― g e o f f (gcannon), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:18 (nineteen years ago) link
― Failin Huxley (noodle vague), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:21 (nineteen years ago) link
Failin, you couldn't hit it. There's nothing to hit!
― donut debonair (donut), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:22 (nineteen years ago) link
― Curious George (1/6 Scale Model) (Rock Hardy), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:23 (nineteen years ago) link
― donut debonair (donut), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:24 (nineteen years ago) link
― Rocker For Light (on a Bad Brains kick) (Eleventy-Twelve), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:25 (nineteen years ago) link
― Leon Future Coffee (Ex Leon), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:29 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:32 (nineteen years ago) link
"The fate of our troops isn't a game. The fate of the victims on 9/11 is not a game." But she told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, "most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that."
― Je4nne ƒury (Jeanne Fury), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:35 (nineteen years ago) link
― The Ghost of Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:37 (nineteen years ago) link
― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:38 (nineteen years ago) link
― shookout (shookout), Monday, 18 April 2005 20:56 (nineteen years ago) link
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Monday, 18 April 2005 21:04 (nineteen years ago) link
interesting mix of reactions from righty blogs
― kingfish, Monday, 18 April 2005 21:09 (nineteen years ago) link
― Star Cauliflower (Star Cauliflower), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 02:16 (nineteen years ago) link
Does Ann Coulter make a positive contribution to American political culture?http://cgi.pathfinder.com/cgi-bin/graph/piegraph?height=150&width=420&bg=ffffff&fg=000000&d1=78250,990000,Yes%2016.6%&d2=390025,000033,No%2082.8%&d3=2629,999966,Don
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050425/story.html
― dave225 (Dave225), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 11:18 (nineteen years ago) link
And the Ace of Spades decides that the Coulter cover is actually "proof of media bias" against conservatives. Why? Because Coulter didn't get a cover until now.
Ha ha ha ha.
― Pashmina (Pashmina), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 11:27 (nineteen years ago) link
And yeay, I'd "hit it", but then I have the hots for todd rundgren as well, heh.
― Pashmina (Pashmina), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 11:32 (nineteen years ago) link
I thought the same thing!
I got super-annoyed when I first saw this (Tom Delay barely gets a mention in the corner, and he actually has some REAL influence over American government!). Now my attitude's more like, "Eh. Let the baby have her bottle."
It also makes me laugh at Time since they're about two years behind on even CONSIDERING a front page story on someone like her.
― sugarpants: new and improved! (sugarpants), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 12:59 (nineteen years ago) link
She is the Paris Hilton of neocons.
(I wonder when Time is going to do their cover story on La Hilton?)
― sugarpants: new and improved! (sugarpants), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:02 (nineteen years ago) link
http://www.timecanada.com/story.adp?storyid=001&part=1&area=
― spitoon, Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:32 (nineteen years ago) link
Baaaaaahahahahaha!
― dave225 (Dave225), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:37 (nineteen years ago) link
She had her moment in 2002; after that book came out, none of her following ones were even that successful. She's so passe; now it's all about, you know, reading Teh Bible, not Ann Coulter.
(I like looking back at this thread - I said Arianna could take Maureen two years ago!!)
― Vic in Alderaan (Vic), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:45 (nineteen years ago) link
― Vic in Alderaan (Vic), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:49 (nineteen years ago) link
― miccio (miccio), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:51 (nineteen years ago) link
Having read the story, I don't get much of an impression of Coulter other than that she seems constantly desperate for attention. Her political beliefs don't seems particularly well-formed, either, for someone who's allegedly written entire books on the subject.
― sugarpants: new and improved! (sugarpants), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 13:55 (nineteen years ago) link
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."
― Space Is the Place (Space Is the Place), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 14:13 (nineteen years ago) link
― Vic in Alderaan (Vic), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 14:18 (nineteen years ago) link
― Vic in Alderaan (Vic), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 14:19 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jimmy Mod Knows You Eat Your Own Farts (ModJ), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 14:50 (nineteen years ago) link
― Thermo Thinwall (Thermo Thinwall), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 15:09 (nineteen years ago) link
interview with Time's John Cloud, who wrote the piece.
in summary, "fuck you. ann doesn't fuck up all that often. david brock sucks dicks."
David Brock wrote a whole book saying, 'Oh, my other books? They were lies.' So I don't think David Brock has a lot of credibility on the question of Ann Coulter. And what they are doing is a smear job. That's his other history -- David Brock has a history of smear jobs. And this is a smear job against me personally.
[...]
The idea that this is a puff piece is just absurd. And it's part of this left-wing attack machine that David Brock has invented for himself in his shame.
John Cloud John Cloud is a staff writer for Time magazine, where he has worked since 1997. Before coming to Time, he was a senior writer at Washington City Paper. He wrote this week's much-discussed Time cover story about Ann Coulter.
Brian Montopoli: First things first: Why did you write the story? Did you pitch it, or did the editors come to you and say, "We want to do a cover on Ann Coulter?"
John Cloud: Last summer, you know, we put Michael Moore on the cover. And, by the way, at that time we didn't get quite the reaction, certainly not from the left, which seemed rather pleased with the cover we did on Michael Moore. You get it from both sides.
As for how the story got suggested, I suggested it after the election. Ann Coulter [it seemed to me] had epitomized the way politics was discussed last year during the election. It was slash-and-burn, on both sides. Her side won, rather decisively, and it seemed the right time to figure out who was this force behind the way our political dialogue was being conducted. Ann Coulter is the person who is shaping the tone of this dialogue in many ways, and I thought it was time to examine her.
BM: One of the criticisms that people have made is that Time has bottom line considerations [that go into] who it puts on the cover, and choosing to put Coulter on the cover reflected either a pursuit of conservative readers or a desire to just put a hot woman on the cover, which is pretty much what the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz said. And let me read you something from Eric Alterman, and just ask you to respond: "Time's cover story/whitewash of Ann Coulter ... will make it impossible for serious people to accept what the magazine reports at face value ever again. It is as if Time had contracted a journalistic venereal disease from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and is now seeking to lower itself to their level in pursuit of their ideologically-obsessed audiences."
JC:Well, this is just absurd. A few weeks ago, we put Jeffrey Sachs' book on how to end poverty on the cover. I mean, is that going to be a huge seller for conservatives? We did a piece on television indecency that basically concluded that the FCC had gone too far in regulating television. That was on the cover recently. I don't pick the covers, unfortunately -- I don't have that much power here -- but we did Michael Moore on the cover last summer, we've done, over the years, incredibly flattering covers on Hillary Clinton, on both of the Clintons, multiple times. We did Ann Coulter because she's an interesting figure. I could not care less what conservatives or liberals think of Time magazine's covers, and if people read my work over the years -- I've been a journalist for ten years -- and if you read that body of work I think you'll see that I'm not trying to kiss up to conservatives. And if you look at Time magazine, even over the last month, this idea that we're kissing up to conservatives is wrong.
Plus, who are their sources for this? Did Alterman do any reporting before he made this assertion? I think a pertinent thing about Alterman is that he has said publicly that he will not engage Ann Coulter in debate. He won't go on television with her. So his solution to Ann Coulter is to act as though she doesn't exist ... I don't agree with that approach to people that we don't necessarily like. I think you engage those people in open debate, you get those people to talk about their ideas, and then you weigh those ideas. And my story does that. My story is very fair about her.
I think maybe Eric and Ann are in the same bunch. They also, by the way, use the same language. He calls Ann Coulter a name-caller, but he doesn't do anything in that screed against me except use sort of fancy name-calling. He says [the piece] is a "moral, professional, intellectual abomination" without making an argument about the actual substance of the piece. Instead, he picks up something from David Brock's Web site [Media Matters] and reprints it on MSNBC's website. Now David Brock is a very famous hater of Ann Coulter. They used to be friends, they're not friends anymore. He is also a serial liar. David Brock wrote a whole book saying, 'Oh, my other books? They were lies.' So I don't think David Brock has a lot of credibility on the question of Ann Coulter. And what they are doing is a smear job. That's his other history -- David Brock has a history of smear jobs. And this is a smear job against me personally.
BM: I realize you don't have a lot of faith in what the Media Matters people have been saying. But the one line [from the Time article] that seemed to upset a lot of people on the left was, "Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words 'Ann Coulter lies,' you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors." I looked at the Media Matters stuff on Coulter. There were a lot of examples of what seem to me to be errors. Even if you don't think highly of David Brock, how do you respond to that?
JC: This one sentence in a 5,500-word piece has been worried over more than any other. Which is fine, I'm happy to defend it. My piece does not say that there are no Ann Coulter errors. In fact, I offer some Ann Coulter errors that we haven't seen before, and I quote people like Ronald Radosh at some length on the problems with the more recent book of hers, which is Treason. David Brock, who knew Ann Coulter from years ago, goes to a book that's years old, and prints some mistakes from that book, and of course [there are] mistakes. And a lot of them are corrected. If you go out and you buy a copy of Slander now, you won't find those mistakes in it, because the publisher has corrected them.
Now, I had a choice of, do I want to, in my article, list every single Ann Coulter mistake ever made, even ones that have been corrected by the publisher -- which is, by the way, what almost every other journalist who has written about her has done -- or do I want to say something fresh and interesting about her? Do I want to engage her on issues and try to figure out what makes her tick and whether this is all an act? That was what my story was about. My story was not primarily about picking apart ... all 1,000 of Ann Coulter's columns or the hundreds and hundreds of pages that she's written in her books. My job in this story was not to be a fact-checker. I don't say in this story that she's never made a mistake. In fact, I point out some mistakes. This is a story that calls some of her writing highly amateurish. I say I want to shut her up occasionally. I quote a friend of hers calling her a fascist [and] another friend of hers calling her a polemicist. I quote Eric Alterman, Salon, James Wolcott, Andrew Sullivan, and Jerry Falwell all criticizing her. The idea that this is a puff piece is just absurd. And it's part of this left-wing attack machine that David Brock has invented for himself in his shame.
BM: Ann Coulter has obviously said, as you well know, some pretty offensive things. There have been a lot of things on the blogs about why people are so upset. One blogger wrote ...
JC: Are these conservatives or liberals who are upset? Because both sides are very upset with this piece.
[Interviewer]: I've been seeing the conservatives complaining about the cover picture and the liberals complaining about the content. One thing I read on a blog that maybe gets to why this is bothering people so much is, as you know, Ann Coulter said at one point that her "only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." And one blogger wrote, "I reserve the right to be slightly upset about Time glorifying a woman who once expressed dismay that one of my parents wasn't murdered in a terrorist bombing. So please, with no due respect, fuck the fuck off." It obviously gets a little coarse. But, you know, Time has put on the cover a woman who a lot of people feel is sort of beneath contempt.
JC: Brian, Brian, we have put Josef Stalin on the cover. We have made Adolf Hitler the person of the year. We are a news magazine. The cover of our magazine is not glorification. It is news. This whole idea is bizarre to me. If the New York Times did a front-page story on Ann Coulter, would it be glorifying her or would it be covering her? And, by the way, the picture that we used on the cover is apparently such a horrible image for conservatives that they can't even read the story.
As to the New York Times quote, our package has a whole list of outrageous quotes from Ann Coulter. It's called "What Did She Say?" and we have a whole list of them. The New York Times quote she said to another reporter, George Gurley. She said at the time that it was a joke. You can say it was a despicable joke or that it's not a very funny joke. But if she's kidding around with another reporter, and says something to him that he puts at the end of his article, am I then obligated to print that in my article? I mean, we've already seen that quote. Again, this is about trying to get a fresh look at Ann Coulter. I didn't reprint every outrageous quote, but, by the way, she told me outrageous quotes that are in my story. We don't need to go to the New York Observer to find outrageous quotes from Ann Coulter. They are in Time magazine...
― kingfish, Friday, 22 April 2005 17:42 (nineteen years ago) link
― kingfish, Friday, 22 April 2005 17:56 (nineteen years ago) link
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Saturday, 23 April 2005 01:19 (nineteen years ago) link
― Eisbär (llamasfur), Saturday, 23 April 2005 01:20 (nineteen years ago) link
(Cloud seems awfully defensive for someone who claims to have presented an unbaised look at Ms. Coulter.)
― sugarpants: new and improved! (sugarpants), Saturday, 23 April 2005 01:25 (nineteen years ago) link
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-quotable-coulter,0,1820649.story
"Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit with a penchant for creating controversy, caused a ruckus when she called 9/11 widows "witches" and accused them of using their husbands' deaths for their own political gain.
It is just the latest of the high-emotion, sharp-rhetoric attacks that she has leveled in four previous books and frequent appearances on cable television programs. Her firebrand style even inspired NBC's "The West Wing" to create a "a blond, Republican sex kitten" in her mold. In her latest book, Coulter criticizes the four New Jersey widows who pushed for an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed their husbands at the World Trade Center. The women also backed Democrat John Kerry's presidential candidacy in 2004.
"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much," Coulter wrote.
Among Coulter's previous statements, she advocated the invasion of non-Christian nations after Sept. 11 and the deportation from the U.S. of "all aliens from Arabic countries." She said American Taliban John Walker should be executed to show liberals what happens to traitors. And she said the only real question about President Clinton was "whether to impeach or assassinate."
I'd be amazed if even the most radical Republicans could defend this.
― Space Is the Place (Space Is the Place), Friday, 9 June 2006 11:37 (seventeen years ago) link
― Space Is the Place (Space Is the Place), Friday, 9 June 2006 11:41 (seventeen years ago) link
― DAVE, for #1 Hits of yesterday and today! (dave225.3), Friday, 9 June 2006 11:47 (seventeen years ago) link
Apparently "freaked-out gonzo-insane blowhard" is preferable to "just a blowhard"?
― Dan (Don't Go For Second-Best, Baby) Perry (Dan Perry), Friday, 9 June 2006 12:33 (seventeen years ago) link
― Ed (dali), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 20:51 (seventeen years ago) link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/5099674.stm
― Ed (dali), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 20:53 (seventeen years ago) link
― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 21:58 (seventeen years ago) link
― Ed (dali), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 22:02 (seventeen years ago) link
Really though, it's the fact that she's smart AND she believes what she's saying that makes her so scary.
― Chuck_Tatum (Chuck_Tatum), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 22:07 (seventeen years ago) link
it's because the left-leaning half of the christian spectrum has started gaining more and more traction... jim wallis et al... so naturally, somebody's gotta basically make the case very loudly that if you're christian, you better not be voting democrat. (or anything but what you're told to.)
m.
― msp (mspa), Tuesday, 20 June 2006 22:55 (seventeen years ago) link
― beanz (beanz), Wednesday, 21 June 2006 10:59 (seventeen years ago) link
― Ned T.Rifle (nedtrifle), Wednesday, 21 June 2006 11:24 (seventeen years ago) link
― RJG (RJG), Wednesday, 21 June 2006 11:47 (seventeen years ago) link
― ed slanders (edslanders), Thursday, 22 June 2006 12:16 (seventeen years ago) link