“If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d be Republicans.” That’s the title of columnist Ann Coulter’s sixth and latest book. It was published by Random House, the largest commercial publisher in the English language.
Coulter starts out by telling us that “Uttering lines that send liberals into paroxysms of rage, otherwise known as ‘citing facts,’ is the spice of life. When I see the hot spittle flying from their mouths and the veins bulging and pulsing above their eyes, well, that’s when I feel truly alive.” Anybody who wants to spend $24.95 on the 432 pages of the book’s hard-cover edition only needs to consider a few quotes from it to understand Coulter’s type of “journalism”.
“I’m a middle-of-the-road moderate and the rest of you are crazy,” she said about her politics, and about environmental policies: “God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’” Talking about abortion, she claimed that “For liberals, a human life begins at the precise moment the person starts filling out his first application for a government job.”
On global warming, she observed: “The temperature of the planet has increased about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century. So imagine a summer afternoon when it’s 63 degrees and the next thing you know it’s . . . 64 degrees. Ahhhh!!!! Run for your lives, everybody! Women and children first!”
Coulter ridicules virtually all Democrats: “Here is a foolproof method for keeping America safe. Always do the exact 180-degree opposite of whatever Jimmy Carter says.” “Bill Clinton’s library is the first one to ever feature an Adults Only section.” “Hillary wants to be the first woman president, which would also make her the first woman in a Clinton administration to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office instead of under it.”
In the late 1990s, Coulter’s weekly column was syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate asserting that "Ann's client newspapers stick with her because she has a loyal fan base of conservative readers who look forward to reading her columns in their local newspapers.”
Numerous dailies used to subscribe to her columns because they seemed to titillate readers. Sooner or later, however, the Coulter column was dropped when the publishers faced firestorms of criticism and outrage, among them neighboring Springfield’s State Journal Register. Even archconservatives lost patience with a columnist who claimed that women are mentally inferior, too “vicious” to be in the army, and should be stripped of their right to vote.
Yet, being outrageous has clearly produced more publicity and profits for Ann Coulter than it usually would for columnists conscientiously researching and carefully wording their essays. Every one of her previous five books made the New York Times bestseller list: High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter, and Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
Thousands of Americans not only bought her books while Larry King and David Letterman invited her to their shows. The media need readers and listeners to make money.
Coulter first appeared on national television in 1996 on MSNBC. But the network dismissed her first, after she insulted the late Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, and eight months later, after she insulted a disabled Vietnam veteran. Nevertheless, her notoriety brought her more invitations to television and radio shows, among them CNN’s Crossfire and American Morning, NBC’s Today Show, Fox’s Hannity and Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor, and Rush Limbaugh’s over 600 radio stations.
Freedom of speech allowed Coulter to tell
The New York Observer it was her only regret with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh “that he did not go to the New York Times building." Yet, freedom of the press also allows the media to shut Ann Coulter out--for the sake of journalistic truth and civility.