Ann Coulter on cover of Time magazine
posted by Sean @ 4/17/2005 08:50:00 PM
10 comments
Politics Schmolitics
We are a group of friends and acquaintances -- a merry band of pranksters indeed -- who have been arguing about politics on-and-off, then really on, then a little off... since 1998. On email. But that meant literally thousands of emails a year. That was too many. So here's the blog dedicated to carrying on that spirit of political and pop culture argument and dialogue. You might think of us as "schmoliticians", because while we take politics seriously, we try not to take ourselves quite so.
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10 Comments:
Boy, they did a good job airbrushing out her horns and spiked tail. She looks almost human.
She looks perfectly normal - until she opens her mouth. That's when she betrays herself as one of the undead.
Can't empathize? Then demonize.
Surely, you're referring to Ms. Coulter. To wit:
"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." - in a New York Observer interview, August 26, 2002.
"Then there are the 22 million Americans on food stamps. And of course there are the 39 million greedy geezers collecting Social Security. The greatest generation rewarded itself with a pretty big meal." - WorldNetDaily, December 2, 2003.
"The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet -- it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that's the Biblical view." - from her column "Oil Good; Democrats bad," October 12, 2000
"When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker 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." - at the Conservative Political Action Conference, February 26, 2002.
"I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote." Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, August 17, 1997.
"Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of 'kill everyone who doesn't smell bad and doesn't answer to the name Mohammed')". - from her column (at townhall.com), March 4, 2004.
(Thanks Wikipedia for the quotes--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Coulter#Quotations)
Nicely done. Like I said, all she has to do is begin speaking. She is quite capable of the "demonize" part all by herself.
She is certainly sensational, cut from the same cloth as Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh, Janeane Garofalo, Bill O'Reilly, and Michael Moore...etc.
I hold the above and their ilk as hyperbole... extremists... the furtherance of the base arguments of their ideologies. Peas and carrots on the dinner plate of ideas.
But she's not more evil than anyone else who sells political works.
I'll save the evil label for Tim McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden, Eric Rudolph, etc.
Good point, Randy. Ms. Coulter certainly isn't evil in the sense that Bin Laden, Hitler, et al are/were evil. I guess we're guilty of engaging in some of her trademark "hyperbole."
My biggest problem with folks like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, etc. is the extreme hatred they hold for the opposite side. It's one thing to believe passionately in a set of ideas and to oppose someone else's views, but where does this highly personal, unabated hatred come from? The fact that we're all Americans, working for the benefit of the same democracy and the same citizens never seems to enter into their minds. And it's not just the pundits; it's everywhere in Congress on both sides of the aisle. The pundits just seem to get the most press because they launch the most vitriolic and hateful attacks, and because, for some reason, they continue to operate under the assumption that we care what they say (although, I suppose this blog thread proves their point.)
Now, vituperation — abuse, invective, scorn — has, I would argue, in its ideal state, no necessary political ax to grind. The desire to verbally rough somebody up is not a partisan impulse.
Of course, that’s far from where we are. We’re in a left/right world rather than a funny/not-funny world.
Indeed, polarization, or the pretense of polarization, is the only thing that seems to provide a socially acceptable excuse for vituperation. It just may be that as a function of American uptightness and verbal correctness, we’re forced to invent a political excuse to say something unkind. The end of civility, this corrosive discourse, the taking up of opposite sides is perhaps just a smoke screen under which we can express the natural desire to be impolite.
We may not be so left and right. But rather, more generally, and diffusely, we’re dissatisfied, ambivalent, annoyed, bored. Instead of left and right, we just don’t like the bland, blah-blah, pointless, and point-of-view-less media we’re getting. Hence, the restless quest for newer, more interesting, more radical forms.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that political name-calling/personal attacks are just a socially-acceptable outlet for our natural inclination to be mean. I'm not so sure I can agree. I would argue that it is in our nature to cooperate--look at how language/society developed as a logical progression from early man's formation of big-game hunting parties. I would say that it is in our nature to want to work together, to trust each other, because on a more primal level we understand that this is our only chance for survival. To provide an everday example, why do people stop at stop signs when there are no cops around? Because we know that cooperating with our fellow motorists will keep us safe. If we were self-interested jerks, we could just blow through the stop sign. Chances are others would stop and let us go, we'd get where we wanted to go faster and screw the other guy. But, we don't. Of course, there are exceptions, but I would bet the vast majority of people stop at stop signs, let people merge in front of them on highways, open the door for someone with an armload of groceries, etc. For most people, it feels good to particpate in society, there's some unseen, but very real, benefit to it. If everyone acted in their own self-interest, none of us would accomplish anything. We cooperate because it feels good, and we know/hope that somewhere down the line, someone will return the favor. And, again, I think this is a more accurate representation of human nature. I would agree that political vituperation could be a product of our collective boredom with politics as they are now. But, I don't think it's a sign that underneath it all, we're all bullies wanting to hurl invectives at anyone who disagrees with our views.
My comment was a direct plagiarizing of an op-ed that I'd posted before on Schmolitics (and to which nobody commented). It can be found here.
For what it's worth, Harris, I agree with you. There is intrinsic value in civilized, social behavior. I don't believe there is a) a natural tendency to be mean (self interested maybe but not mean) and b) political bickering is just "meannes" that has to be contexualized.
The de-evloution of political discourse is more complicated than that.
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