I read the call to action in lapin's terrific diary. I admire the spirit and the energy on display.
But I cannot disagree more.
I may be unpopular for this advice ... but I think that no response is the best response.
Read beyond the flip as to why ...
The one thing that you must understand is that Coulter is
looking for a response to Tuesday's vomit spew ... and preferably a high-visibility response. She'd
love to get the 9/11 families to go on
The Today Show and rebut her. She'd sell more books. But, more importantly and getting even more basically into her id, she'd get the attention she craves.
Let's consider this: there was a limited audience on Tuesday 6/6/6, when that beast went on The Today Show to spew vomit all over the 9/11 families. But I saw her performance and it backfired for her. I'm speaking as someone who has been paid in the past to assess the impact of a PR effort.
Here is my assessment of Ann Coulter of late:
I think we should see more of Ann Coulter on the non-Fox broadcast media. A lot more.
I came to this conclusion since the day she stopped pissing me off. It was after a wise friend of mine told me to remain calm while listening to her, to pretend she was trashing the other side. He said: "Just substitute the words 'domestic spying' everytime you hear her say 'partial birth abortion' in a sentence. Pretend she's on our side."
Some of the best political advice I've ever gotten ... whether applied to Ann or someone else.
From day one, as I focused on the hate in her voice, I quickly realized that it reminded me of some self-proclaimed spokespeople for progressive issues that make me cringe when I hear the hate and venom spewing from their mouth instead of reasoned argument. So I quickly realized that her hatred must be jarring to the wiser sheep and shepherds in the GOP fold.
Then I started noticing other things: a sad sort of narcissism, that includes the most amazing projection of her own personal faults onto "liberals" and those she hates; sexualized demeanor and inappropriate dress for a serious political commentator; rudeness of a kind I've seen elsewhere and referred to as "Tourette's Rudeness"; a growing desperation in her voice; a lot of nodding (that's code for a subset of Kossacks here who're familiar with "nodders"); and lately a shakiness that one might confuse with Parkinson's.
I say we need to see more of Ann Coulter since I think, especially these days, the GOP loses hundreds and maybe even thousands of votes every time she appears in the non-Fox MSM. Coulter is deteriorating from desperation or from other causes. I won't speculate. But she clearly is on some sort of massive personal downslide.
As many of you stated, Coulter was on The Today Show this AM. Matt did a credible job of interviewing a troubled woman who could only shout him down and was unable to stop her body from twitching.
And as for her making her mark on 6/6/6 ... She sounded like the consummate fascist orator only without the charm. She was loud and desperate and rude and wild-eyed and shakey.
I think she's off some sort of medication: she was clearly visibly shaking ... and not in a nervous way either. I must say Matt was a surprise: able to display (or unable to hide) absolute visceral disgust at her statements about the 9/11 families without playing the usual "nicey-nice".
So of those viewers who were watching, my assessment is the she was able to peel off quite a few votes from the GOP and give them to the Democrats. That would be those viewers on Tuesday, who voted GOP in the last several national elections, are disgusted with the executive branch and the GOP-controlled Congress, and just needed one last straw ...
Rebutting her in such a forum will do only two things:
1) sell more of her books, thus encouraging more books and more insane hateful rants
-and-
2) make some viewers think she must have had a point after all since the result was that the families reacted as if she had a valid viewpoint to counter.
I didn't watch any of the clips of the show available on the web. I saw it live that morning. So I'm not quite sure if the clips captured the end (or near the end?) of the interview when Coulter was loudly booed by the Today Show live audience!
In the 80s when my husband lived in Astoria Queens, there used to be a guy who stood for several hours a day on the streetcorner nearest his apartment ranting to the world. At the time my husband was my boyfriend and the ranter was the son of his landlord. He would rant on and on in a semi-rational way about the state of the world and would intersperce some rational sounding comments with the statement that the Rockerfeller family were really Jews and they had taken over his brain.
I happened to see a naive yuppie engage him in a discussion on that corner one time and a few of the onlookers (neighbors) who usually ignored him actually paused to listen to the discussion between the two. And I noticed for several days later these same neighbors would stop to greet and engage the landlord's son, whom they usually avoided, as if he were completely normal. It was as if the prestige and respect that was ceded to the yuppie by nature of his looks or obvious privilege temporarily elevated a notorious nutty neighbor to temporary sanity. And he had a major episode afterward ... resulting in his arrest and incarceration overnight ... since he had a "temporary audience". I can only assume that it "proved" to him in the interim that his deeper nuttiness was soundly based.
Coulter is my husband's former landlord's son ... except she has the imprimatur of a Cornell education and an early embrace by the NRO crowd. But they mostly ignore her now since she has exhibited more and more an out-of-control mental illness that they don't recognize as such but embarasses them none-the-less.
Let us leave Ann standing on the corner claiming that the 9/11 families have taken over her brain ... while we avert our eyes.