Misconstruing Miss Coulter

Klavan On The Culture

By Andrew Klavan
http://pajamasmedia.com/
February 20th, 2009 8:51 am

Ann Coulter’s new book Guilty, has been my bedside reading lately. So far, it’s terrific.

You know, it’s funny. When a mainstream critic calls a book or movie outrageous, daring, shocking, or revolutionary, it usually means it’s the same old boring stuff: someone bares his ass or curses out Jesus or attacks some vestige of decency or honor that’s managed to survive the cultural locusts. It’s all so groundbreaking you can hardly keep from snoring.

But when someone like Ann comes along—someone who really is outrageous, daring, shocking and disconcertingly adorable to boot, these same brave radical critics suddenly fling their aprons over their faces and run shrieking from the room like Frank Rich or some other hysterical old woman.

Coulter’s chapter hilariously entitled “Victim of a Crime? Thank A Single Mother,” is a case in point. It caused her to be roundly attacked throughout the press for being unfeeling toward the “plight” of single mothers. But the chapter is really about the plague of illegitimacy that destroys children’s lives, saps the resources of the state, increases crime rates, plunges whole communities into generational poverty—and is then romanticized and even encouraged by the mainsteam media. If a liberal says, “Clap your hands and believe in the Global Warming Fairy,” the MSM responds: “The Debate Is Over.” But when Coulter marshals facts, figures and examples to prove her point, the widespread response is, “Ann is mean! She hates single mothers!”

But okay, that’s the liberal media for you. What really bothers me is when we conservatives do the same thing. Ann is constantly being denounced by conservative pundits and bloggers for her outlandish style—for making a John Edwards joke using the word faggot or for responding to 9/11 by saying we ought to convert the Arab world to Christianity or for saying that Jews are perfected by Christ—so on and so forth.

Look, I don’t always agree with Coulter. She sometimes seems to scream black whenever the media screams white (a strategy that works only about 85 percent of the time). I’m pretty sure we really did evolve from apes — myself within living memory. And I enthusiastically endorse any and all non-bloodletting sex acts done in private between consenting adults—as long as you don’t then ask me to pay for the resulting child, abortion or course of medication.

But the whole way liberals work is to redefine manners and morals in such a fashion that conservative common sense automatically becomes hateful. If you note that women and men are different, you’re misogynistic. If you denounce the destruction of marriage in black communities, you’re racist or moralistic. If you call for the defense of America against the world-wide Islamist menace, you’re a bigoted warmonger. If we take this garbage seriously even for an instant, we spend our whole lives playing catch-up, saying sorry, going on defense.

Coulter’s answering strategy is to blow all that foolishness away. She says the unsayable thing, does it with intelligence, humor and style and gets the world exactly right far more often than not. And did I mention she’s disconcertingly adorable? There’s more good, honest material in a paragraph of her work than in any entire edition of the New York Times. She may be a loose cannon now and then, but somehow the barrel always ends up pointed in the right direction.