The Truth About Ann Coulter

There's an interesting piece in the online edition of The New Republic by a woman named Elspeth Reeve about Ann Coulter. Ms. Reeve is billed as a "reporter-researcher" and she is very young -- judging by her article either still in college or recently graduated. It helps to know that when you read the article. It explains a lot.

At any rate Ms. Reeve, who by her own admission is a "liberal" from a "red state," loves Ann Coulter. Seriously. Just loves loves loves loves her. And she's willing to admit it in The New Republic (although only in the online edition, not in the actual magazine).

You have to admit, that takes balls. Or deep stupidity, I'm not sure which.

"Coulter is a pretty woman who holds up a mirror showing us the ugliest parts of ourselves," Reeve writes, when it's palpably obvious that the opposite is true: Coulter is an ugly woman who holds up a mirror showing us the ugliest parts of herself. The only thing that is interesting in what Coulter writes is the glimpse she gives us into her terminally twisted psyche. Her books and column never tell us very much about their ostensible subject matter (primarily because her knowledge is usually faked and her scholarship shoddy), but they sometimes tell us far more than we'd really care to know about Ann Coulter herself (her obsession with "excrement" in Godless is a recent and typically icky example).

"All wrapped up in liberals' snarky comments about her hair is a wellspring of latent guilt for judging her by her hair," Reeve claims. Well, I can honestly say that I don't judge Ann Coulter by her hair: I judge her by her penis. Okay, I'm kidding.

Reeve can't really come up with anything to say in defense of Ann Coulter (which, one would assume, would seem to be the point of an article that is billed as: "A DEFENSE OF ANN COULTER") other than the fact that she is outrageous and says things that might occasionally have a slight glint of truth in them. Well, as Noel Airman says in Herman Wouk's novel "Marjorie Morningstar," two and two make four, even if Hitler says so, but that's no reason to admire Hitler.

Ooops, did I just compare Ann Coulter to Hitler? I apologize. That's so unfair. Hitler's mustache wasn't nearly as big as Coulter's. Ooops. Did I say that?

The fact is that I don't give a shit if Coulter weighs less than your average anorexic zygote, or if she drinks like a fish, or if she shoves her finger down her manly throat on a regular basis, or if she's a bottle blonde who wears skirts that cry out for a speculum when she's pushing fifty. None of that, in the final analysis, matters.

What does matter is that she's intellectually dishonest. What does matter is that she wrote a book that purports to be an attack on Darwinism when she hasn't bothered to read Darwin. What matters is that she accuses liberals of being traitors by lying about what we stand for. What matters is that she takes a lying, scurrilous, pathetic drunk like Senator Joe McCarthy and holds him up to be some kind of paragon of patriotic virtue. What matters is that she can claim that James Agee once called Holocaust footage a "hoax" when she obviously hadn't read the article in question and was inaccurately extrapolating from a one-sentence remark in someone else's book.

That's what matters about Ann Coulter, Ms. Reeve. She's a phony and a fraud. The fact that she's a butt-ugly bitch is just extra. She's as big a lunatic as Andrea Dworkin, only thinner and blonder. And she's not worth taking seriously by anyone with half a brain. I suspect that Ms. Reeve knows this, but, being young and ambitious, she knew that writing an article about how much a self-proclaimed liberal could "love" Ann Coulter would be a cheap (but effective) way of getting a clip in The New Republic -- even if it was only in the online edition.

My guess is that Ms. Reeve has no scruples whatsoever and will do or say pretty much anything to attract attention and advance her career. I have no doubt she will go far, and I suspect that her role model will be the woman she claims to love so much.

Tom Moran