[litbrit speaking]
I really liked Glen Greenwald's take on the (latest) Ann Coulter bit of blather. He discusses a conversation on Fox last night between Kirsten Powers, Bill O'Reilly and Michelle Malkin; Malkin makes the observation that Coulter is "very popular among conservatives", and Greenwald makes the following point:
This is why -- the only reason -- Coulter's remarks are so significant. And the significance lies not just in this specific outburst on Friday but in the whole array of hate-mongering, violence-inciting remarks over all these years. Its significance lies in the critical fact that Malkin expressly acknowledged: "She's very popular among conservatives." The focus of these stories should not be Coulter, but instead, should be the conservative movement in which Ann Coulter -- precisely because of (not "despite") her history of making such comments -- is "very popular." (Note, too, that Malkin urges that Coulter be shunned not because her conduct is so reprehesensible, but because her presence "is not going to be a help" win the 2008 election).
Coulter's use of a gay epithet to try to insult John Edwards waswrongheaded on many levels, not the least of which is the fact thatpersons who aregay are rightly offended that the state of being who they are--and thelanguage used to describe this state--was, and is, being used toengender slurs with which to attack another person who clearly isn'tgay (in this case, Edwards). They object to people using "gay" and"faggot" and worse as slurs because so doing implies that the word, andthe state of being, is somehow negative. Surely thoughtful persons ofall political persuasions would agree that it's time to denounce, andput a stop to, this nasty habit.Coulter didn't literally mean that Edwards was gay; rather, she usedthe word to imply that John Edwards was a sissy, a girly-man, a personwho isn't macho. And to a large sector of her conservative audience,machismo--or, more pointedly, the appearance or outright illusion of machismo--is the be-all and end-all of electability. Greenwald notes:
