Bill Scher: How We Can Retire Ann Coulter (TomPaine.com)

[marmar]

How We Can Retire Ann Coulter
Submitted by Bill Scher on June 28, 2007 - 7:30pm.

How to deal with a noxious but prominent commentator like Ann Coulter? Confront her bigoted remarks and outright falsehoods? Or ignore her in hopes of dimming her spotlight?

It would seem to be a lose-lose proposition.

Getting a rise out of her political opponents is her job, so challenging her on the merits only helps her sell books, which keeps her on TV.

But unless you buy out Rupert Murdoch and control your own media empire, dimming her spotlight is seemingly impossible, no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and close your ears.

Bob Borosage notes that TV producers, desperate for ratings, have no shame in booking the vapid Coulter. And I'm not holding my breath waiting for shame to arise.

Coulter's train wreck qualities practically guarantee a ratings bump for all audience-starved newstainment shows -- both from hard-core fans and disgusted opponents.

So can anything stop her from filling the national discourse with more hate and lies?

Yes. If she loses her fans.

That's not as crazy as it sounds.

After she called Muslims "ragheads" at the 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference, and John Edwards a "faggot" at the following year's conference, some conservative bloggers expressed their disapproval. An open letter posted on several conservative blogs last March said:

Coulter's invective is a sign of weak thinking and unprincipled politicking.

CPAC sponsors, the Age of Ann has passed. We, the undersigned, request that CPAC speaking invitations no longer be extended to Ann Coulter. Her words and attitude simply do too much damage.

Sage advice.

Coulter is arguably as much of a personification of the failure of conservatism as George W. Bush. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/how_we_can_retire_ann_coulter?tx=3

[Dhalgren]

1. K&R! Insightful, interesting piece...

[hfojvt]

2. haven't conservatives already decided this?

"With her off the stage and ceasing to be a distraction, conservatives will better able to engage in a factual debate over the direction of our country.

It's up to conservatives to decide if that's what they really want."

How often in the last 25 years or so have they engaged in 'factual debate'? Hasn't Coulter, in fact, been a prime example of the way they 'debate'? 1) Smear and attack your opponent 2) lie, distort, fabricate, and 3) never apologize, back down, or admit an error.

Consider the Bush vs. Gore debate. Gore talked about Bush's tax cuts and how they favored the rich. Bush responded with 'that's just fuzzy math' and the mainstream media ran with nitpicking on some of Gore's examples. Instead of headlines and news-shows that said 'listen to Bush lie' it was 'listen to Gore sigh'. Our conservative candidate is dishonest, but we will not tell you that. We will tell you that their candidate is arrogant.

[provis99]

3. the real problem is a lot of people like her

If they didn't, she'd be relegated to 3 a.m. talk show guest spots along with ufo fans and illuminati conspirationalists. But, she does have a very large audience. So the real question is, what do we do about her legions of crazed fans?