Saturday, March 03, 2007

Is 'Bad Publicity' Better Than 'No Publicity'?

Ann Coulter speaks to the Conservative Political Action Committee

Everytime I provide video clips of conservatives, I wrestle with the possibility that all I'm doing is helping them get more press. After I play that argument out to its logical conclusion, I realize that that's exactly what needs to happen. People need to see them, hear them, unabridged, unedited, to get as close as possible to seeing inside their minds. Ignoring them, hoping they will go away, hasn't been a winning strategy for Democrats.

In her own element, among friendly and welcoming faces, Ann Coulter's true nature comes out in its full glory. Like in this exchange with a member of the audience:
QUESTIONER: I go to Virginia Tech and unfortunately I have a professor so liberal he finds Karl Marx to be too conservative. He stated in class that not only is Nancy Pelosi an American hero, but that if Jesus were alive today he would be a far left liberal. Can I ask you what the appropriate response to this would be?

ANN COULTER: Start a Joe McCarthy Club. [LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE] Look, you can't rebel against authority by wearing a Mao T-shirt on a college campus. You can wear a Joe McCarthy t-shirt on campus. That'll upset the little darlings. [LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE]


Watch the video clip:







In case anyone believes that she is joking, she isn't. Ann Coulter genuinely believes that Joe McCarthy was an American hero. She wrote a book about him. She apparently has no problem with McCarthy holding up blank pages in his hand and saying that he had the names of a thousand communists in the State Department. That was typical of the vicious lies that McCarthy spread to further his own career. But apparently, Ann Coulter has no problem with that kind of behavior, which says a lot about her.

The way that she speaks really offends me: In over-simplified, black and white terms, about people as if they were cartoon caricatures. It indicates thinking that is simplistic and polar. Life isn't like that, society isn't like that, people aren't like that, except, apparently, in Ann Coulter's mind. What she has to contribute to an already overheated and divided electorate is derision and more bile.

Republicans can try to distance themselves from her publicly, "on the record," but privately they embrace her and are very happy to have her appear at gatherings like this one with C-PAC. Coulter's comments about black people and Christians are shocking:








Here are the full videos of Ann Coulter's appearance before C-PAC:




Part 1






Part 2






Part 3






Part 4

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