Just stop egging her on, please! - The Providence Journal

Lee Drutman: Just stop egging her on, please!

07:19 AM EDT on Wednesday, March 14, 2007

LEE DRUTMAN

BERKELEY, Calif. -- SO WHY, again, is Ann Coulter news? Right, right. She’s a fire-breathing blond bombshell who says outrageous things that no reasonably self-respecting person would ever say, and then defends her latest faux pas with relish that would make even an all-beef hot dog blush (none of that gay, French apologizing for her!). And in this 24-hour news cycle era, the bow-tied blowhard pundit Tucker Carlson perhaps put it best when he recently said, “[W]e’re always happy to have her on . . . She’s great TV.”

But by great TV, Mr. Carlson means exactly what? An immature, predictable little-miss-princess, pushing every button she can get her eager little fingers on, screaming out for ever-more attention (“Look at me! I just called John Edwards a ‘faggot’! And I’m pretty, and I don’t regret it one bit!”)? This is not exactly Edward R. Murrow here.

Coulter, to her credit, is smart enough to know that if she goes to the Conservative Political Action Conference, as she did March 2, and says “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I’m — so, kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards, so I think I’ll just conclude here and take your questions.” Well, of course, people will get upset, and, of course, the newspapers and the cable talk shows will cover it, lavishing her with the positive reinforcement that every child in that acting-out phase craves so desperately (and giving her yet another opportunity to flog her latest book). Besides, it’s what we’ve come to expect of her by now anyway. Did anybody really think she’d pass up an opportunity to say something provocative like that? The only question is: what will she do next?

“C’mon, it was a joke,” she tells The New York Times, tongue firmly in cheek. “I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean.” On her Web site, she responds to a statement by Edwards campaign manager David Bonior (a former congressman) by writing: “It’s always good to divert Bonior from his principal pastime, which is fronting for Arab terrorists.” Oh, Ann, there you go again, titillating us with your blithe disrespect for appropriate civic discourse (or anything resembling a fact). Maybe we’ll get lucky and you’ll make another fun remark referring to certain exotic sexual practices.

She’s right, of course. It is a joke. But the joke is on the media, and on civic discourse. When Fox News’s Sean Hannity announces, “We’ll just put it on the calendar, every other Tuesday, Ann will be here to defend it,” Coulter must be laughing all the way to the bank. All she has to do is say something else offensive and outrageous and insulting and . . . she gets another round of media appearances! And the public (joy of joys!) gets treated to yet another exciting, insightful and thought-provoking session on ad-hominem attacks.

Praise be, then, to the daily Lancaster (Pa.) New Era, for its announcement on March 6 that it had “halted publication of Ann Coulter’s syndicated column following her crude characterization of presidential candidate John Edwards as a homosexual at a public appearance on Friday. Coulter’s use of name-calling, sarcasm and overstatement in her columns too often detracts from the arguments she seeks to make.”

Maybe if every newspaper pulls her column, if every cable-news show stops inviting her to fill the airwaves with her nonsense, if no publisher agrees to promote her book, maybe she will finally just go away, like the little child who finally realizes that nobody is going to listen no matter how loud she screams and so just gives up and lets everybody have some peace and quiet at last.

But no, everybody responds and just encourages her. John Edwards eagerly places a video of her remarks on his Web site to help him raise money, even as he decries her comments as “un-American and indefensible.” Coulter’s critics jump all over her and call for Republicans to also denounce her comments. But that’s exactly what she wants: More attention.

And as long as the media and critics keep giving it to her, she will keep acting out.

So, reporters and editors everywhere, please: Ann Coulter is not news! She has been doing the same thing for years; there is nothing “new” about it. She has no pretensions to anything serious (as her awful, inaccurate and problematically attributed writing clearly shows). She is nothing more than a third-rate stand-up comic whose idea of wit is to insult people with crude jokes about their alleged sexual perversities. Or, at least, she would be, if the media were to finally take away her platform and report instead on something of actual consequence.

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drut14_03-14-07_PI4OBQG.21fda79.html