Before the memory fades, let’s mentally trundle back to the early summer of 2007; Hillary Clinton had a wide lead in the polls over John Edwards and that jug-eared upstart from Illinois, Sen. Barack Obama; on the GOP side of the street, Rudy Giuliani was the clear favorite of Republicans, unless TV actor Fred Thompson decided to enter the race.
The cynical media successors to the Madmen that inhabit the glass-walled canyons of lower Manhattan, dispensing infotainment, gossip and opinion under the banner of ‘news’ -- akin to telling us rubes with a straight face that Cheez Whiz is a healthy product of nature -- and their even madder-men colleagues who toil in the shadow of Capitol Hill in Washington, had all but anointed Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani as America’s Inevitable Choices for President at this time in the election cycle of 2007. Anyone with a television, access to cable news, and a strong stomach could hear the punditry burble day and night with omniscient assurance that the media-dubbed ‘America’s Mayor’ and certified Hero of 9/11 -- mainly because he gave press conferences and didn’t cower in a bunker -- was just so gosh-darned popular that no other candidates need apply except, maybe, Reaganesque actor Fred ‘The Craggy Gravitas of a President’ Thompson.
Some of us with the aforementioned TV, cable access, and a supply of airsickness bags, also drifted over to C-SPAN to catch the various candidates’ unfiltered speeches on the trail. This presented a different picture of Giuliani; in front of a live audience, the former mayor of New York City was sweaty, nervous, lisping and, worst of all for a politician, a clunking bore devoid of charisma. The response of the gawking civilians to his boilerplate GOP solutions stitched together by his frequent references to 9/11, as if Bush’s faltering economy could be tamed by War On Terror demagoguery, was tepid at best. At the end of Rudy’s tedious tirades, the C-SPAN cameras would draw back to reveal Giuliani’s politely-applauding potential voters as mostly unenthusiastic and weary -- at least those not actually asleep on their feet. It did not take much, even for the rabble who are not on a first name basis with D.C. Insiders, to see that Rudy in the flesh, stripped of his cloak of media worship, really was the sad, awkward embodiment of Joe Biden’s later quip, “a noun, a verb and 9/11.” Our Big Media, in typical form, misdiagnosed that the election of 2008 would be all about protecting us from religion-inspired terrorists and who better to do that than a dull, peevish New Yorker who once wasted taxpayer money trying to have a painting banned because it offended his Catholic sensibilities? (Incidentally, the ‘Reaganesque’ Fred Thompson did run, wrapped like a corndog in media-conferred gravitas, and also turned into a shambling heap of sleep-inducing ho-hum, dropping out early with his numbers in the tank. Without a Hollywood script, old Fred was drowning in a sea of self-created monotony.)
Similarly, Mitt Romney is a Godsend for insomniacs. Aside from the fact that he has flip-flopped more often than a Sea World attraction, Romney on C-Span is the same unsharpened pencil he was during the 2008 primaries, with a couple of important carry-over features that even Giuliani lacked: 1.) Mitt exudes insincerity as if he had soaked in musk oil. His one-cylinder ideology could fit on the back of a cereal box with room to spare for a cartoon character and full list of polysyllabic test tube ingredients, mostly the same GOP bumper-sticker nostrums that have already brought us to the brink of disaster, but his beady-eyed lack of authenticity in delivering the goods is significant. 2.) Romney is an unabashed Mormon in a party whose primaries are greatly controlled by born-again ‘Christians’ who think Unitarians consort with the devil and Methodists are destined for hell. To some of these Christopublicans, a Mormon is as exotically evil as a Rastafarian and worthy of the same fiery fate. Since they won’t be voting for Mitt, and the Tea Partiers recoil in disgust from his Taxachussetts liberal to wingnut firebrand hypocrisy, it’s hard to see who will vote for him in the primaries.
As with Giuliani, Romney has a recognizable name, bales of money, a constituency within the Pundit Class and Power Elite, and a temporary lead in the polls, but that’s not enough to secure him the GOP nomination this year. He’s a noun, a verb and it’s time for a nap, and won’t be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.
Copyright 2011 RS Janes.
http://tattlesnake.blogspot.com
Showing posts with label Fred Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fred Thompson. Show all posts
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Whatever Happened to Ann Coulter? Edition
Her Influence Nearly Gone, She's Still Out There Slipping Further Into Inconsequence as Reality Proves Her Wrong -- Even to Many Conservatives
"Facts are stupid things."
-- Ronald Reagan, at the Republican National Convention in 1988.
On Dec. 3, 2007, C-SPAN aired a speech Ann Coulter gave at the National Press Club in Washington on Nov. 28th, sponsored by the neocon Young America's Foundation and it's Orwellian adjunct, something called the National Journalism Center, which has as much a relationship to real journalism as Ann's Christianity has to the principles expressed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The NJC is very proud that Coulter herself went through their program twenty years ago -- which gives you a good idea of its journalistic worth -- and invited her to address its 30th anniversary dinner.
Appearing a tad raccoonish in her heavy black eye make-up, Coulter's negligible grasp of fact and logic has now exited stage right completely, leaving her resembling nothing so much as a piece of smirking Swiss cheese framed by long blonde hair, shakily babbling with intermittent coherence into a microphone.
Plowing the same rut she has turned into a muddy grave by sheer repetition, and sketching the typical Coulter cartoon portrait with a house painter's brush, Ann attacked her usual enemies; all of those horrid 'liberals and Democrats,' the amorphous grab-bag target for her hate; an evil entity with one mind who, in Ann's hilarious political psychosis, run the country with an iron hand suppressing poor brave conservatives like herself, while simultaneously meekly surrendering to 'Islamofacist' terrorists and anything larger than a bedbug everywhere else. If you detect a little 'cognitive dissonance' here, congratulations and welcome to Coulter's home planet where the mental landscape is a continual funhouse ride requiring a 'memory hole' to forget what you just said every three paces.One example of this would be Ann's baffling delirium that liberals and Democrats started demanding "Where's Osama?" after Saddam Hussein was captured, and only then because former Iraq War supporter and sporadic Bush apologist Peter Beinhart chiseled the embarrassing question on a tablet and handed it down to the rest of us. In the earth-orbits-sun cosmos Coulter shuns, 'Ls & Ds' were asking this long before the Iraq War even started, and it had nothing to do with Beinhart, as a few minutes at 'the Google' will reveal.
But in her hasty slide to media oblivion, fast-and-frothing Ann has no time for Googling or fact-checking -- that sort of thing is strictly for the wimpy liberals who dwell in the fringe moonbat minority, loathed by 'real Americans,' yet are powerful enough to destroy our country.
Included among the other lowlights of Coulter's addled presentation was a swipe at New York Times columnist Paul Krugman alleging that "no one reads him," although this may have been mere literary envy: Krugman appears regularly in one of America's highest-circulation newspapers and his columns are seen by millions; Ann's flaky diatribes are buried amid the 59 other conservative columnists at TownHall.com and surrounded by the tasteful 'Liberal Hunting Permit' and '3 books for a buck' Conservative Book Club ads at her own website.
She also made the bizarre statement that no one listens to Air America Radio or watches MSNBC and asserted that, to cover its embarrassment, MSNBC will not disclose its ratings. In fact, AAR's ratings are up, as are MSNBC's, especially in Keith Olbermann's time slot vs. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, and the ratings information is easy to obtain -- Olbermann himself has talked about MSNBC's ratings several times on his program. But, then, that would require doing a little research before you open your mouth and pick up your foot, not, as we've seen, Ann's strong point.
She riffed on classic Coulter standards as well, and with as much underwhelming logic: Hillary Clinton is a 'whiny feminist' who, if elected president, will put every American woman in a burqa, which should induce a double-take even in those who don't like the New York Senator and, once again, places Ann at odds with her own expressed doubts about women having the vote in this country.
Then she moved on to her strong support for the Second Amendment, but a smirking dismissal of the First as "highly overrated" -- you know, the same constitutional amendment guaranteeing free speech and a free press that Ann and her colleagues in the right-wing media habitually abuse to 'get their message out.'
And Good Christian Ann wants to kill more "moo-slims" (that's how she pronounced it), not in the name of defense, but for revenge, and it doesn't seem to matter to her if they're actual terrorists or not. After all, she did want to bomb their countries, kill all of their leaders, and convert them to Christianity, apparently just for following Islam. On Coulter World, the thought never intrudes that this might be a very poor way to introduce people to your religion, but Ann figures that it worked so well on Native Americans and Filipinos that it should be tried again. That many of them had to be massacred in the process of being rendered safe for Jesus doesn't enter Ann's mind. Oh, I forgot -- to a neocon, this is a 'funny' remark, and not in an ironic sense.
She also briefly engaged in the fringe right-wing lunatic history myths that have become her trademark: the drunken Sen. Joe McCarthy was a Great American whose demise came solely at the hands of the 'liberal media' and not anything he did to himself; the Democrats have always been the pro-slavery, pro-segregation party since Lincoln was president in the 1860s, ignoring a large chunk of the 1940s thorough the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson finally passed the various civil rights acts that legally ended segregation in the Old South, leading to 'integrationists' such as Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and other Dixiecrats becoming Republicans, and ushering in Nixon's tacitly racist Southern Strategy in 1968. But then, this is all in a day's work for the historically-challenged Coulter.
However, to be fair, let's give Ann credit where it's due: She did freely confess that she's "not a builder," she's "a destroyer," and she just loves to "tear people down."
Reflecting the utter ideological chaos that is the current Republican Party, she also admitted she doesn't much like Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mike Huckabee, although she previously spoke highly of Romney at the CPAC 2007 convention. (A flip-flop?) These days her favorite candidate is the troglodytic Rep. Duncan Hunter, under investigation in a 'Duke Cunningham'-style bribery scandal and listed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as one of the "22 Most Corrupt Members of Congress." However, she did allow as how she'd vote for "any idiot the Republicans nominate."
Well, I won't belabor this topic further; suffice it to say that her speeches and ideas are mired in the moldy "I'm a victim" neocon carping of two decades ago and her enemies and attacks are always the same, except now she's donned the mantle of Christianity to try and gull the faithful into buying her books. If you want to know what else she said in her speech, all you need do is read a dozen of Coulter's columns at random, then make sure to cross-check her 'facts' with 'the Google,' so you won't be misinformed; and her crimes against common sense and logic will be apparent to those who possess an average amount of either one.
Times have changed and most Americans want to dump the neocon Republican failures in the nearest trash heap, but Coulter's still playing her pathetic one-note samba that's now turned into a whiny funeral dirge.
During her talk, the C-SPAN camera occasionally panned the room and the faces were revealing; Coulter's well-worn lines were greeted with tepid applause or subdued laughter and some of the conservative Republican audience, heeding the reality of the last six years under Bush and the anger of the citizenry at the GOP, simply stared at Coulter as Rupert Murdoch might stare at a speech by an avowed Marxist. It's said by those who managed to escape the mass suicide at Jim Jones' People's Temple in Guyana that, while some fanatics willingly drank the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, others had to be forced at gunpoint to pour it down. A feeling similar to that of the latter faction was in evidence here -- Ann was the crazed Jones, bleating blabber to the end, while some of her acolytes were scheming ways to save themselves and their party from the sure doom ahead. To use a dreaded sports analogy, the team was getting a pep talk at the two-minute warning, but the smarter players had faced the reality that the score is 63 to 3 against them, and their eyes had glazed over in anticipation of defeat.
Coulter was ironically followed on C-SPAN by Bill Clinton; considering her ongoing obsession with his sex life, perhaps that's Ann's secret desire as well.
At least Ann admitted she "didn't really have a job."
Observing the weak reaction of this supposedly Coulter-friendly crowd, she might soon have to find one.
"Facts are stupid things."
-- Ronald Reagan, at the Republican National Convention in 1988.
On Dec. 3, 2007, C-SPAN aired a speech Ann Coulter gave at the National Press Club in Washington on Nov. 28th, sponsored by the neocon Young America's Foundation and it's Orwellian adjunct, something called the National Journalism Center, which has as much a relationship to real journalism as Ann's Christianity has to the principles expressed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The NJC is very proud that Coulter herself went through their program twenty years ago -- which gives you a good idea of its journalistic worth -- and invited her to address its 30th anniversary dinner.
Appearing a tad raccoonish in her heavy black eye make-up, Coulter's negligible grasp of fact and logic has now exited stage right completely, leaving her resembling nothing so much as a piece of smirking Swiss cheese framed by long blonde hair, shakily babbling with intermittent coherence into a microphone.
Plowing the same rut she has turned into a muddy grave by sheer repetition, and sketching the typical Coulter cartoon portrait with a house painter's brush, Ann attacked her usual enemies; all of those horrid 'liberals and Democrats,' the amorphous grab-bag target for her hate; an evil entity with one mind who, in Ann's hilarious political psychosis, run the country with an iron hand suppressing poor brave conservatives like herself, while simultaneously meekly surrendering to 'Islamofacist' terrorists and anything larger than a bedbug everywhere else. If you detect a little 'cognitive dissonance' here, congratulations and welcome to Coulter's home planet where the mental landscape is a continual funhouse ride requiring a 'memory hole' to forget what you just said every three paces.One example of this would be Ann's baffling delirium that liberals and Democrats started demanding "Where's Osama?" after Saddam Hussein was captured, and only then because former Iraq War supporter and sporadic Bush apologist Peter Beinhart chiseled the embarrassing question on a tablet and handed it down to the rest of us. In the earth-orbits-sun cosmos Coulter shuns, 'Ls & Ds' were asking this long before the Iraq War even started, and it had nothing to do with Beinhart, as a few minutes at 'the Google' will reveal.
But in her hasty slide to media oblivion, fast-and-frothing Ann has no time for Googling or fact-checking -- that sort of thing is strictly for the wimpy liberals who dwell in the fringe moonbat minority, loathed by 'real Americans,' yet are powerful enough to destroy our country.
Included among the other lowlights of Coulter's addled presentation was a swipe at New York Times columnist Paul Krugman alleging that "no one reads him," although this may have been mere literary envy: Krugman appears regularly in one of America's highest-circulation newspapers and his columns are seen by millions; Ann's flaky diatribes are buried amid the 59 other conservative columnists at TownHall.com and surrounded by the tasteful 'Liberal Hunting Permit' and '3 books for a buck' Conservative Book Club ads at her own website.
She also made the bizarre statement that no one listens to Air America Radio or watches MSNBC and asserted that, to cover its embarrassment, MSNBC will not disclose its ratings. In fact, AAR's ratings are up, as are MSNBC's, especially in Keith Olbermann's time slot vs. Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, and the ratings information is easy to obtain -- Olbermann himself has talked about MSNBC's ratings several times on his program. But, then, that would require doing a little research before you open your mouth and pick up your foot, not, as we've seen, Ann's strong point.
She riffed on classic Coulter standards as well, and with as much underwhelming logic: Hillary Clinton is a 'whiny feminist' who, if elected president, will put every American woman in a burqa, which should induce a double-take even in those who don't like the New York Senator and, once again, places Ann at odds with her own expressed doubts about women having the vote in this country.
Then she moved on to her strong support for the Second Amendment, but a smirking dismissal of the First as "highly overrated" -- you know, the same constitutional amendment guaranteeing free speech and a free press that Ann and her colleagues in the right-wing media habitually abuse to 'get their message out.'
And Good Christian Ann wants to kill more "moo-slims" (that's how she pronounced it), not in the name of defense, but for revenge, and it doesn't seem to matter to her if they're actual terrorists or not. After all, she did want to bomb their countries, kill all of their leaders, and convert them to Christianity, apparently just for following Islam. On Coulter World, the thought never intrudes that this might be a very poor way to introduce people to your religion, but Ann figures that it worked so well on Native Americans and Filipinos that it should be tried again. That many of them had to be massacred in the process of being rendered safe for Jesus doesn't enter Ann's mind. Oh, I forgot -- to a neocon, this is a 'funny' remark, and not in an ironic sense.
She also briefly engaged in the fringe right-wing lunatic history myths that have become her trademark: the drunken Sen. Joe McCarthy was a Great American whose demise came solely at the hands of the 'liberal media' and not anything he did to himself; the Democrats have always been the pro-slavery, pro-segregation party since Lincoln was president in the 1860s, ignoring a large chunk of the 1940s thorough the 1960s when Lyndon Johnson finally passed the various civil rights acts that legally ended segregation in the Old South, leading to 'integrationists' such as Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and other Dixiecrats becoming Republicans, and ushering in Nixon's tacitly racist Southern Strategy in 1968. But then, this is all in a day's work for the historically-challenged Coulter.
However, to be fair, let's give Ann credit where it's due: She did freely confess that she's "not a builder," she's "a destroyer," and she just loves to "tear people down."
Reflecting the utter ideological chaos that is the current Republican Party, she also admitted she doesn't much like Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, John McCain or Mike Huckabee, although she previously spoke highly of Romney at the CPAC 2007 convention. (A flip-flop?) These days her favorite candidate is the troglodytic Rep. Duncan Hunter, under investigation in a 'Duke Cunningham'-style bribery scandal and listed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as one of the "22 Most Corrupt Members of Congress." However, she did allow as how she'd vote for "any idiot the Republicans nominate."
Well, I won't belabor this topic further; suffice it to say that her speeches and ideas are mired in the moldy "I'm a victim" neocon carping of two decades ago and her enemies and attacks are always the same, except now she's donned the mantle of Christianity to try and gull the faithful into buying her books. If you want to know what else she said in her speech, all you need do is read a dozen of Coulter's columns at random, then make sure to cross-check her 'facts' with 'the Google,' so you won't be misinformed; and her crimes against common sense and logic will be apparent to those who possess an average amount of either one.
Times have changed and most Americans want to dump the neocon Republican failures in the nearest trash heap, but Coulter's still playing her pathetic one-note samba that's now turned into a whiny funeral dirge.
During her talk, the C-SPAN camera occasionally panned the room and the faces were revealing; Coulter's well-worn lines were greeted with tepid applause or subdued laughter and some of the conservative Republican audience, heeding the reality of the last six years under Bush and the anger of the citizenry at the GOP, simply stared at Coulter as Rupert Murdoch might stare at a speech by an avowed Marxist. It's said by those who managed to escape the mass suicide at Jim Jones' People's Temple in Guyana that, while some fanatics willingly drank the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, others had to be forced at gunpoint to pour it down. A feeling similar to that of the latter faction was in evidence here -- Ann was the crazed Jones, bleating blabber to the end, while some of her acolytes were scheming ways to save themselves and their party from the sure doom ahead. To use a dreaded sports analogy, the team was getting a pep talk at the two-minute warning, but the smarter players had faced the reality that the score is 63 to 3 against them, and their eyes had glazed over in anticipation of defeat.
Coulter was ironically followed on C-SPAN by Bill Clinton; considering her ongoing obsession with his sex life, perhaps that's Ann's secret desire as well.
At least Ann admitted she "didn't really have a job."
Observing the weak reaction of this supposedly Coulter-friendly crowd, she might soon have to find one.
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