I feel almost dirty writing something here about Ann Coulter. It strikes me that all her invective and "controversial remarks" have but one purpose: The financial enrichment of Ann Coulter. There are people out there who hate Liberals and will shell out good money (or tune in talk radio) to enjoy them bashed and attacked…and I don't think most of them even care if the attacks are fair or the facts are accurate. They just want to see "the enemy" slapped around. A similar marketplace is growing with regard to beating up on George W. Bush but it hasn't yet proven to be as lucrative. Judging by the polls, it may still get there.
The section of Coulter's new book that's making headlines and getting her on highly-rated TV shows is her attack on a small group of 9/11 widows whose main sin seems to be that they made commercials for John Kerry. (Has anyone asked her if she'd object to 9/11 widows making commercials for Bush-Cheney?) The premise here is that Democrats — or maybe it's Liberals she's singling out — trot out "victims" to make their cases and then argue that victims are sacred and that the opposition isn't somehow allowed to respond to them.
Seems to me that, first of all, Ann Coulter has no problem responding to victims. So if there's a problem there, her gripe is with folks on her side who allow that to intimdate them. Or maybe they don't respond because some of them think that you lose more than you gain when you attack someone like a 9/11 widow or a mother whose son died in Iraq. Certainly, we see a lot of right-wingers this week who think Coulter's doing more harm than good to their cause. It also seems to me that the unseemly action for a woman whose husband died in the 9/11 tragedies would be to just take the settlement money and go shopping, rather than to try and change the system or demand investigations.
It especially seems to me that George W. Bush and those who support him have done a darn good job of wrapping themselves in victims and other sacred heroes. Bush does it every time he invokes 9/11 in response to some criticism or gets himself photographed with grieving families or surrounded by uniformed firefighters. His supporters do that every time someone faults Bush or Rumsfeld and the rejoinder is, "You're attacking our troops." Same trick: Instead of debating issues, you hide between someone who's considered inviolable. If I thought Ann Coulter was out to get everyone on both sides to knock that off, she'd be my new hero…but I don't. I think she just wants to stir hatreds to sell books.
Last night, Jay Leno had Coulter on, paired with George Carlin for what NBC press releases promised would be mano a mano combat. But that was a false promise because Carlin, even if he thinks Coulter is utterly wrongheaded, is not about to fault someone too much for saying things that some find offensive. He kind of makes his living doing that, after all. Leno offered a feeble challenge to her views but since she's good at this kind of thing and since her supporters packed The Tonight Show audience to cheer her, she came off as a superstar, at least to the kind of viewer likely to ever buy her book. I suppose Jay and his producers thought it was worth it because of the ratings they'd get with the great Carlin-Coulter Slap-Off…but they didn't even get that. The numbers for last night were about average for a Wednesday, maybe even a few tenths of a point off. I'd like to think it's because America, like me, is already bored with this bogus controversy.