Of Ann Coulter's Ancestors and Ann Coulter's Imitators

[queerbychoice]

Today I read Silas Marner by George Eliot. I was considerably taken aback to discover that Ann Coulter is a character in Silas Marner. An extremely minor character, but still. Her role consisted only of the following cameo appearance:

There were women in Raveloe, at the present time, who had worn one of the Wise Woman's little bags round their necks, and, in consequence, had never had an idiot child, as Ann Coulter had.

I can only presume that the present Ann Coulter is a direct descendant of this former Ann Coulter, and inherited the idiocy accordingly. Okay, I know that the form of "idiocy" that George Eliot meant was harmless unintentional mental retardation rather than the present Ann Coulter's willfully idiotic evil, but the word "idiot" is a much more appropriate description of the modern representative of the Coulter family.

Then I searched Google News for the latest articles about Hurricane Katrina. It's become awfully difficult to sort through all the articles about Bush in search of any new articles about the actual victims. When I did find one ("Katrina's Unsung Victims"), it went to great lengths to point out that:

What I'm learning in the shelters is that it's not just the poor who have no place to go and no place to fall back on; it's also ordinary working people who in better times might have been counted as part of the middle class, too.

What, so if it were "just the poor" it wouldn't be as tragic??? Will the Washington Post next be running articles that say things like, "What I'm learning in the shelters is that it's not just black people who have no place to go and no place to fall back on; it's also ordinary white people"? HOW CAN THIS EVEN BE A CONSIDERATION IN HOW MUCH SYMPATHY THEY DESERVE???

And the really sad thing is that some other corner of my mind is actually thinking, "Well, since the reality is that this kind of appallingness actually does make a difference in how much a lot of people will care about the victims, how can I entirely condemn the Washington Post for pointing it out?" It's just that the way they pointed it out is so . . . shameless . . .

The next article Google News linked me to was "My Solution For Katrina: Repeal The 19th Amendment." It was written by a woman. Why am I not surprised? Oh, that's right, Ann Coulter has inured me to these things. On the other hand, I was rather surprised that it was written by a woman who openly acknowledged having recently been brain-damaged; I'm somewhat tempted to wonder whether she was this misogynistic before the brain damage. Anyway, this woman who is if anything even more rabid than Ann Coulter linked me, in turn, to the single most horrifyingly overtly racist "news" website I've ever yet come across . . . after which I decided that this must really not be a good day for me to be surfing the Internet. So if you need me, I'll be hiding under my bed for the rest of this evening.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I've occasionally tried to concede that others have a right to their views, but such links reinforce the obvious truth, ultra-conservatives are utterly vile individuals who have no place in a civilized society. It's culture war, and we are losing.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Yup. And as much as I try to concede that the left has its crazies as well, I really don't think the Left has an Ann Coulter equivalent.

Headline:

[sammka.livejournal.com]

White "News" Writers Assault Countless Black Individuals Via Internet
Claim They Are Revolutionaries Acting To Counter Decades Of Institutionalized "Reverse Racism"

:

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

The text of the article needs to include something about this quote:

"Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black."

Um, yeah, considering that the majority of people in the U.S. are white, it's somewhat difficult for criminals of any race not to have a majority of white victims . . .

(Also, why do Hispanic people get a mention but not Asian people or Native American non-Hispanic people, etc.?)

Re: :

[theobscure.livejournal.com]

Asian people are the "good minority" and it seems as though most white Americans would rather pretend the native (non-Hispanic) people don't exist.

Re: :

[sammka.livejournal.com]

Um, yeah. I didn't even see that quote at first. Of course, since there's no significant difference between that 45% and 43%, it actually proves the opposite point (and one that community activists have been complaining about for years) that black-on-black violence is extremely disproportionate when compared to black-on-white violence. This is partially explained by the fact that a lot of it is within-community and/or intimate violence, and, of course, our society is extremely socially segregated.

I also wonder why they pointed out that whites also commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks (and disproportionately so, which therefore means something more than "whites aren't racist in their choice of victims for violent crime"). Are whites also racist against white people?? Are we to believe that whites are so upset about the perceived racial injustice perpetrated by their fellow whites that they go out of their way to assault other random white people whenever possible? Because in a way, that would be awesome.

Oh, oh! Also, since their reasoning clearly suggests that whites are actually disproportionately the victims of violent crime (hey, black people kill more whites than blacks, and so do white people, and let's just say that members of other races hate whitey too), wouldn't white neighborhoods be the worst places to live???

I'm having so much fun trying to deduce things about the bizarro world these people live in.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Interesting how the women mentioned in that "Solution for Katrina" article just happen to be Democrats, and not, picking more or less at random, Katherine Harris, Gail Norton (pause for a scream of AUUUUUGHHHHHHHH! on my part) the woman convinced that the United States really doesn't need all of those national forests) or Condoleeza Rice.

(Or, if you object to the names I've mentioned, other Republican women like Ileana Ros-Lethinen, from South Florida, or Olympia Snowe, or Susan Collins.)

But anyway. I was forwarded an e-mail from someone who claimed that the "U.S. welfare state" had caused the New Orleans looting. I pointed out that looting has been ongoing for about 4000 years now in a variety of political and social structures, and is more typically associated with war, revolution, or poverty, not welfare. I didn't get a response.

[alysbowie.livejournal.com]

I'm not American (and not familiar with the Constitution of the USA) but I was aghast at the article calling for women to lose the vote. Somehow I can't see the world being any safer with women not voting...

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Me neither!

[comeoneileen.livejournal.com]

That repeal-the-19th-amendment article is hilarious. See, women in positions of political power aren't taking time out to address specific women's issues in this time of crisis, therefore, women as a class are unfit to participate in politics in any form. In other words, Clinton's and Pelosi's failure to address the crisis from a feminist perspective proves the feminists wrong. Also, this rule only applies to women whom the current "freaking insane" branch of the Right finds offensive. Our Secretary of State, for example, gets no mention for having gone shoe shopping in Manhattan while the entire cabinet was supposed to have been working around the clock, although that's exactly the sort of anecdote you want in your calls to repeal the 19th amendment.

And furthermore. . . what brain power of Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter?

I read some of this columnist's other work. Much of it seems to be concerned with her growing dismay at the number of Hispanics now living in her town. Like, she went to the mall the other day, and OMG TEHR WAS THIS RUDE HISPANIC LADY WITH A BABY! And did she mention she was rude? And Hispanic? And then she realized that EVERYONE WORKING IN THE STORES WAS HISPANIC! And RUDE! And the people shopping were Hispanic, rude, AND HAD TOO MANY KIDS! RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! And OMG the kids all wanted stupid pets at the pet store and SHE JUST COULDN'T STAND IT SHE HAD TO GET OUT OF THE RUDE HISPANIC EXCESSIVELY FERTILE NIGHTMARE IT HAD BECOME! So, in conclusion, she's not down on Hispanics or anything. She's just saying.

[sammka.livejournal.com]

RUDE WHITE LADY ALERT!

[comeoneileen.livejournal.com]

the single most horrifyingly overtly racist "news" website I've ever yet come across

The Council of Conservative Citizens is a direct descendant of the White Citizens' Council, which was founded by Mississippi senator James Eastland in 1954 as an anti-segregation group, and quickly became known as "the uptown Ku Klux Klan" It was comprised of well-to-do white businessmen who used their economic and social pull to make life difficult for anyone sympathetic to integration (firing them from their jobs, refusing credit, etc..) Despite the name change, CofCC is still pretty widely recognized as a not-so-stealth white supremacy group. Trent Lott was outed as having had some affiliation with them a while ago, much to his embarrassment.

[normlessness.livejournal.com]

My God you are right about that article in the WP.

Yeah, the thing about Coulter is that she really is not dumb. I heard about how dumb she was, but when I read one of her books, I realized that she exactly what she was doing. She knew exactly how to appeal to people's prejudices (or people's reaction to prejudice) to get them to buy her book. Evil, but genius.

I cannot see how a woman wants to repeal the 19th Amendement... Maybe she wants to go back to the days where wife battering was publicly accepted and... well... things are still pretty bad now for some women. I read this thing written by the Jehovah's Witnesses that basically said that if a woman who did not yell or fight back while being raped... then according to them she was not really raped. And this was not something written about them... this was from the Watchtower. So, according to them, if a woman has a gun to her head and does not fight back, but gets raped, then she wanted it.

Yeah, if the site is conservative, and uses the word "black" 19 thousand times on the main page... then you know what kind of argument they are trying to make.

[lilerthkwake.livejournal.com]

That woman is getting on my nerves. I could only read have the dumbass editorial.

I love how she said the these reports of looting in the media may have been exaggerated, but she knows TRUE stories because supposed "eyewitness accounts" have spread through the military. Bitch, please. It is ludicrous to say that these reports that have "spread" are not tainted by exaggeration, distortion and outright dishonesty just because they came from the military. People in the military lie, too, and the more times a story is repeated from one person to another, the more likely it is to change and grow. Haven't you ever played telephone? Dork!

[chisparoja.livejournal.com]

So I’d like to offer Bush II a deal: I’ll work on the whole 19th amendment thing if in the meantime he tackles the feministas. Oh, and by tackle, I mean humiliate them into a self-imposed exile.

If USA abolished universal suffrage would the American liberals still talk about "dialogue" with fascists? Would USA finally turn into the pariah state it should already be having declared it will "pre-emptively" drop nuclear bombs or would Europe still look to "mend fences" with it?