I’ve managed to avoid Ann Coulter up to now – we don’t travel in the same social circles – but my impression was that she was an all-right gal, the right-wing version of one of the savvy left-wing female columnists who delight us with their clever turn of phrase. Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd and even Arianna Huffington come to mind.
Wrong.
I’m a politics junkie, have followed presidential elections since I was a kid, staying up late to total Electoral College votes with pencil and paper. I remember Stevenson’s Presidential campaigns – both of them – and his speech to the UN at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, considered by some one of the finest pieces of diplomatic oratory of the last century.
And now? My, my, my how have our standards of public discourse have sunk, to tight tank and cesspool levels.
Ann Coulter has written the most scurrilous, indecent verbal assault on a public figure that I have read in almost 50 years.
As if the revolting attacks on Vietnam veteran, triple amputee and former Senator Max Cleland weren’t bad enough in the now-infamous 2002 midterms, Coulter couldn’t resist heaping yet more denegration on this honorable, intensely patriotic man.
In doing so, she’s discredited herself and the political philosophy which she claims to represent.
I would love it if Conservative leaders like William F. Buckley and Thomas Sowell would repudiate this – forgive the phrase – bush leaguer – at their earliest convenience.
Then again, please excuse me, I wouldn’t insult men as intellectually elegant as Buckley and Sowell by presuming that they would demean themselves by even noticing someone like Coulter.
Feel free to click through the link above, but do yourself a favor, belt down a stiff one first.
Then we have the Bush campaign, the eternal whiners, fretting recently about John Kerry’s taking $640,000 in campaign contributions from special interests.
My smellin’ salts please, Scarlett, dear.
Compare that, if you will, to the following record for George “I’m a war president” (don’t remind us) Bush:
$3.2 million from big oil and gas companies
$1.4 million from drug companies
$8 million from big banks and investment firms
And Enron has been his single biggest contributor — over $600,000.
That comes to a little over $13 million, over 20 times the amount which supposedly has put John Kerry in the pockets of lobbyists.
Well, I don’t like campaign contributions from any source, and I’d be very happy if the whole ugly business of private – and public – financing went away.
Unfortunately, that won’t happen in the universe in which we live, so I suppose purists are left with selecting the lesser of the two evils.
And if John Kerry carries only 1/20th of the stench of special interest funding than Bush, then a priori, he smells sweeter than a rose. Or at least sweeter than a swamp.