I am proposing a ban on Ann Coulter at DU. I don't mean a formal, admin-enforced ban; the fewer of those we have, the better. This would be just an informal agreement among the honorable members of DU not to give Ms. Coulter any free publicity. It's time for us to stop sending her fifteen minutes into overtime. That is what she really wants, is to see a divided country react to her. Frankly, I'm tired of her. Let's not post her droppings here any longer.
Ann Coulter contributes nothing of value to civic discourse in America on any subject. I say this not because I disagree with her views, although I do, but because she cannot effectively argue those views. She can't get her facts right; her arguments are laden with logical fallacies; she thinks she can refute an opponent with an insult (and seldom a very clever one); and she's a terrible writer. Her work is intellectually worthless.
Many of the facts she cites in her arguments are not facts at all, such as the claim that Bill Clinton would have lost the 1992 election had it not been for Ross Perot taking all those votes away from President Bush; surveys have shown that among those who voted for Perot who would have voted at all had he not been on the ballot, the vote was split about evenly between Clinton and Bush.
She raises red herrings at any opportunity. For an example of her raising red herrings, check out
this video. In response to a discussion about Mr. Murtha's proposal to prohibit sending more troops into combat unless they are properly equipped, she continuously raised the fact that Murtha was investigated by the FBI in the Abscam sting about 30 years ago. She further reveals her racist bias in the clip by asserting that it demonstrates that Murtha is willing to do business with Arabs, who are terrorists. Not only is Ms. Coulter raising a red herring, but she is holding Murtha guilty by association and even a formal fallacy in that her argument rests on an illicit process
(Osama is an Arab; Osama is a terrorist; therefore, all Arabs are terrorists). That's three logical fallacies in one short video clip.
She substitutes invective for discursive reasoning. For example, among her most infamous remarks is calling September 11 widows "harpies". That was just a cruel, insensitive remark. She was hired by
USA Today to cover the Democratic national convention in 2004, was bounced after her first article referred to the Democrats collectively as "the spawn of Satan". Bearing in mind that with much of Ms. Coulter's audience there is something wrong with being gay, she has asserted, with nothing to support the argument, that she would lay "even money" that Hillary Clinton will be "coming out of the closet" soon, that President Clinton shows "some latent signs of homosexuality", and that Vice President Gore is a "total fag."
Her invectives often become wishes for or even incitements of violence, as when she expressed regret that Tim McVeigh didn't bomb
The New York Times building. In her book,
High Crimes and Misdemeanors, she said that the debate about Clinton should not have been whether he did it with Monica, but "whether to impeach or assassinate". She has also joked about poisoning Supreme Court justices. She also stated that John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, should have been executed "in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too." I don't know what kind of intellectual gymnastics she performed to equate liberals, who believe in freedom of religion, with the extreme totalitarian Islamic fundamentalism of the Taliban.
Finally, she can't hold a theme to save her life. Let us take for example
her most infamous editorial piece which got her fired the
National Review Online. It begins as a tribute to her friend, Barbara Olson, who was killed in the September 11 hijackings. It might have been interesting to put a human face on the events of that horrible day, even if Barbara Olson was not on my most admired list. I'm sure Ms. Olson had her good points and it was a good time for her friends to talk about them. After discussing the warm relationship Ms. Olson had with her husband, US Solicitor General Ted Olson, Ms. Coulter goes into contrasting that with the relationship of Bill and Hillary Clinton, or rather her fantasies of what that is, since Ms. Coulter has no way of knowing what breakfast at the Clintons is like. From there, she jumps into an invective against Arabs and Muslims in general, finally proclaiming "we should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
What should have been an elegy for a friend turned out to be little more than a vehicle to slander the Clintons and every Muslim on earth. There was no bridge other than the completely irrelevant personal attack on the Clintons from the tender remembrances of Ms. Olson to the hysterical call for war against the Islamic world. Rather than honor a friend, Ms. Coulter made a fool of herself and wrote her way out of a job.
Her writings are worthless. Ann Coulter is vile, bigoted and hysterical. She has no tolerance for a difference of opinion, as she proclaims all who disagree with her "harpies" or homosexuals. Her arguments are pock marked with material falsehoods and logical fallacies. And she can't write anyway.
What Ann Coulter gets when someone at DU posts one of her droppings, perhaps for shock value, is attention. That attention gratifies her. She feeds on our attention. It is time to starve the beast.
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