“Ann told host Bill Maher that women “should be armed but should not vote. No, they all have to give up their vote…the problem with women voting- and your communists will back me up on this- is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.”
Joe Maguire, Brainless
Let’s face it: Ann Coulter is an easy target, and hard to miss.
She’s the tallest girl on the little yellow bus to Hell, and obviously, suffering the dire consequences of not wearing her protective helmet like the rest of the passengers, for like them, she too is prone to involuntary fits and hysterics some mistake for lectures or television appearances; she too is prone to bang her head to senselessness, but in Ann’s case, she cracked her skull against a wall of concrete reality. And, oh my, is the poor woman cracked.
I mean, looking for flaws in her research, or contradictions, or outright lies is like looking for crabs on Paris Hilton’s bar stool. Eventually you stop counting and round off to the nearest hundred.
So reading Joe Maguire’s work on her was, well, not exactly revealing or groundbreaking. But, it does serve well in one respect: it’s a worthwhile compendium of Coulter’s idiocy, a veritable collection of just about every stupid ass, mean-spirited, hypocritical, racist, deceitful thing the smegma-sucking Aryan hag has ever said and wrote when pimped by the far right.
Still, it’s fun to see Maguire’s vivisection of her body of work, just to see how dysfunctional and rotten things really are inside. His was no easy task, he actually read all of her books. That’s no small feat, poring over all of her predictable and tiresome writing is a revolting stunt worthy of MTV’s Jackass, where eating cow shit for 200 dollars can make it to the Silver Screen. And certainly, the latter stunt is preferable to reading all of Coulter’s work.
Now, it’s time to ask, is this book truly objective?
Knee-jerk partisans of any stripe, are and always will be the greatest impediment to their own party’s correction, improvement and most importantly- credibility; as this is the “cheerleader” element crooked party members will always turn to when they need concealment or protection. Thus. the left has its share of Ann Coulters, its share of writers and pundits who see nothing wrong with pardoning the greatest trespasses against the public trust, up to and including murder, if the guilty is one of their beloved party. When this happens, the condemnation of both Democrats and Republicans, hurled piously against each other, rings hollow and repulsively hypocritical. And as I read Maguire, I wondered, is this really going to hurt the right’s prize sow, if the left attempts to play down its own misdeeds, or insult the intelligence of voters whom are wary enough to know both parties protect their own when it comes to corruption, and this at the expense and peril of trusting constituents? An excerpt from an earlier post on knee-jerk partisan tunnel-vision seems fitting here, so bear with me: “Democrats and Republicans are both equally prone to a crippling loss of critical decision making faculties- particularly reason- when it comes to life-altering choices such as electing leaders in high office. “We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts….The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted,” Westen and his colleagues say… The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.” For more on this study, have a look at this article: Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds...”
[pullquote]Ann told host Bill Maher that women “should be armed but should not vote. No, they all have to give up their vote…the problem with women voting- and your communists will back me up on this- is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.”Joe Maguire, Brainless
[/pullquo
te]This bias, alas, is not absent in Maguire’s book, but it is refreshingly scarce. Despite that, Maguire still risks falling into the same partisan trap of logical fallacies Ann Coulter now calls “home sweet home”. When discussing the abortion clinics to “drinking establishments” in making a point about how Ann equates pro-choice with pro-abortion, which isn’t exactly a weak argument on her part, if you consider you are either pro-letting others terminate life or pro-not-letting-others terminate life. Even if the village idiot is the one telling you the house is on fire, it doesn’t make the claim automatically invalid. The success of Ann Coulter is not based in her ability to spew lie after lie, since people would catch on and avoid her, no; the success of this yammering biped pig in lipstick and heels is based on a a knack for using a mixture of self-evident truths to package and conceal a lie or agenda. Maguire’s comparison is this:
“Meanwhile, Ann’s belief that being pro-choice and being pro-abortion are the same thing is about on par with saying that you either support the right of bars to exist and are therefore an alcoholic, or you think drinking establishments should be outlawed, which makes you a teetotaler. While in many cases either of those may be true, the conditions arbitrarily assume a binary state. That is to say, it doesn’t leave room for the possibility that somewhere, in the tens of thousands of pubs, taverns, inns, and watering holes that litter this great country, there is someone soberly sipping a soda.”
So I can just picture Maguire debating Ann on television regarding the excerpt above:
Ann: So what you’re saying, Joe, is that abortion clinics can be compared to “drinking establishments”? Didn’t your book compare a bar to a type of clinic whose sole purpose is to terminate life?
Joe: Wait, eh…
Ann: Mind you, a clinic in a lucrative abortion industry that preys on vulnerable women, whom are then manipulated and brainwashed so thoroughly that terminating the human life inside them is not seen as profiteering on the killing of their unborn, but rather, as a costly but noble expedient to reassert their “reproductive rights” as women.
Joe: You choose to drink a martini, and you choose to abort. There is a valid parallel to a drinking establishment if we talk about choice.
Ann: Here’s a choice for you: I choose not to discuss this any further with an idiot who thinks a bar and an abortion clinic can be compared in an abortion debate. (Ann rolls her eyes, flips her hair smugly, scratches her balls). Thanks Joe, I think you just boosted sales of my book “Godless” by 3,000 percent.
If the commentary by Ann sounds out of character (that is, unusually lucid), it’s because I wrote it, and wrote it on the premise that Ann Coulter is sane, when clearly she is batshit crazy. To be fair, this is probably the only place Maguire attacked the beastly Coulter with a cardboard sword. The rest of the book does a potent job of debunking her logic, and he does it by using her own words against her. For example:
“Arguments by demonization, rather than truth and light, can be presumed to be fraudulent.” Ann Coulter “There are substantive arguments contained in conservative name-calling.” Ann Coulter, Slander
As you can see, juxtaposed against Ann’s earlier comments or writings, Maguire presents a more recent, opposing batch of her work and quotes, and the impression you get when seeing the glaring contradictions and hypocrisy is that Ann has an inconsistent ghost writer or multiple personalities, and if the latter, she chose to keep the worst ones just to spite us all. Also detailed in the book is Ann’s tendency to plagiarize, and most curious of all, a televised instance wherein Coulter says women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Back in a February, 2001 appearance on Politically Incorrect, Ann told host Bill Maher that women “should be armed but should not vote. No, they all have to give up their vote…the problem with women voting-and your communists will back me up on this- is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.” This is ironic, coming from her, since she loves to boast that the democracy we brought to Afghanistan gave women the right to vote; the same right she believes American women shouldn’t have. That said, women fans of Coulter are hereby encouraged to follow Ann’s advice, and not vote again this year or any other.
“Brainless: the Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter” hits the book stores October 10th, 2006. Grab a copy, it’s a great read.