hat here.

            Yes, it’s true. The US has supported some unsavory characters ever since we started getting into ‘foreign entanglements’ in a big way after WW II. MS then hauls up players like Marcos, the Shah, and Saddam while failing to mention leftist heroes like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro (to which we may shortly add such luminaries of freedom as Mugabe and Chavez). According to RJ Rummel’s very well researched “Death by Government” site, the left’s poster boys hold the records over anyone else for sheer slaughter – by far (and we’re not even counting abortion).

            MS’s slight of hand here is to act as if there is some sort of equality in the enormity of crimes committed. The only one we’d have to concede is Saddam, who I expect would’ve been a major-league butcher if he’d had the opportunity. It was a monumentally stupid decision for the reagan admnistration to support him – and here we are trying to clean up the mess 20 years later. But to compare Marcos to Mao, or the Shah to Stalin?

          • You can count Pinochet in you
            You can count Pinochet in your column also.

            I think you would have a hard time finding a mainstream Dem who adovated supporting any of the dictators we have discussed here. It is pathetic how you seem to lump all “liberals” in with Stalin, etc. Nice to hear how the John Birch Society is still in business in some precincts of this country. Wasn’t Eisenhower a Commie also? Get a life.

          • Pay no attention to Fred, his
            Pay no attention to Fred, his posts show that he has trouble working and playing well with others. I think you can find many people who self-identify themselves as liberals and do not hate G-d or Jesus, who think that all murder is wrong be they fetuses or persons on death row. The liberals that Fred (and yourself) conjure up only truly exist in your own imaginations.

            Notice how I gave several factual examples and Fred says, “Well, maybe.” You see, facts cannot be allowed to interfere with established beliefs; a growing trend on the Right side of the political spectrum (i.e. GWB).

            [NOTE FROM MODERATOR: personal comments like the one I struck above are likely to get comments deleted without warning.]

          • The Old Moral Equivalency – Again
            MS, who evidently hasn’t the courage to even come up with a screen name, pulls the dead-rabbit of moral equivalency out of his tattered hat yet again. To wit:

            “I think you can find many people who self-identify themselves as liberals and do not hate G-d or Jesus, who think that all murder is wrong be they fetuses or persons on death row.”

            You see, MS has just equated abortion, the utterly unjustified slaughter of an unborn child in the womb, to capital punishment, the execution, following a judicial process to determine guilt, of those who are responsible for acts of unspeakable evil. Those who sit on death row in the US and other civilized nations belong there in nearly every single instance. (Islamic and totalitarian countries aren’t included in this list.)

            I suggest you go an take a look at the rows of dead children shot in the back or blown up by the fearless and brave practicioners of the “religion of peace” today in Russia, MS, and try and make some pathetic relativistic argument of how it would be “murder” (yet another leftist tactic, attempting to re-define words) to execute those who perpetrated this evil. (Apparently a few were captured alive.)

          • It was my understanding that
            It was my understanding that the Pope, speaking for the Catholic Church” engages in the same type of “moral equivalency” that you accuse me of.

            Mr. Kalb, how come Carolus comment calling me a coward for not inventing a name is allowed to stand? Is this not the type of personal comment you crossed out in a posting on a separate topic?

          • The comment seemed much narro
            The comment seemed much narrower than the one I crossed out, and besides, I’m more likely to be bothered by personal comments when someone with a distinct and continuing identity is the object of the comment.

            Rem tene, verba sequentur.

          • But Liberals against abortion and for God, etc., aren’t typical
            “The liberals that Fred (and yourself) conjure up only truly exist in your own imaginations.”

            Not so, Mysterious Stranger (today, 3:19 PM). First, Seth Williamson was talking about what he termed the full-monte liberal who is a Dem Party activist and so forth. Naturally there are people who endorse parts of the Dem program without endorsing the whole thing. The late Dem Pennsylvania Governor Casey for example did not endorse the full-monte Dem position on abortion. Former Dem Colorado Governor Richard Lamm doesn’t endorse the full-monte Dem (and also GOP) position on open borders. Such individuals are saner than those who endorse the Dem full monte, as Seth refers to it. Second, a full-monte liberal is, for me, someone like Paul Begala (and others who so obviously belong in this category they don’t need to be mentioned—Hillary, for instance).

            Yes, I agree with Seth Williamson’s characterization, one hundred percent. And he’s right to say it openly: let the other side get a good eyeful of what people think of them. Maybe some of them will wake up and mend their ways.

            Finally: I agree with all of Carolus’ comments about false moral equivalency.

      • Coutler
        fitzhugh—Ann Coulter never said all liberals were or are traitors. At least not in “Treason.” She cited examples of patriotic liberals who did not support or work as agents for the Soviet Union.?

        • A bit of retort
          “Ann Coulter never said all liberals were or are traitors.” -Muhlenberg, 10/7/04

          “I’VE BEEN TOO busy fretting about “why they hate us” to follow the Democrats’ latest objections to the war on terrorism. So it was nice to have Al Gore lay out their full traitorous case this week.” -Ann Coulter, 8/25/02

          Not to be nitpicky, but I’ve heard this argument so many times from Coulter-heads that it’s starting to get old. In the quote from her above, She tells us that the democrats have a “traitorous case.” One could infer that this implies that they are traitorous. Now, if someone is traitorous, then they usually are a traitor.

          —END COULTER—

          Ok, I’m sorry if I am being repetitive for saying what I just said, but I am sick to death of it. It’s despicable, untrue, and tipical of her.

    • Anne
      Your ignorance shows with your comments. How dare you give a woman a pass because she is a woman. Gender does not determine incompetence. Women DO know what a country is is, and DO know how it works. It is people like you that poison the world

      • I’m sorry to thrust truth in your face, Mysterious Stranger
        “Women DO know what a country is, and DO know how it works.” (—Mysterious Stranger, 10/6/04, 1:51am)

        Do they? Let them show it in the voting booth then. Typically what we get from them is support for the Dem Party (less so in the case of wives, who have husbands to influence them, thank God!), not exactly something that reflects positively on their understanding of what a country is or how one works, or what a race might be …

        “Gender does not determine incompetence.”

        Each sex not only has natural inborn strengths and weaknesses (i.e., things at which it is naturally more competent compared to the other sex, and things at which it is naturally more incompetent compared to the other sex), its strengths and weaknesses naturally complement the weaknesses and strengths, respectively, of the opposite sex, the whole thing aimed at men and women falling in love with each other; at facilitating things like marriage or at least long-term couple-formation and other loving, lasting relationships; at getting through the process of pregnancy and of actually giving birth; at founding stable, loving, nurturing families; at raising children—things like that. I realize, Mysterious Stranger, that blurting all this out at you affects you the way suddenly thrusting a crucifix right into a vampire’s face affects the vampire. I know that. I’m sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose to be mean or hurtful. It’s just that truth needs to be spoken and faced sooner or later— to put it another way, sooner or later you’ll need to start forgetting what your left-wing radical el-mucho-sicko college teachers told you and start dealing with truth.
        ________________________

        Long live Flanders!

        • “Typically what we get
          “Typically what we get from them is support for the Dem Party” (—me, above)

          That, or using their cluelessness to influence the Republican Party in the direction of way-out-there radical leftism so wacko it makes Karl Marx look like a knee-jerk white-Southern-U.S. good-old-boy redneck in comparison.
          ________________________

          Long live Flanders!

  2. At least we don’t have Garrison Keillor
    http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/

    Keillor’s loathing for himself, Minnesota and Minnesotans always gave me the creeps. So maybe it’s encouraging that he hates huge numbers of other people much, much more. (The time some friends forced me to go to one of his shows he also drove me up the wall by a really nihilistic rendition of Emily Dickenson’s “Because I could not stop for death” to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.)

    Rem tene, verba sequentur.

  3. People are interested in her
    Just a note, for whatever it’s worth: this forum discussion gets about 20 visits a day from people doing Google searches for “Ann Coulter.” I looked and it’s about the 470th item that comes up on the search. I don’t know exactly what that shows, but it’s clear that lots of people are obsessed by her.

    Rem tene, verba sequentur.

    • Ann just has this effect on conservative men
      After a pair of leftist college students tried to hit Ann with cream pies the other night as she was giving a talk (she ducked just in time), she told the guys in the audience to “get them” as they ran away. Needless to say, conservative men will do anything for Ann: the culprits got got (and are now facing charges).
      ________________________

      “If a tree falls and an expert doesn’t hear it, is there a sound?” Yes, the sweetest, most melodious sound in all creation: the sound of entropy being brought clanking, screeching, grinding to a halt.

      • entropy sounds?
        even your signature reveals traits from your personality and your approach to things.
        Your definition from entropy is wrong.

        • Karol, entropy’s related to information and therefore to meaning
          “Even your signature reveals traits of your personality and your approach to things.” (—Karol Kamminsky)

          Isn’t that what signature blurbs often do, Karol? Often, they reveal “traits of the commenter’s personality and his approach to things.” Every commenter who’s registered with the Turnabout site can choose a signature blurb which will automatically appear at the end of his comments near his pen name.

          “Your definition from entropy is wrong.”

          Here‘s what I replied several months ago to someone who questioned that reference to entropy. It explains my intent.
          ________________________

          Long live Flanders!

          • Karol, here’s some stuff about it at the Wikipedia
            Here‘s a Wikipedia article about Shannon’s paper, which includes links about thermodynamic treatments of information and the relationship between information and entropy. Clearly there’s a deep relationship between what we know as information on the one hand, and what we know as meaning on the other. Leftism takes us away from meaning, toward meaninglessness. That was my fundamental point.
            ________________________

            Long live Flanders!

          • No offense was intended!
            And thinking in your strange monarchists leanings review it,I imagine you can love it:

            “During the last three centuries the Western world has seen the growth of a damaging division in the way in which we see and understand the world around us…
            We are only now beginning to understand the disastrous results of this outlook. The Western world has lost a sense of the wholeness of our environment, and of our inalienable responsibility for the whole of creation. This has led to an increasing failure to appreciate or understand tradition and the wisdom of our forebears accumulated over the centuries…
            It is as if tradition represented the enemy of man’s lofty ambition; the “primitive” force which acts as an unwelcome reminder – deep in our subconscious – of the ultimate folly of believing that the purpose and meaning of life on this Earth lie in creating a material form of Utopia – a world in which Technology becomes a “virtual reality” God; the arbiter of virtual reality ethics – and thus the eventual murderer of the Soul of Mankind.
            To my mind, tradition is not a man-made element in our lives – it is a God-given awareness of the natural rhythms and of the fundamental harmony engendered by a union of the paradoxical opposites in every aspect of nature.
            Tradition reflects the timeless order, and yet disorder, of the cosmos and anchors us into a harmonious relationship with the great mysteries of the Universe…”

            H.R.H. Prince Charles, “The Sacred in Modern Life”

            Blindness to the existence of an enemy,
            makes it impossible to conquer him.

  4. Ann Coulter et al
    Coulter, Noonan, Crowley, Ingraham on the right knee jerk pavlovian. They dont have the excuse of Hannity.He is a blithering idiot. Unfortunate that intelligent people pon the left Pelosi, van Den Heuvel are also knee jerk party liners. Seee the 2 books on Willy Munzenberg Double Lives by Stephen Koch ,Red Millionair by Sean MacMeekin. Also Theory and Practice of Communism by R.N.Carew -Hunt and Carl Boggs the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci. Lenin as quoted by Huffington uses the term strategic minority. Itis no accident that Eu and the erstwhile neocon US are not friendly to Christianity. See how Zapatwero is reopening the Spanish Civil war. It is shameful how they gop after senile old men like Pinochet but not Castro, Murdoch, Soros, the China Commissars. How come no trials for gerntocracy of the former USSR. Putin was KGB commander in the DDR. The age of antiChrist post Vat II.Merry CHristmas. John Morrison

  5. humor
    Coulter has the capacity to capture the humor and absurdity inherent in liberalism. This infuriates liberals, who take themselves (and their worldview) very seriously. Coulter is to contemporary liberals as Voltaire was to the eccliastics of the 18th century. She pricks their pious, little bubbles of self-delusion.

    From different angles, both Kierkegaard and Nietszche saw the absurdities of liberalism, and both made fun with it in their own distinctive ways (and of course each had very different prescriptions to cure the disease of liberalism). I can’t think of any serious writer in the 20th century who has carried on this tradition.

    As for Russell Kirk, he was an apologist. Coulter is a polemicist. They do different things, and serve different purposes. Coulter may cause someone to question and think about the premises of liberalism; Kirk offers an alternative to liberalism.

  6. Ann can!
    Please, Ann bashers. You are speaking of the woman I love.

    Look — Ann Coulter is an agent provocoteuse who has developed her own polemic style, every bit as much as H.L. Mencken or Hemingway had their own writing styles.

    Now it’s natural that when someone develops a distinctive and very personal, if not eccentric, style, some people will like it and some won’t. Fine.

    In Ann’s case, I think that many of the conservatives whose grain she goes against (we won’t bother discussing why leftists hate her) have a stereotyped idea of what a conservative writer should be. In this view, he or she should be a classicist or historicist, frequently quoting Cato, Aristotle, Burke, Chesterton, et al.; should be heavily influenced by established religion; should advance subtle and scholarly arguments.

    All that is a perfectly valid brand of conservative commentary, if it suits the personality of the commentator, but it is not the only one. Ann’s modus operandi is the rapier, not the fencing sword. She sarcastic, over-the-top, sassy, outrageous, colorful — a combination that could be too much of a good thing (or bad thing, depending on your taste) were it not held together by a rare wit and feeling for the mot juste.

    But! But! It’s not her style we object to, it’s her opinions, some will say. To which I reply: First, is she really that far beyond the pale? I would suspect that if each of her columns was translated into conventional arguments, most traditional conservatives (not country club Republicans) would sign off on at least 75 percent of them. How many writers have a higher batting average than that?

    Second, her “arguments” are not to be taken at face value; they are not academic propositions; they are ideological bunker busters, arguably the only kind of high-explosive rhetoric capable of penetrating the armor that establishment liberalism has surrounded itself with, namely, the mass media, the government bureaucracies, academia, and the urban chattering classes. When the other side owns the culture’s commanding heights and places there the opinion-making machinery, you don’t send the cavalry against it. You call in an air strike.

    Sorry about the over-extended military metaphor there, but this is war, a war against a large number of opponents who want to turn the country into a quasi-Marxist, anti-individualist, centrally governed, politically correct, terrorist-appeasing state. On our side we need quiet thinkers, and we also need shrewd hysterics. Prince Hamlet, you will recall, was only mad when the wind was blowing north-northeast. When it blew southerly, he could tell a hawk from a handsaw.

    • I agree. I think she’s
      I agree. I think she’s looking for a way to turn up the intensity to compete with the constant barrage of sardonic humor, twee emotions, and righteous rage from the left.

  8. Even if Ann Coulter likes George Bush I still adore her
    What’s not to love in the following comment by her? (I just now ran across it in an e-mail solicitation from an outfit named Patriot Post—I don’t have a URL for it.)
    ______

    “With all their hysteria about Valerie Plame, I had nearly forgotten what the Democrat Party stands for. It’s good to be reminded that the sole item on the Democrats’ agenda is abortion. According to Dianne Feinstein, Roe v. Wade is critically important because ‘women all over America have come to depend on it.’ At its most majestic, this precious right that women ‘have come to depend on’ is the right to have sex with men they don’t want to have children with. There’s a stirring principle! Leave aside the part of this precious constitutional right that involves (1) not allowing Americans to vote on the matter, and (2) suctioning brains out of half-born babies. The right to have sex with men you don’t want to have children with is not exactly ‘Give me liberty, or give me death.’ In the history of the nation, there has never been a political party so ridiculous as today’s Democrats. It’s as if all the brain-damaged people in America got together and formed a voting bloc.” —Ann Coulter
    ______

    I mean, how can anyone not love this woman after reading stuff like that?
    ________________________

    Long live free Flanders!

  9. All’s forgiven, Ann. Lots of us could’ve blurted that out.
    COULTER JOKES JUSTICE SHOULD BE POISONED

    The Associated Press

    LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Jan. 27

    Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, speaking at a traditionally black college, joked that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned.

    Coulter had told the Philander Smith College audience Thursday that more conservative justices were needed on the Supreme Court to change the current law on abortion. Stevens is one of the court’s most liberal members.

    “We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ crème brulée,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”
    ______

    [Incidentally … “Conservative commentator”? But she’s completely middle-of-the-road! I mean—if that’s the way the game is played, how come Katy Couric, Eleanor Clift, and Christiane Amanpour are never introduced as “liberal commentators”? Hey just curious … (And they wonder why we get so frustrated at their neverending outrageous unfairness that some of us start fantasizing about things like poisoned crème brulée …)]
    ________________________

    Long live free Flanders!

  10. Ann Coulter is our ally
    Rick Darby is right. Let’s not jump on Ann. A calm critique followed by constructive criticism is all that is in order, with I might add, a thankful comment or two for her strength and smarts. The chief fault inherent in heresy is a drive towards ultra-purity in too many things. We can get along with Ann, as long as she doesn’t blast traditional conservatism, like committed neocons do.
    Let’s keep the drive towards purity for the things that matter, like promoting a Leitkulture rooted in Western Christendom.

    Dave

Comments are closed.