We’ve spent no small amount of time over the years here at The BRAD BLOG calling out the duplicity, hypocrisy, cruelty and even felony crimes of Ann Coulter.
We’ve personally run her off the radio waves, helped discourage otherwise legitimate news outlets from giving her airtime, lest they damage their own credibility, helped her become persona non-grata at CPAC (where she was previously queen), and helped to document, in no uncertain terms, her own, personal, multiple cases of voter fraud in at least two different states.
People used to ask why we even bothered with her. She was and is, after all, clearly a horrible person with grotesquely ugly, hateful and violent views, and a years-long proclivity for propping herself and her career up at the unapologetically cruel expense of others.
But Ann Coulter mattered. As a GOP Superstar, she helped set the agenda for a huge segment of the nation (whether the chumps, rubes and suckers she helped to influence even knew it, much less were willing to admit it.) And few were able to respond to her bullshit effectively to set the record straight.
The good news, as Heather Digby Parton explains in a detailed column at Salon this week, Coulter, officially, no longer matters. Her books no longer sell, she is no longer the darling of the news networks and, as even she admits, she now has a very difficult time getting booked anywhere, much less being able to sell her once-popular, book-shaped screeds.
“They’re ignoring me now!,” Coulter whined last month to New York’s Annie Lowrey in an article headlined “Ann Coulter Wants to Know Why She Doesn’t Make You Mad Anymore”.
“Coulter has found herself struggling to annoy, enrage, and otherwise provoke the mainstream media or the left,” Lowrey reports. “Bloggers have left her alone. Twitter has left her alone. The networks have left her alone. ‘Nobody will debate me!’ she said. ‘There’s been no ABC, NBC, CBS for me on this book!'”
Parton’s brief, if detailed history of the once-very relevant rightwing polemicist is actually quite fair (far more than we would have been), as is her conclusion in Salon analysis, explaining why it is — particular at the dawn of this new Progressive Age — that Ann Coulter, simply, no longer matters…
Today, Ann Coulter is just political white noise. Sure, she’ll sell her books to the small group of people who can’t get enough of her bilious humor and hatred but her days of being a mainstream pop culture phenomenon are over. Everybody’s heard it all before. There’s almost a whiff of noxious nostalgia about it now.
The question is whether or not there’s anyone left in the Republican Party who can crawl out from under the pile of offal that people like Coulter have buried them under and say something new to America. For the first time in nearly two decades they are ignoring her provocations. Whatever else happens that’s very good news.
Her picture should (only) appear in the dictionary under “troll” — for several of the definitions. She is a self-parody of a scary-clown.
Put her in Roger Water’s imagined retirement home for political thugs:
“They can appear to themselves every day,
on closed-circuit TV,
to make sure they’re still real.
It’s the only connection they feel.”
Where’s the consumer warning, Brad, that photo frightened me….ten pounds of makeup can’t even begin to hide who she really is inside….
Newt Gingrich’s word list is so 1990,s.
The stupid dream is over. I would have hoped for at least a fart. It wasn’t to be. 🙁
A 600 word post, and you still didn’t put your finger on it. I’ll help you out–here’s why we hear less from Ann Coulter:
1) The mainstream outlets that are AC’s bread & butter don’t completely dominate American media like they did 10-15 years ago
2) Her three most recent books–“Mugged,” “Never Trust A Liberal Over Three–Esp a Republican,” and “Adios America”–are at odds with mainline opinions in the Democrat and Republican, thus alienating her media patrons at FoxNews and elsewhere.
If you published even a small portion of Adios America in the NYT, people would lose their minds — probably now more than ever before.
Yes, “liberals hate America” is a meme with zero novelty value left. At the same time, it’s been taken up by others with a lot more legitimacy as media characters, like … oh, whatshername, the Congresswoman who wanted new McCarthy hearings. At least Michele Bachman actually won an election once or twice.
Beyond the, uh, value of her ideas, such as they ever were, as a vicarious companion Coulter’s inevitable journey from “abusive MILF” to “angry grandma” has left her with a much smaller natural fanbase. And half the staff of Fox News are now former beauty queens. Standards have just gotten higher in the world of political BDSM.
And, why was Coulter ever famous in the first place again? People ask this question now. The age of the uncredentialed amateur is ending. Now it’s our college professors vs. their college professors in the media, not just any random wingnut who met Bill Maher at a party.
Coulter is becoming increasingly bizarre and can say Adios to her credibility and her career.
See “Adios, Ann: Coulter Trashes Nikki Haley” at http://wp.me/p4jHFp-7m.