A Virginia Liberal

Al Franken sparred off with Ann Coulter on a radio station called, near as I can tell, KBOX. Once again, if you want to hear the whole thing, you can download it for yourself, but I’ll give you the highlights.
For those of you that don’t know, by the way, Ann Coulter is the reigning diva of the hysterical right, or rather, the hysterical diva of the reigning right. She’s written three books which were #1 New York Times bestsellers, and her last one peaked out at #11. I’m personally glad that people are catching on how much she lies and lies and lies. Either that, or her nutcase conservative supporters saw her on TV. Here she is being interviewed by Katie Couric of NBC news. alt="Yes, she's really the one on the right." /> Christ, another quarter inch and we’d have hit the jackpot. If Coulter had remembered that her audience wasn’t horny teenage boys, but, what did I say? Oh, yes, nutcase conservatives, then she would have worn something a little more… hell, she just would have worn something. Most people who watch Ann Coulter were hard right. She just wanted them to be hard. Anyway, here she is arguing with Al Franken on a radio show called KBOX. If you have a file-sharing software, you should be able to find this for yourself.
Ann was questioned by the interviewer regarding her false claim that the New York Times didn’t write about the death of Dale Ernheardt until three days after it happened, she said, “The New York Times did begin an article by saying ‘his death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart’, and my point still stands”. To her credit, she was referring to an article which was actually written by Rick Bragg three days after the event occurred. What Coulter didn’t know anything about was the front-page story the New York Times wrote the day after Earnhardt’s death. Ann: “Okay! Okay! They mentioned it the next day!” Al: ”Mention it, they didn’t mention, they had a front page story on it.” Ann: “Yes, they mentioned it the next day!” When she can’t yell over people like she tried with Katie Curick, she just repeats herself even though she’s admittedly, in this case, wrong.
Al Franken quotes Ann Coulter in Lies saying that she was “friendly with” him. She vehemently denies this in her book, saying: Franken’s very first charge against me is that I told a reporter from the Observer that I was “friendly” with Franken, when in fact, we are not “friendly.”
“Needless to say, I never claimed to be friendly with Al Franken” she says. However, caught in a moment of candor here, she was asked “Ann, you know Al Franken?” and responded with an enthusiastic “Yeah, hi Al!” In her book, Ann dismisses this whole ‘friendly’ thing as reverse-name dropping on Franken’s part-you know, so Al could get more publicity for his #1 NY Times bestseller. And she’s right. After all, working on Saturday Night Live during its peak and for another 15 years after that doesn’t mean he’s famous. Nor, obviously, do two #1 New York Times Bestsellers. Or performing at the White House Correspondance Dinner, in front of every important comedian, journalist and politician in the country. Really, this guy has been so unbelievably petty in an attempt to prolong his few seconds in the limelight as to pretend he’s friends with Ann Coulter. How completely puerile.
Really, Ann, you could learn a thing or two about longevity and how not to grab too much attention too quickly. How high did your most recent book climb on the NY times list? #11? Maybe if you hadn’t pissed off every person in your field (political news) then you wouldn’t routinely come off as overbearing and unpleasant when people saw you argue with them on TV.
When Al Franken said that Ann Coulter used absurd search methods and then lied about results, Coulter responded by saying “The New York Times did not, in fact, report the speech. Franken does not say otherwise. My guess is - and this is just a stab in the dark - Franken doesn’t say otherwise because he can’t say otherwise, inasmuch as … THE NEW YORK TIMES DID NOT REPORT THE SPEECH. What Franken says is that my search method was faulty - though, somehow, it still managed to produce the truth! (To wit: The New York Times did not report the speech.)”. Readers of this probably thought that The New York Times did not report Jesse Jackson’s speech. They also probably thought that Al Franken didn’t say that the New York Times reported his speech because, according to Coulter, THE NEW YORK TIMES DID NOT REPORT THE SPEECH. Of course, she made that up. Right after the paragraph she wants you to know about, Al Franken wrote “A more reasonable search (Jesse Jackson and Christmas and Britain) shows that, yes, of course, the Times did run an article on December 20 about the controversy using excerpts of Jackson’s speech, which was prerecorded.” I looked this up myself and found that not only did Franken say they reported it, but unlike when Ann Coulter says someone said something, The New York Times actually DID have an article about Jackson’s speech.
If you’re shaking your head right now, just wait, you’ll be shaking it harder. You’ll need to wedge your noggin in a paint mixer to be able to shake it fast enough for this crap.
In his book, Franken has a list referring to Ann called How to Lie with Footnotes, after quoting her saying she’s got seven hundred and thirty footnotes, then points out she has none. Anyone with any sense can tell it’s not the substance of his argument, or anything more than opportunity for a joke or two.
Al Franken then brought up something Ann had written in her book regarding one of Thomas Friedman’s articles, Naked Air, saying that people should be forced to fly nude so that they couldn’t bring weapons onto plains. Ann then quotes him as saying “Friedman blames ‘religious fundamentalists of any stripe’ for the September 11th attacks”. She says “This is known as a paraphrasal. Liberals seem to think I can’t paraphrase what they say-“ “No, no, no, I’ll tell you why your thing was a lie-“ “’Scuze me, I’m enjoying this, I really am, but it’s 11:55 and I have to go.” Of course, Ann can’t pretend to research things during a live debate, so when cornered with her numerous lies, she can’t lie about her lies about lies, so she just runs away from the fight. Can we trust anything about this woman? Is she a compulsive liar? Is she stupid?
I don’t just ask if she’s stupid because I’m liberal, and the only way we ever argue is by calling names, never doing tedious research like Ann.
While Coulter can be very witty, using names such as “head-injury boy” to describe those she dislikes, she’s really pretty dumb. She can’t make an argument without making things up about perfectly honest and non-head injured journalists.
Let’s take the spot where she says Frazier Moore has an injured head.
“I defy anyone to explain what head-injury boy is trying to convey in his crucial, accusatory sentence: “Coulter misappropriated Friedman’s words in a way that has nothing to do with racial profiling or anything else addressed in his column.” Huh?”
Maybe she really is stupid enough not to understand what that means. Can you? I can. Hey Ann, let’s go through one fairly straightforward sentence by a member of the intelligentsia (that means smart people). What he’s saying, Ann, is this. Coulter (you) took one sentence out of Friedman’s article that has little to do with anything in the rest of the article. There. Simple enough for you, head-injury girl?
One thing Coulter illogically stays the course through is sexual discrimination, something Republicans notoriously haven’t done much about. “Liberals seek do destroy differentiation between the sexes in order to destroy morality.” What? If liberals were ‘destroying differentiation between the sexes’ then we’d be trying to genetically engineer unisex humans. I guess Coulter doesn’t care that, on average, women make 75 cents for every dollar men make. Logically, if Coulter sees trying to raise women’s average income as immoral, then women earning less must be moral. Why is that? Is it because Coulter is rich, displaying an “I’ve got mine” attitude the way Clarence Thomas does to affirmative action? Or is it because she’s post-op?
Laugh, will you? Laugh this:
Or this!
Has anyone else noticed that Ms. (Note the Ms.-never been married, fourtysomething. When questioned, Coulter stated that she has no boyfriend.) Coulter has huge hands, and a rather pronounced adam’s apple. Those of you that watch Nip/tuck will recognize those two things as the signs of a sex change operation. The word Ms. takes on a whole new meaning now, huh?
Besides proving she’s got no sense of decency, this picture begs a certain observation. You see, from what I’ve heard, wigs can be very itchy. That, of course, is aside from her incredibly short skirt. Conservative? I don’t think so.
But if I had to sum up everything here, every single thing in this, a small and inadequate catalogue of her lies, I’d have to say what I was wondering when I wrote this.
So, Ann, post-op or pre-op?