Ignore No More

Another thing about the Coulter brouhaha (or is it a kerfuffle?) I've been noticing is the number of people, a small but substantial minority, who opine that giving the beast the attention it craves is just shoveling out more troll chow. If the issue were just Coulter there might be something to that, but as it stands, this is really an opportunity to expose the nasty little CPAC claque for what it really is, and maybe even to hold the media chumps who keep Coulter's mug on the TV screen somewhat accountable for their participation in all this.

See, it doesn't matter if we little people ignore her or not -- we don't affect anything, not with any significance. And we on the left especially can't get it together enough to make a dent in what clogs the airwaves, while they have no compunction about gang-faxing NBC for a couple weeks and getting a show yanked practically overnight because it's too iconoclastic. But, you know, for the most part we do ignore the majority of Coulter's weird spasms, and it's made no difference.

John Kerry thought he'd seize the moral high ground by ignoring the pathetically obvious calumniations of the swift boat assholes. How'd that work out?

Already the "joking" assertions are gaining at least minimal traction, as the cretinous tit-monster known as Atlas Juggs subtly demonstrates. Does she really want to go there? Hasn't it already been made abundantly clear on which side of the aisle the overwhelming majority of self-loathing closet cases reside? If it turns out that, say, during one of her idol John "Colonel Sanders" Bolton's forays into Plato's Retreat, another guy's johnson came somewhere near his, um, radar, will AJ then retract every deep-throat homily she's thrown down for him?

Ignoring these people is a perfectly rational response, as if one were ignoring a bratty kid in a supermarket whose parent just refuses to discipline the kid even a little. But as I've always said, it's a complete waste of time to respond rationally to irrational people, and the problem is that these are bratty kids with money and political power.

Look, what undid Kerry with the swift boat bullshit was not that his hesitation allowed the lies to gain credence; the people who needed to believe that about him weren't going to be swayed anyway. But it showed the people who were still on the fence about him that he would take shit from these cocksuckers, and that was what was unacceptable. Fuck that "I'm not going to dignify that with a response" bullshit. This is politics, boyo, and it's a bloodsport, and motherfuckers who lob cheap lies into crowds and cameras need to be cockpunched forthwith. You may not like to do it, you may feel that it's beneath your dignity, but the sooner those people find that there's no longer any upside to their fabricated bullshit and their lame "jokes", the better off the whole process becomes.

A couple months ago a cast member from the show Grey's Anatomy came under fire for outing a fellow cast member, and repeatedly calling him a "faggot". At the very least, if you have a problem with gay people, then maybe working in showbiz in Hollywood is not the best idea. I dunno, maybe "faggot" is becoming the new n-word, and in the great scheme of things, that's probably for the best.

But here's my point: within days, the offending cast member literally saw his career just about go out the window, and he'll probably be making conciliatory gestures to the gay community for some time to come. He quickly realized that if he ever wanted to work again, he was going to have to grovel and genuflect, and prove that he wasn't an irrational hater of teh gay. Again, his career was at stake; whether or not it should have been is not the issue here. The point is that Coulter's career is heavily dependent on publishing, and on broadcast and public appearances. These things are all facilitated by people and companies who make money enabling this nonsense.

Like I say, there are several options here, all of which are viable. The real goal is not Coulter, but the corporate machinery and the knuckle-dragging base that keeps creatures like it in play. You get rid of Coulter, they'll just find another troll to take its place; you monkey-wrench the machinery that makes a fat buck peddling inchoate bullshit to impressionable rubes, then maybe you start turning the tide back just a hair, and strike a blow for serious (if not solemn) discourse.

[Update: Apparently the excuse being put forth now by the fan base is that, since Bill Maher got away with tacitly endorsing the assassination of Dick Cheney, this lone transgression from Coulter pales in comparison.

First off, Maher's comment was remarkably ill-conceived and unnecessary, and counterfactual for that matter -- does anyone seriously suppose that if the suicide bomber at Bagram had gotten to Cheney, that we wouldn't instantly find some units somewhere to rotate in there and rain hot death on the nearest available scapegoat? Please. I understood the point Maher was attempting to make, but it fell way too close to the "if you could go back in time and push Hitler in front of a train in 1921, would you?" argument, which has always struck me as something of a jerkoff question that doesn't adequately consider externalities. If anything, a Bagram incident in which Cheney had been killed or even injured would more likely have rendered the suicide bomber this century's Gavrilo Princip. So yeah, Maher fucked up, but the fact is that he's generally been intellectually honest enough to admit when he's fucked up, unlike Coulter.

Secondly, Coulter has a long and well-catalogued history of exactly this sort of thing, including vicariously wishing sudden death upon Bill Clinton and John Paul Stevens, as well as anyone -- American or Middle Eastern -- seen to be thwarting the braintrust's master plans. If death wishes were horses, this broad would have a fucking breeding sanctuary. So spare us the drama, ladies.

Then again, judging by the high-quality erudition of the linked example (even some of the taglines are multiply misspelled; one brain surgeon attributes his clunky, too-funny-by-half slogan to an unnamed "Genious"), it's no surprise that rubber-gluing Bill Maher was their intellectual redoubt of first choice. It enables them to instantly project their assumptions, and announce loudly and proudly that every sentiment expressed by Bill Maher automatically vocalizes what everyone not in awe of the Bush-Cheney brilliance must also feel.

Which was the whole point of the link, and indeed of the CPAC, in the first place. They are not for anything per se, they are merely reconstituted antidisestablishmentarians, bred with soccer hooligans. Hofstadter would be both proud and mortified to see how remarkably consistent his observations have remained, and even flourished in some pockets.]