Perusing diaries here, I frequently come across the assertion that Ann Coulter is just plain freakin' nuts. Even some conservatives would agree with that assertion. I once saw a right-wing blogger describe Coulter as a tool of the liberal media, an extremist the MSM have propped up to make conservatives look foolish. I'm in the minority in suspecting that her vicious persona is actually some kind of demented act designed to attract attention. In essence, she's a troll.
Consider some of her especially notorious moments: accusing the 9/11 widows of enjoying their husbands' death, saying that Justice Stevens should be given rat poison, calling Joe McCarthy a hero, and suggesting that women shouldn't have the right to vote. She writes books with titles like If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans. In an earlier book, she wrote that liberals have "joyless sex." In short, she's so much of a walking caricature it's a wonder so many people take her at face value.
Alan Keyes--now there's a real nut-job. Anyone who doubts it should remember what he did to his daughter. Coulter, by contrast, doesn't seem to carry her intolerant rhetoric into her personal life. She dates Democrats, describes herself as a friend of Bill Maher's, and has nice things to say about her liberal sparring partners, as in her back-cover endorsement of Michael Eric Dyson's Debating Race:
I will protect both our reputations by saying Michael Eric Dyson and I often disagree--but one thing we do agree on is the importance of ideas. This book is an absolute delight to read. It contains a font of information, delivered with Dyson's distinctive eloquence. I screamed or laughed on every page at memorable phrases (such as the comparison of Martin Luther King to Puff Daddy). As always, Dyson is fiercely honest, controversial, engaging, funny, and brimming with arguments and ideas.
She preaches what sounds like hardcore conservative evangelicalism, yet she has never clearly explained what church or denomination she belongs to, if any. She has never been married and has been through a series of out-of-wedlock relationships. I'm not implying that she therefore can't be religious. I am not a judgmental person. But the brand of Christianity she preaches doesn't seem consistent with the lifestyle she lives. Yet to accuse her of hypocrisy would seem somehow off-base, for she's shamelessly open about how she lives.
Conservatives who defend Coulter frequently describe her as some kind of right-wing comedienne. That conclusion invites the question of why she's never been seen in any sort of comedy forum. FOX News has never presented her as anything but a news commentator. Yet her defenders call what she does comedy.
David Horowitz, for example, described her as a "satirist" while defending her remarks about the 9/11 widows. I'd like to ask Horowitz what it is Coulter is satirizing. Satire needs a target. You don't just "satirize"; you have to be satirizing something. I expect Horowitz's reply to be, "Liberals, of course." By that definition, I suppose, Mel Gibson was "satirizing" Jews during his infamous drunken tirade.
In a few cases, Coulter herself has adopted the humor defense. She did it after being criticized for having called John Edwards a "faggot." Her defense, according to FOX, was that it was a "joking comment that was taken out of context," and that faggot is just a "schoolyard taunt meaning 'wuss.'" She might as well have called him a "bastard" then tried to pass it off as a joke on the grounds that she wasn't suggesting his parents were unmarried. Or take the following exchange on Crossfire in 2003:
BEGALA: ...you gave a famous interview to "The New York Observer" where you said, "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is that he did not go to "The New York Times" building." You were later asked on a Web site called rightwingnews.com if you regret that.
Now everybody says stupid things, and I've thought of course you said you would regret it. You did. Here's what you said, though. "Of course I regret it. I should have added, after everyone had left the building, except the editors and reporters." Now, again, is that Ann Coulter's view of patriotism to call for mass murder?
COULTER: No, that was just a joke, Paul.
BEGALA: I don't think it's very funny.
(APPLAUSE)
NOVAK: Then why do you think they're laughing?
COULTER: I think that should be the new slogan of the Democratic Party. I don't think that's funny. That's not funny. You can adopt the slogan of the feminists. I don't think that's funny.
That is actually a common theme on the right, that liberals don't have a sense of humor. You won't get any argument there from Stephen Colbert.
This puts a whole new twist on the idea that the right lives in a different universe than we do. They don't just see reality differently, they don't even share our definition of a concept as basic as humor. I'm reminded of Roger Ebert's description of the 1994 cinematic turkey Clifford: "There is something extraterrestrial about [this film], as if it's based on the sense of humor of an alien race with a completely different relationship to the physical universe."
I can appreciate the work of conservative humorists like P.J. O'Rourke who at least play by the same rules as we do when it comes to generating laughs. Here, for example, is O'Rourke's take on Coulter (during an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher): "Ann Coulter to me is someone who says things that I say all the time, but I say them at three in the morning when I'm drunk as a monkey. She says them at three in the afternoon stone sober in bright daylight."
Coulter's remarks are often sarcastic, but that doesn't automatically put them in the category of humor or satire. As Geoffrey Nunberg put it, to ask whether Coulter is sincere is like "asking whether schoolchildren are sincere in the taunts they throw at each other across the school yard." If I had to describe what she is, I'd call her the non-Internet equivalent of a troll.
Trolls visit online forums and post controversial or inflammatory messages designed to provoke users into a frenzy. Some trolls are subtle about their intentions, acting as if they're simply engaged in healthy debate, when in reality they're deliberately trying to drive other users up the wall. It's not always easy to tell trolls apart from controversial but sincere posters. On Daily Kos, for example, a user might get attacked as a troll for simply posting opinions that are unpopular here. But at least we on the Internet are familiar enough with the concept of trolls that we've developed methods of dealing with them.
There's no equivalent concept in the media. Everyone knows that some commentators are weird and over-the-top, but there's a general assumption that they all believe in what they do, even if the occasional ones (e.g. Jim Cramer) admit to exaggerating a little for entertainment purposes. So it's no wonder that most people fail to grasp what Coulter is about, taking her to be merely a leggy, female version of Rush Limbaugh. She's in her own category that no one has yet invented a word for, so for now "troll" will have to do.