Ms. Wrong
Several years ago I met up with an old girlfriend. She had difficulty in trying to explain her new job to me that evening. You see, she was involved in a new type of PR strategy which targeted news coverage for their clients. Basically, it was "product placement" of people and products within hard news settings. I was somewhat amused at the idea. Little did I know that just a few years later I would be sickened by this morally bankrupt practice. I will always love that girl very much but I can now honestly say that I detest what she does for a living, if she still does.
Enter Ann Coulter and Time Magazine. Time Magazine being the hard news source, Coulter being the rather odious product being pitched. For anyone unfamiliar with the exploits of Ms. Coulter, she is the current reigning High Priestess of the ultra-conservative, bleached-blonde, mini-skirted, psuedo sex-kitten pundit brigade. They grow them on a farm somewhere outside Topeka, I believe. It's said to be one of only three family farms left in the midwest.
Coulter first entered the public arena as a right-wing activist lawyer representing Paula Jones in her bogus sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. She often used arguments against Clinton couched in feminism/sex abuse terms which is odd considering that her political convictions, if they are real, are decidedly anti-feminist. She also called the President a "rapist" and wondered whether "he should be impeached or assassinated". This initial gem was just the first in a long litany of "Coulterisms" which could be considered as crossing the line of decency by a wide berth.
Coulter has since become a darling of right-wing punditry throughout the cable news market. She consistently attacks the "left-wing media" for trying to marginalize her and keep her down. She does this as a featured guest during shows on all of the "left-wing media" outlets. I guess they're not "keeping her down" hard enough? In the last few years she has authored a number of right-wing screeds which she calls "books". She opened her "book" "Slander" with a seemingly honorable series of words which went something like "the tone of political debate in America has become completely intolerable". She has since backed up this noble conviction by calling all liberals "traitors", suggesting that, in regard to Muslim countries, "we should kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity" and by humbly opining that American Taliban fighter "John Walker Lindh should be killed in order to physically intimidate liberals, to make them realize that they can be killed too". She certainly has raised the level of political discourse, huh?
Not satisfied with these gems, she has continued to assault the senses with further wisdom such as saying that Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh chose the wrong target (he should have chosen the Manhattan headquarters of the NY Times instead). When confronted with the outlandish notion that US troops in Iraq were intentionally targeting journalists her knee-jerk response was to dismiss it by saying that she "only wished that it were true". She also referred to the White House's Senior Correspondent, Helen Thomas, as "that old arab".This is the kind of thing Ann Coulter contributes to our world. Aren't we lucky to have her to protect us from that "intolerable tone"?
The Time piece seeks to soften Coulter's hard-edged image with childhood photos and more current shots of a somewhat sexy nature. That is, if you consider a tall, bony, forty-something woman with an adam's apple larger than Ivan Lendle and more makeup than Katherine Harris and Tammy Faye Baker combined to be sexy. Coulter's lack of character can also be divined by addressing how she conducts her life in relation to what she writes. She recently told Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera that she has no misgivings about going out for the evening, picking up strange men and sleeping with them. She is also known as a heavy drinker who used to live on Manhattan's exclusive Upper East Side (you know, that bastion of elitist eastern liberalism) and socialize almost exclusively with homosexual men (you know, fag hag). Clearly, the Coulter message is "do as I say, not as I do" (you know, hypocrisy).
While it is true that Time Magazine does have a storied history of right-wing bias, I do not believe that this is their sole intention in attempting to rehabilitate Ms. Coulter. What's going on here is PR as news. It works and it sells. No doubt we are on the verge of either a new Coulter "book" or some other career move for which her PR machine is now revving up. I am disappointed. Disappointed that a hard news organization like Time would devote it's pages to a downright awful human being like Ann Coulter. Was it that slow a news week? Didn't the Pope die? Didn't insurgents begin a scary new resistence strategy in Iraq? Didn't another earthquake hit southeast Asia? Is Ann Coulter really the big news? Of course not.
As for Coulter herself, I can only say this. I strongly considered calling this column "Ms. take, Ms. erable or something like "Ms. Right or Mister Wrong?". Finally I decided on the simplest path, "Ms. Wrong". Coulter is perhaps the single most reprehensible human being in our media and media driven culture today. If she ever receives meaningful payback for all the awful and negative discourse she has put out into the world, she will never survive it. Perhaps, one of these nights, one of those strangers she so likes to go home with will turn out to be a bad choice and put her out of our collective misery. One can only dream. Good night, Ann.
Enter Ann Coulter and Time Magazine. Time Magazine being the hard news source, Coulter being the rather odious product being pitched. For anyone unfamiliar with the exploits of Ms. Coulter, she is the current reigning High Priestess of the ultra-conservative, bleached-blonde, mini-skirted, psuedo sex-kitten pundit brigade. They grow them on a farm somewhere outside Topeka, I believe. It's said to be one of only three family farms left in the midwest.
Coulter first entered the public arena as a right-wing activist lawyer representing Paula Jones in her bogus sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton. She often used arguments against Clinton couched in feminism/sex abuse terms which is odd considering that her political convictions, if they are real, are decidedly anti-feminist. She also called the President a "rapist" and wondered whether "he should be impeached or assassinated". This initial gem was just the first in a long litany of "Coulterisms" which could be considered as crossing the line of decency by a wide berth.
Coulter has since become a darling of right-wing punditry throughout the cable news market. She consistently attacks the "left-wing media" for trying to marginalize her and keep her down. She does this as a featured guest during shows on all of the "left-wing media" outlets. I guess they're not "keeping her down" hard enough? In the last few years she has authored a number of right-wing screeds which she calls "books". She opened her "book" "Slander" with a seemingly honorable series of words which went something like "the tone of political debate in America has become completely intolerable". She has since backed up this noble conviction by calling all liberals "traitors", suggesting that, in regard to Muslim countries, "we should kill their leaders and convert them all to Christianity" and by humbly opining that American Taliban fighter "John Walker Lindh should be killed in order to physically intimidate liberals, to make them realize that they can be killed too". She certainly has raised the level of political discourse, huh?
Not satisfied with these gems, she has continued to assault the senses with further wisdom such as saying that Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh chose the wrong target (he should have chosen the Manhattan headquarters of the NY Times instead). When confronted with the outlandish notion that US troops in Iraq were intentionally targeting journalists her knee-jerk response was to dismiss it by saying that she "only wished that it were true". She also referred to the White House's Senior Correspondent, Helen Thomas, as "that old arab".This is the kind of thing Ann Coulter contributes to our world. Aren't we lucky to have her to protect us from that "intolerable tone"?
The Time piece seeks to soften Coulter's hard-edged image with childhood photos and more current shots of a somewhat sexy nature. That is, if you consider a tall, bony, forty-something woman with an adam's apple larger than Ivan Lendle and more makeup than Katherine Harris and Tammy Faye Baker combined to be sexy. Coulter's lack of character can also be divined by addressing how she conducts her life in relation to what she writes. She recently told Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera that she has no misgivings about going out for the evening, picking up strange men and sleeping with them. She is also known as a heavy drinker who used to live on Manhattan's exclusive Upper East Side (you know, that bastion of elitist eastern liberalism) and socialize almost exclusively with homosexual men (you know, fag hag). Clearly, the Coulter message is "do as I say, not as I do" (you know, hypocrisy).
While it is true that Time Magazine does have a storied history of right-wing bias, I do not believe that this is their sole intention in attempting to rehabilitate Ms. Coulter. What's going on here is PR as news. It works and it sells. No doubt we are on the verge of either a new Coulter "book" or some other career move for which her PR machine is now revving up. I am disappointed. Disappointed that a hard news organization like Time would devote it's pages to a downright awful human being like Ann Coulter. Was it that slow a news week? Didn't the Pope die? Didn't insurgents begin a scary new resistence strategy in Iraq? Didn't another earthquake hit southeast Asia? Is Ann Coulter really the big news? Of course not.
As for Coulter herself, I can only say this. I strongly considered calling this column "Ms. take, Ms. erable or something like "Ms. Right or Mister Wrong?". Finally I decided on the simplest path, "Ms. Wrong". Coulter is perhaps the single most reprehensible human being in our media and media driven culture today. If she ever receives meaningful payback for all the awful and negative discourse she has put out into the world, she will never survive it. Perhaps, one of these nights, one of those strangers she so likes to go home with will turn out to be a bad choice and put her out of our collective misery. One can only dream. Good night, Ann.
posted by Paul_NJ | 11:32 AM
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