Dr. J.'s BF Short Shot: The Significance of Ann Coulter

[babylonsister]

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/jonas/054

Dr. J.'s BF Short Shot: The Significance of Ann Coulter
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 03/19/2007 - 10:19am. Steven Jonas

Ann Coulter is not a joke. She is not perceptive. She offers no new insights, even from the Right. She is not irrelevant. She is not far out. She is not crazy. She is not brainless (indeed she may be very smart but that is hard to ascertain from a distance and through her public persona). She is not to be ignored. Nor is she to be shut up, as the Human Rights Campaign would like to do.

Ann Coulter is in fact very significant. Ann Coulter is the face of the modern Republican Party. Most readers of BuzzFlash are aware of her remark when she implied that John Edwards is gay. Whether or not he is should not be a matter for public discussion. (It is highly unlikely that he is, but hey, you never know.) But Ann Coulter wanted to make it so for two reasons. First, John Edwards has taken, in the contemporary Democratic Party sense, left-wing positions on most issues other than the future of Israel/Palestine. Second, John Edwards has a real chance to win the Democratic nomination, and with Barack Obama as his running mate would present a formidable obstacle to Republican retention of the White House short of a declaration of martial law by CheneyBush for some "national emergency" that would oh-so-conveniently occur say in mid-October 2008, and suspension of the election (a distinct possibility). So, what to do, for someone like Coulter?

Discuss the Bush record? Present a program for solving the nation's major problems? Get out of Iraq? Hardly. Change the subject, a favorite tactic of the modern Republican Party. Take control of the agenda, the favorite tactic of Karl Rove. Ignore Edwards on the issues, but get people talking about whether he is gay, where Coulter got her info, Coulter's outrageousness, and Ann Coulter herself. The HRC's call for a boycott and eventual ban plays right into her hands. The discussion additionally becomes "free speech", etc. So what should be done?

Ann Coulter should be draped around the necks of the Republican Party. When she made her "faggot" remark to the Republican core, the "Conservative" Political Action Committee, the audience actually laughed. This is where these people are and this is where they would like our country to be. That's the point we have to make over and over again. Homophobia is a major political weapon for the Republicans (just like it was of the Nazis). This is a divisive, destructive, and irrelevant issue, designed only to create hate and distract the American people from what that party is doing to our country. The "Three D's" are what the Republicans are all about: Distract, Divide, and Destroy. We should be taking Coulter and Hannity and Limbaugh and all the rest of them and say: "This is the Republican Party. As long as they are in charge, ‘liberal' or no, ‘anti-war' or no, this is what our country will look like not-too-far down the road." America is better than this, than them, oh-so-much better. Let's stop being defensive about Coulter. Let's go beyond her and hammer the Republican Party over its head with her.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly contributing author for The Political Junkies, and contributing editor for The Moving Planet Blog.

[MissMarple]

1. "Ann Coulter is the face of the modern Republican Party."

Quite cogent. That is it in a nutshell. That should be in every newpaper and on every progressive radio progam in the country.

P.S. I'm nominating.

[BOSSHOG]

2. There can be no doubt

The same trash who say they support the troops then make fun of people who EARNED the purple heart for taking bullets for their country. The same trash who calls a man a faggot and gets a chuckle. The same people who have never done anything FOR their country. She represents each and every one of them.

[MAGICBULLET]

4. Right on!!

they just love to be God-models don't they? what is right by THEIR God, is what they seem to perceive as right for everyone else! What about my God, the one that represents us?? The God that looks like me, the God that I can trust??

[yurbud]

6. that's what freaked me out with Bushies particularly after 9/11--they dramatically closed the gap

between their talk radio rhetoric and their actual actions.

Ann is not the American Goebbels. She is more like the talk radio demagogues in Rwanda who called the Tutsis cockroaches that needed to be exterminated.

[Mz Pip]

3. It's always been my belief

That Ann Coulter does a great service to the Republican Party by making the rank and file elected GOP look sane. Meanwhile she validates their bigotry and hate with her rants. She makes it seem okay to be hateful. She and Rush have a huge audience. Some people listen to them just to be entertained but I think the vast majority listen because they validate their bigotted beliefs.

She is the poster child for what many conservatives believe but refuse to say.

Mz Pip
:dem:

[Faygo Kid]

5. Ever hear Monica Crowley on the radio? Melanie Morgan? Ann wanna-bes.

Don't give Ann too much credit for her shtick. There is something very strange about her, getting thinner and more hollow-eyed all the time. It could be the dead soul she carries around inside her, or could be some very bad substance habits she has picked up. Unless she is protected in a bubble like Limbaugh, she is going to blow up.

[glitch]

7. Thank you! She should be paraded at every opportunity as THE FACE of the Republican Party.

It ain't pretty, but how will they ever learn if we don't use people like her as an example?

Think Republican and THIS could be you.

Of course Ann Coulter isn't unique in this respect. Any Republican can accomplish the same effect. Bushes, Rove, Cheney, Gonzales, Toensing, Delay, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly, that suicide in slow mo ex-CEO of Exxon guy, the list goes on and on and on and on and on...

[hwmnbn]

10. And limbaugh is the fat ass.....

of that same repug party!

[glitch]

12. I can't believe I forgot him! So many creeps to choose from, but he should be on the list. nt

[smoogatz]

8. Bingo. Coulter's the poster-ghoul for all that the Republican party stands for.

They are one and the same--crazy, full of racist, homophobic rage, without a coherent thought in their heads. Their core belief is "liberalism is bad." Except for bashing immigrants, the poor and gay people, that's all they've got.

[lolly]

9. Agreed.

Whoever get the Democratic nomination should use the tape of her at that meeting as part of a campaign commercial. Play it over and over. Play the other Repubs laughing at her. Call on the Repub nominee to denounce her.

[depakid]

11. With all due respect to the good doctor

It's pretty clear to me that Coulter does in fact have a personality disorder....

Then again, I'd say there's substantial prevalence of Axis II disorders among Republican party "leaders" and spokespeople.