By Brad Friedman on 7/2/2015, 7:35am PT  

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...

Lowrey thinks Coulter is pretty much an act that's gone sour in the age of polarization and she may be right. She compares her to Donald Trump (who Coulter extols for his "immigrants are rapists" comments, which she believes he got from her) and there is a certain kind of scary-clown aspect to both of them. But I think it's something else - she just isn't all that shocking anymore. And the reason is that, after all these years --- through which she and her fellow right-wing bomb throwers have been poisoning the discourse and polluting our politics with the most egregious dehumanization of just about everyone on the planet who doesn't look and sound like them --- nobody is listening anymore.

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.

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Article Categories: Ann Coulter, Fox 'News', Florida, Election Fraud, Connecticut, Republicans