It's a simple story, really. Take one 50 yr. old guy who reads plenty of blogs, but is otherwise not particularly "activist" (more "Don't Turn Off the Power!" than "Fight the Power!"), and let Ann Coulter finally get him off the dime.
While reading Glenn Greenwald yesterday morning, I saw his brief mention of an Ann Coulter column denouncing Dems as a "sleeper cell" in this country...
More ho-hum, right? Well, this one was posted at the Richard Nixon Library website. My old ex-president? The one who taught an impressionable adolescent valuable lessons in what constitutes an "Imperial" Presidency? Say what you want about Nixon, I honestly don't think he would have stomached the current stream of Konservative Kulture Klowns like Coulter, et al.
Well, I chose an email address, not quite at random, I knew I didn't want to arrange a school tour or donate money, but I chose the soon-to-be head of the Library. Here's what I sent,
"Thanks for publishing that wonderful piece by Ann Coulter on the Library’s website. Really elevates the tone of the place. Nothing like a delusional hack to bring a little class to the Nixon Library...Is there anything you would NOT put on-line? I can’t imagine what the standards would be that would allow Ann Coulter’s raving but find something else "beyond the pale".
With absolutely no confidence in ANY standards of professionalism at your "Library",
I remain,"
Blow me down if he didn't call me up within an hour of my having sent the email and apologize! To be clear, this guy, Timothy Naftali, had nothing to do with posting Coulter's garbage on the Nixon Library website, has not even taken over the job yet, but is reaching out to some random guy in the middle of nowhere to assure me that high levels of non-partisan professionalism will be adopted in the future. He did ask why he was suddenly getting all these emails and I pointed him to Glenn's blog at Salon. Glenn puts it together here
So, did I really take on Richard Nixon and win? No, all I did was add my voice to a lot of other voices and get a typical Coulter piece of vicious tripe taken down from one website. It was deeply satisfying, though, and made the "old" me look at my adolescent son and his friends, living through this latest installment of the "Imperial" Presidency, and realize they will have an effect out of proportion to their geographic location (you could watch the Watergate hearings on TV in Fairfield, Iowa but you weren't likely to have much of a voice in national politics). And it reminded me, because evidently I needed reminding, what we say can be heard; what we do can have an effect.
Maybe it's just spring, but this particular sap definitely feels like rising.