Glenn Greenwald has a great post on just why Ann Coulter will continue to be lionized by the extreme right-wing.
Are there any journalists at all interested in figuring out why this is the case? If Coulter is such a blight on humanity, such a monument to indecency and all that is wretched in our political culture, what does it say about the political movement that has been running our country for the last six years (at least) that they embrace her so enthusiastically?
Coulter plays a vital and irreplaceable role in this movement. The reason I linked to that Bob Somerby post on Maureen Dowd yesterday is because he makes the critical point -- one which Digby, among others, has been making for a long time, including in a great post last night -- concerning how the right-wing movement conducts itself and the rhetorical tool they use not only to keep themselves in power, but more importantly, to keep their needy, confused, and scared base feeling strong and protected.
Here's the post by Digby that Greenwald refers to:
A lot of the shrieking aversion to the dirty hippie came from all that "feminine" hair on men's heads and "masculine" hair on women's bodies, if you'll recall. My brother was constantly harrassed about "looking like a girl" in 1966 Mississippi for having hair below his collar. In those days, hair was a political statement and even though forty years have passed and most of those people can only dream about all that hair they no longer have, the right successfully parlayed that gender role anxiety into a political narrative that continues to powerfully effect politics today.
Coulter is somewhat desperate so she's articulating this stuff in a crude and obvious fashion in order to keep her stale schtick going. But this concept is so ingrained in the political culture by now that the only thing that really stands out about it is the fact that she used an obvious epithet that is out of public fashion, even at a rightwing event.
Digby's footnote:
Of course,it goes without saying that none of this is to say that actually being gay or being called gay is a bad thing. It's just another dogwhistle they use to tease the lizard brains of their bigoted and repressed base (and peel off a few old people.) It's a silly construct that is not going to work for them much longer as both gays and women take and open and equal place in the leadership of the nation. Coulter's sad, campy threadbare show has the feel of a final tour to me.
I'm not so sure. The CPAC is already refusing to acknowledge that her comments were beyond the pale -- she'll be back next year, count on it. This is a point I made repeatedly in the comments at Ann Althouse's token post on Coulter -- she belongs to the right. They adore here, and they own her. Whatever she says is going to stick to them, and they're starting to realize that the country is moving away from them. That is why some of the right wingnuts are condemning the "faggot" remarks. That's the only reason -- as long as Coulter is their voice, they can't pretend to be civilized human beings. Sara Robinson at Orcinus sees it in a similar light.
I think Greenwald is missing a beat here, however:
Coulter insisted last night that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur -- that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay -- but instead only used the word as a "schoolyard taunt," to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was not to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him like they do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders.
I don't buy it. She did it deliberately and it was meant as an insult. That's how she works. The very fact that Greenwald can cast this as "feminizing" Edwards plays right into that trope. It's a stereotype that her knuckle-dragging audience will eat up, no matter how much it contravenes observable reality, and I fault Greenwald for not seeing the layers here. Coulter is clever -- she not only insults Edwards by demasculinizing him, but she does it in a way that her church-going, bigoted base will lap up, by further marginalizing an already marginalized group.
This comment by Michelle Malkin is more than a little illuminating:
And there is a divided opinion among grass-roots conservatives about what she did. I was one of the people who condemned the raghead comment last year . . . . If going into 2008, that is what the Republican Party is trying to do and win back the Congress and take the Congress and win the White House, having her there is not going to be a help.
That's why the right wing is distancing itself from the "faggot" remark. Not because it's reprehensible, but because it's no longer socially acceptable to refer to gays that way and it will hurt their chances to take back Congress.
And don't forget that these are the people who will continually point to all the "anger and hatred" on the left and when pressed, come up with some anonymous commenter at some liberal blog (who could just as easily be a neo-fascist troll out to stir some shit). Here's an earlier post from Greenwald on that subject:
Precisely. And along those lines, several right-wing bloggers who did not sign the petition are running around today giddy because they think they found equivalent statements made by "prominent leftist figures" -- including such towering political leaders on the left as Conan O'Brien, Chris Rock, Alec Baldwin, Alexander Cockburn, Dan Savage, and Louis Farrakhan -- many of which are from 20 or 10 years ago, with the average being 8 years old.
The fact that they found such examples proves, they all claim in unison, that I "lied" in this post -- because my argument, of course, was that no liberal of any kind has ever said anything offensive or wrong in the entire history of the world, so finding examples where that happened -- no matter how isolated, stray, inconsequential, unrepresentative, or old -- proves that I'm a "liar." The reason I ignore most attacks from right-wing bloggers is not because I don't believe in the virtues of responding -- I do -- but because most of the attacks are at this level and it is honestly difficult to generate the motivation to reply (as but one helpful hint, if you want to accuse someone of "hypocrisy," you must (a) excerpt a standard the person has advocated and then (b) show how they have violated that standard; failure to follow steps (a) or (b) means that you have not made out a case for what is called "hypocrisy").
This is the moral foundation of the movement that has brought us wars of choice, torture as a routine interrogation technique, spying on American citizens, erosion of the Bill of Rights, lies and slander as the mode of political discourse, rigged elections, an economy manipulated for the benefit of the wealthy, a runaway executive accountable to no one, and a host of other choice tidbits. You can find echoes of this everywhere on the right, from Coulter to Malkin to Dobson to those masters of the invective falsehood, Hannity, Savage and Limbaugh. Their justification? Some anonymous liberal said something nasty once. And their followers just eat it up.
That's the Republican base -- a bunch of wannabe brown shirts. Sound extreme? Condemning a particular remark is easy and expected. One can go all the way from the nelly platitudes of Mitt Romney (a Coulterism: "Mitt? What kind of name is that for a grown man?") to the ineffectual puffing of the HRC. What's going to count, and the only thing that's going to count, is if she's cut off. No more plum speaking engagements. No more best sellers. No more free passes from the MSM (yeah, right -- the forecast in Hell is for continued unseasonably warm temperatures). Know what?
Ain't gonna happen.
Y'know what else? Couldn't happen to a nicer party.
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