the daily snivel

Did you know that Ann Coulter, the radical, hate-filled Moe the Bartender of the extreme right, made the cover of TIME Magazine this week? Digby has more, making what I think is an essential point. Those armchair warriors who adore people like Coulter, who cheer and dance on the graves of people like Marla Ruzicka (an aid worker who was killed this week while trying to help civilian victims of the war in Iraq), are actually cheering on the insurgents who killed her and are the professed enemies of the United States. This poorly thought out cheerleading completely erodes away the kind of moral high-ground required to make the ridiculous claim (as Coulter frequently endorses) that liberals are in any way guilty of treason. Physician, heal thyself.

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Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

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While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a "preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy's labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That's what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

I'm not going to argue with my fellow Democrats any more about how Janet Jackson's nipple and Desperate Housewives' double ententres are coarsening American media culture. This is not because American media culture isn't being coarsened. But T&A is clearly not the problem. It's the sick, depraved fucks who are selling liberal death fantasies to the public and being aided by idiots in the mainstream press who are so in the (ever heating) tank that they have lost all sense of perspective.

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