Category Archives: The Zeitgeist

King Cuts Coulter Down

Ann Coulter, Homosexuality, Media, The Zeitgeist

Florence King leaves most pipsqueak contemporary “writers” standing (they’re syndicated, however, she’s not). The famous misanthrope and recluse saw fit to emerge from hibernation to kick Ann coulter around in a column for National Review. Some other conservatives crawled from under dank rocks and attempted to respond to King’s studied contempt. Here’s a taste of why they failed so miserably:

Coulter’s sexual remarks are at once grim and flippant. Commenting on a psychologist’s plan to teach children about gay sex in a loving way, she said: ‘How can you teach children about anal sex in a loving way? Or any sodomy, for that matter?”
I am not saying that everyone has to be witty and original and overflowing with dazzling bons mots — after all, Coulter is a lawyer and I wouldn’t want to see her let down the side. I am just curious to know why she was content to call Katie Couric “the affable Eva Braun of morning TV.” Couldn’t she come up with something better? How about Simper Fidelis?…
At her best, Coulter writes well, but the chief source of her success is that she is a perfect match for the American ideal: smart as a whip but dumb as a post, educated but not learned, sexy but not sensuous, all at the same time. She would not hesitate to choose a sledgehammer over a stiletto because her instincts would pull her back from what the 18th century called ‘demolishing your enemies without raising your voice.’ She would know that if a writer uses a stiletto, a lot of people might not get the point, but they would definitely get the loftiness that accompanies irony and understatement. And so, knowing that being called an elitist spells ruin, she opted for a sledgehammer and raised the roof instead.
Her timing was perfect, putting her before the television cameras just in time to take advantage of the whoosh. That’s the sound cable news uses to signal each new 15-second segment in a roundup. They report the latest border debacle, then they go whoosh! and start talking about midwestern floods. When they finish the floods there’s another whoosh! and the subject changes to the stock market. Gone are the days when a break was signaled by a soft rattle of the host’s fake papers and a murmured ‘We’ll be back in a moment.’ Now, if a revered philosopher came on a show, the host would say, ‘Hold your thought, Plato,’ and cut to whoosh.
CNN has the loudest whoosh, a harsh wheezing sound so labored that at first I thought it was me. After all, I made my NR debut 16 years ago with a cover story called ‘I’d Rather Smoke Than Kiss.’ But no. The whoosh is television’s way of telling us that we are being swept up and borne aloft on gusty torrents of swirling excitement. To train us to gasp, they walk us through it by gasping for us.
The whoosh needs a blowhard and it has gotten Ann Coulter, a one-woman Hyde Park Corner who, love her or hate her, is saving television from itself by never uttering Guestisms — those gummy little nothings that guests keep saying over and over without thinking until everybody thinks they have said something thoughtful.”

King’s complete column, “Watch Ann Go Whoosh!,” is here. And here is my “Coughing Up Some Coulter Fur Balls.”

Griffin The Great

Celebrity, Hollywood, Media, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

While not very many smart people are genuinely kind, very many kind people are truly smart. As Oscar Wilde reminded us, “kindliness requires imagination and intellect.” In Kathy Griffin, my favorite comedian, imagination and intellect have combined to yield a great deal of kindness. Her visit to Iraq to cheer the troops lay bare just how kind—and perceptive—she really is.

Griffin’s interactions with the broken Sgt. Adkins—he had just survived a mortar attack that took the life of his fiance and best friend—were achingly sensitive. (She did, of course, ask him if they were giving him any good drugs.)

About the unnecessary war, she said: “The more I’m in an actual war zone, the more it’s just ugly. It’s not cool, it’s not a Toby Keith song; it’s not opening up a can of whoop-ass. It’s just horrible. I don’t know. Is it really worth losing so many of our own?”

Griffin’s account of the Iraq tour on her Bravo Blog is entitled, “I Came. I Saw. Iraq.” But just in case you get the wrong idea, she quickly clarifies parenthetically: “(Which is different than “I saw Iraq. I came.” Which did not happen. Because, like I said—that place is a s**t-hole.)”

I love her to bits.

Addicted to that Rush

Criminal Injustice, Drug War, Media, The Zeitgeist, War on Drugs

It seems authorities are Addicted to that Rush; they can’t stop badgering Limbaugh about his consumption choices. Having arbitrarily decided that ingesting pain-killers is infinitely worse for individual and “society” than compulsive eating, bungee jumping, alcohol or tobacco consumption, the policy pinheads have proceeded to preemptively trample the constitutional rights of people like Limbaugh, before the foreseeable harm to “society” can occur.

Lysander Spooner, the great 19th-century theorist of liberty, held that government had no business treating vices as crimes. “Vices are those acts by which a man harms himself or his property. Crimes are those acts by which a man harms the person or property of another.”

This classical liberal thinks that “incarcerating people for their consumption choices has the consistency of arresting a survivor of suicide for attempted murder. Moreover, if for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else ‘government’ owns him.” (May 8, 2002)

Be mindful that law-enforced medical treatment must also be volubly opposed. The coercive, therapeutic state is a very poor substitute for the avenging state.

Having come up hard against the reality of it, you’d think Limbaugh would have at last leapt in to denounce the Federal government’s War on Drugs. Even National Review has done an about-face. But Limbaugh is too busy hobnobbing in Washington. (Read “Rush Goes to Washington clichés. You’ll want to barf if you’re my kind of person.)

The co-dependency Limbaugh has with the state is by far the more dangerous one.

Auster Angry

Iraq, The Zeitgeist, War, WMD

Lawrence Auster has requested that I print the following:

Ilana,

I think you were out of line the other day when you referred to me as an “apologist” for the Iraq war. To call someone an “apologist” implies he is completely on board with something and is committed to defending it no matter what. To call me an “apologist” implies that I was acting out of partisanship or emotional identification and that I didn’t have a reasoned and critical basis for what I have argued over and over, which was (1) that we had reasons to believe that Iraq, a rogue regime, had WMDs, and (2) that given the existence of terror groups who would like to cause infinite damage to us if they could, we could not permit the Iraqi regime to continue in possession of, and continue developing further capacities in, WMDs which might be transferred to those terrorist groups. I also said prior to the war that I saw terrible things coming out of the war, but that I couldn’t see a way to avoid the logic summarized above that made the war necessary. That’s not being an apologist. That’s having a reasoned, and very reluctant, argument.

You could have described me as a person who supported the invasion for the reasons I have given. Given the huge number of criticisms and doubts I expressed about the war effort from many months before the war to the present moment, particularly my opposition to waging a war for the purpose of spreading democracy, for you to come out and call me simply an “apologist” for the war, period, as though I were an all-out champion of the administration in the manner of a Hugh Hewitt or a Rush Limbaugh, was not true or fair.

Lawrence Auster

Auster is definitely no Hannity, Hewitt or Limbaugh. If I gave that impression, it was unintended. However, because Mr. Auster’s “reasoned” position was palpably and patently flawed, violating objective reality, natural and international law, and the Constitution—he ought not to have held it. Iraq, in those good old days, was an economically desperate, secular dictatorship, profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. At the time of the invasion, it had acquiesced to inspectors (was in fact being criss-crossed by teams of them), hadn’t any ties to al-Qaeda or a hand in Sept. 11. It was a Third-World nation, whose military prowess was a fifth of what it was when hobbled during the gulf war. Iraq had no navy or air force. It was no threat to American national security. —ILANA