Right-wing attack dog and bimbo Ann Coulter (top) slanders Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, in her latest column. This comes as no surprise, as the right wing, which knows no shame, slandered former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland (shown above with Kerry in New Hampshire this month) -- a Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War -- as unpatriotic.
BRING IT ON, bitch!
Right-wing nutjob (that's redundant) Ann Coulter slanders John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, in her latest column.
I rarely read Coulter because her pure, raw, unadulterated hatred makes me sick to my stomach. She has made it her mission in life to try to make all of us as miserable and self-loathing as she is.
Although it's like taking a trip through hell, replete with demons clawing at you, let's take a little trip through Coulter's column, every execrable word of it. You will, I hope, find it instructive. And don't worry; I'll hold your hand.
Ann starts off her exercise in hatred -- which all of her columns are -- by insulting all of the remaining seven candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination:
After the New Hampshire primary, Dennis Kucinich's new slogan is: ".001 Percent of America Can't Be Wrong!" John Edwards' new slogan is: "Vote for Me or We'll See You in Court." Joe Lieberman's new slogan is: "Sixth Place Is Not an Option." (Bumper sticker version: "Ask Me About My Delegate.") Al Sharpton's new slogan is "Hello? Room Service?" Wesley Clark's new slogan is: "Leading America's War on Fetuses." Howard Dean's new slogan is: "I Want to Be Your President...And So Do I!"
This demonstrates that The Demon Coulter, just like her fellow demons of the right, is going to attack any and every Democrat who would be president. To steal a line from Democratic consultant James Carville's latest book, Had Enough? A Handbook for Fighting Back, if one of the Democratic presidential contenders walked on water, Coulter would slander him as being unable to swim.
If you don't stand for giving the rich tax breaks while the middle-class bear the ever-increasing burden of having to increasingly support both the rich and the poor; screwing future generations by running up the federal budget deficit to stunning record levels and trashing the environment for corporate profiteering; and increasing the likelihood of terrorist attacks by unprovokedly, imperialistically and illegally invading and colonizing oil-rich nations for Halliburton and other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp -- using nonexistent weapons of mass destruction as a pretext -- then Coulter & Co. are going to denounce you as an anti-American enemy combatant.
Of course, the whole abortion "issue" -- Coulter knee-jerkedly takes an anti-abortion swipe at Clark -- is just a distraction from the real issues, such as those I just mentioned in the last paragraph.
With the exception, of course, of the plutocrats, these issues will touch all of us -- we will be mopping up after the Bush regime for years to come -- but Coulter and her ilk would rather try to distract the masses with such relative non-issues as abortion and same-sex marriage. (The right wing doesn't care about fetuses. If the right wing really gave a shit about life, it wouldn't be OK with environmental degradation -- it would ensure our children clean air and water -- and it wouldn't be against universal health care for our children and other programs that would ensure their welfare. Perhaps the right wing wants those children to be born just so that they can be miserable; misery loves company. Or maybe the right wing opposes abortion because it wants a steadly supply of wage slaves.)
I digress. Coulter continues to spew forth her venom:
That leaves John Kerry (new slogan: "Nous Sommes Nombre Un!"), who is winning Democratic voters in droves on the basis of his superior ability to taunt George Bush for his lack of combat experience. Like every war hero I've ever met, John Kerry seems content to spend his days bragging about his battlefield exploits. Wait, wait... Let me correct that last sentence: like no war hero I've ever met...
As everyone has heard approximately one billion times by now, Kerry boasts that he has REAL experience with aircraft carriers, and if Bush wants to run on national security, then...BRING IT ON!
Actually, it's the Bush regime that has made warfare and national security the centerpiece of its "accomplishments." It has done this in order to distract us from the fact that domestically, we are rotting from within. (This is much like in George Orwell's 1984, in which Big Brother is perpetually at war -- wars it fabricates, just as how the Bush regime fabricated Gulf War II -- in order to keep the masses distracted from their squalid conditions and to keep Big Brother in power as their "protector.") So it's quite appropriate for any of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination to counter the Bush regime's "re"-election strategy, to throw it back in their faces.
As I believe it was Al Franken who noted in Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, when you throw back in their faces what the Republicans claim, they go beserk. It's like aikido, the martial art in which you cause your opponent's own momentum to work against him or her.
It is quite significant that George W. Bush -- whose father got him into the Texas Air National Guard in order to avoid the draft (Junior miraculously jumped to the top of the Texas Air National Guard's waiting list of 500, but once he got in, he went AWOL) -- has no combat experience. As Kerry has pointed out, if Gee Dubya's precious rich white ass (my words, not Kerry's) had ever been in the line of fire, he might think twice before sending young American men and women to their deaths for Halliburton and other subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp (again, my words, not Kerry's; Kerry has to be "nice," but I don't have to).
As I write this, 522 American service members have died since the United States invaded Iraq on March 20, The Associated Press reports.
Yet Bush the Deserter strutted around in a flight suit on that aircraft carrier on May 1 like he had any right to do so. It was a nauseating sight and he deserves to have it thrown back in his chimplike face, as Kerry has done, one billion and one times.
Back to Ann's bile:
I note that when George Bush directed that precise phrase at Islamic terrorists who yearn to slaughter American women and children, liberals were enraged at the macho posturing of it. But they feel "Bring it on!" is a perfectly appropriate expression when directed at a dangerous warmonger like George Bush. ("Bring it on!" was deemed better than Kerry's first impulse, "Let's get busy, sister!")
"Bring it on!" was an incredibly stupid, unpresidential, dangerous thing for Bush to say. (Thus, he was in character when he said it.) There is no defending it. The Asshole in Chief was taunting terrorists to attack American service members. His precious rich ass will never be in harm's way -- if the shit ever hits the fan he'll be in a bunker like Adolf Hitler was in the end -- so it was easy for him to tell the terrorists to "Bring it on!"
Kerry was indisputably brave in Vietnam, and it's kind of cute to see Democrats pretend to admire military service. Physical courage, like chastity, is something liberals usually deride, but are tickled when it accidentally manifests itself in one of their own. One has to stand in awe of Kerry's military service 33 years ago. Of course, that's where it ends, including with Kerry -- inasmuch as, upon his return from war in 1970, he promptly began trashing his fellow Vietnam vets by calling them genocidal murderers.
Democrats don't "pretend" to admire military service. They admire military service that is for a noble purpose -- unlike Gulf War II -- and comparing courage to chastity is just Coulterian lunacy. She has her own unique brand of "logic." And the devastation upon Vietnam -- including, yes, genocide -- in the pointless Vietnam War is documented historic fact. In the war that Coulter would romanticize, about 3 million Vietnamese and about 58,000 American service members died -- for nothing.
Are the Vietnam vets "genocidal murderers"? No, the stupid rich white men who sent the Vietnam vets to Vietnam as young men to do their killing for them are genocidal murderers, just like the members of the Bush regime who have sent American service members to Iraq to do their killing for them are murderers.
But if Bush can't talk to Kerry about the horrors of war, then Kerry sure as hell can't talk to anyone about the plight of the middle class. Kerry's life experience consists of living off other men's money by marrying their wives and daughters.
For over 30 years, Kerry's primary occupation has been stalking lonely heiresses. Not to get back to his combat experience, but Kerry sees a room full of wealthy widows as "a target-rich environment." This is a guy whose experience dealing with tax problems is based on spending his entire adult life being supported by rich women. What does a kept man know about taxes?
In 1970, Kerry married into the family of Julia Thorne -- a family estimated to be worth about $300 million. She got depressed, so he promptly left her and was soon seen catting around with Hollywood starlets, mostly while the cad was still married. (Apparently, JFK really was his mentor.) Thorne is well-bred enough to say nothing ill of her Lothario ex-husband. He is, after all, the father of her children -- a fact that never seemed to constrain him.
When Kerry was about to become the latest Heinz family charity, he sought to have his marriage to Thorne annulled, despite the fact that it had produced two children. It seems his second meal ticket, Teresa Heinz, wanted the first marriage annulled -- and Heinz is worth more than $700 million. Kerry claims he will stand up to powerful interests, but he can't even stand up to his wife.
Heinz made Kerry sign a prenuptial agreement, presumably aware of how careless he is with other people's property, such as other people's Vietnam War medals, which Kerry threw on the ground during a 1971 anti-war demonstration.
At pains to make Kerry sound like a normal American, his campaign has described how Kerry risked everything, mortgaging his home in Boston to help pay for his presidential campaign. Technically, Kerry took out a $6 million mortgage for "his share" of "the family's home" -- which was bought with the Heinz family fortune. (Why should he spend his own money? He didn't throw away his own medals.) I'm sure the average working stiff in Massachusetts can relate to a guy who borrows $6 million against his house to pay for TV ads.
Kerry's campaign has stoutly insisted that he will pay off the mortgage himself, with no help from his rich wife. Let's see: According to tax returns released by his campaign, in 2002, Kerry's income was $144,091. But as The Washington Post recently reported, even a $5 million mortgage paid back over 30 years at favorable interest rates would cost $30,389 a month -- or $364,668 a year.
Coulter is one of those sick and twisted women who support right-wing sexism, misogyny and patriarchy. If a man marries a woman who is richer than he, it's scandalous, in Ann's World.
Memo to Ann: It's the year 2004. The woman can be richer than the man. MmmmmmmmK?
While Coulter clearly enjoys herself as she delves into John Kerry's marital life, I have no idea how accurate her allegations of Kerry's reverse gold-digging are, and I have no desire to research the matter because I have no more interest in John Kerry's private financial and matrimonial affairs (as long as he's done nothing illegal) than I have in what happened between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. And Coulter has no more insight into Kerry's close personal relationships any more than I do. She insinuates that Kerry has married not for love, but for money -- as she herself would, I have little doubt -- but offers no proof, only slimy circumstancial "evidence."
(The "other people's Vietnam War medals, which Kerry threw on the ground" charge I will research -- I have ordered noted historian Douglas Brinkley's book about Kerry's service in Vietnam and his antiwar activities after the war, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, from amazon.com -- but I'm 99 percent confident that Coulter, in Coulterian fashion, is omitting important facts in order to slander the likely Democratic presidential nominee.)
Anyway, Ann's not done yet:
The Democrats' joy at nominating Kerry is perplexing. To be sure, liberals take a peculiar, wrathful pleasure in supporting pacifist military types. And Kerry's life story is not without a certain feral aggression. But if we're going to determine fitness for office based on life experience, Kerry clearly has no experience dealing with problems of typical Americans since he is a cad and a gigolo living in the lap of other men's money.
Um, I am a liberal and Ann Coulter does not know my mind. I don't have "peculiar, wrathful pleasure in supporting pacifist military types." Actually, if I could pick the next president of the United States, like the U.S. Supreme Court picked the current "president," I'd probably pick Dennis Kucinich, who is a pacifist but certainly not a "pacifist military type."
However, ideologically, Kerry is my second choice of Democratic presidential candidate, and, as Ann notes in the very first sentence of her hatefest, Kucinich has a snowball's chance in hell of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. And, as current events make clear, Kerry has a damned good chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination. Therefore, I have supported him for several months.
And as I've noted before, in a normal presidential election I don't require the candidate I support to be a veteran, but this year's is no ordinary election. This is an election year in which the Republican Propaganda Machine is running at full throttle, because rather than focus on solving any of the United States of America's internal problems, the Bush regime for the past three years has focused only on distracting the masses with its finely honed propaganda that would make Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels jealous while it plunders, loots and pillages our treasury and our national resources (and Iraq's, too). (And we liberals are, according to the right-wingers, the "traitors"...)
Ann finishes (she'd go on, but as a columnist she must have a word limit; I am thankful that I do not):
Kerry is like some character in a Balzac novel, an adventurer twirling the end of his mustache and preying on rich women. This low-born poseur with his threadbare pseudo-Brahmin family bought a political career with one rich woman's money, dumped her, and made off with another heiress to enable him to run for president. If Democrats want to talk about middle-class tax cuts, couldn't they nominate someone who hasn't been a poodle to rich women for past 33 years?
Is it really possible, in one column, to reduce John Kerry to "a poodle to rich women"?
Only in Ann's World, or more, accurately, Ann's Hell. Only after an entire column of omitting facts and distorting facts -- and even creating facts, for all I know -- can Coulter "make" such a "case."
I find it interesting that twice Coulter accuses Kerry of "living off other men's money." (Note Coulter's self-loathing sexism in her repeated use of the term "other men's money"; again, in Ann's World, which looks an awful lot like Texas, only men can make money.)
Yet isn't that what Republicanism is all about -- living off other people's money? If you were not born into wealth, which your ancestors stole from others, you get rich by (1) paying your employees significantly less than their labor is worth and (2) by charging your customers (most of whom are hardworking middle-class Americans) significantly more than the goods or services you control are worth. Being a Republican is all about living off other people's money. It's not the Republicans' money; it's our money, the money they steal from us by underpaying us as workers and overcharging us as consumers.
And let's talk about Enron and Halliburton, with their ties to the Bush regime, and "other men's money," shall we? Yes, the right wing knows all about "other men's money."
Coulter's column is good practice for the two main attacks that the right wing very predictably is going to make on John Kerry over and over and over again:
1. John Kerry is married to a rich woman (gasp!) and
2. John Kerry was a Jane Fonda-like opponent of the Vietnam War; his antiwar activities were a slap in the face to our Vietnam vets.
Of course, it's the chickenhawks in the Bush regime -- neither Bush nor one of Bush's major Gulf War II planners who is not in the military (including Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle) has ever seen a single day of combat -- who would criticize Kerry, who, while they were avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War, volunteered to be shot at in Vietnam.
Of course, these are the same kind of evil people who called former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran who lost three of his four limbs in the war, unpatriotic.
Some lefties are worried about the attacks that the members of the right wing are making on Kerry, but the right wing and its attack dogs like Coulter are going to attack any front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and of course they're going to attack the eventual nominee.
If you're looking for a Democratic candidate that the right-wing nutjobs won't attack, good luck. They'd even find a way to attack Republicanophile Joseph Lieberman, to try to pin the "liberal" label on him.
The people to whom the likes of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly appeal -- namely, the lowest, rock-bottom common denominator -- are not going to vote for a Democrat anyway, so it's energy misspent trying to appeal to these people.
Better for us progressives to spend our time and energy with the independents and undecided voters who are in the center or lean leftward, who aren't as concerned about such things as the fact that John Kerry's wife is rich as they are concerned about such things as not just jobs, but good jobs; health care for all who need it; education that truly leaves no child behind; the preservation of Social Security and Medicare; stopping environmental degradation for corporate profit; billions of their hard-earned tax dollars going to bogus wars that only enrich corporate crooks and make them and their children more, rather than less, vulnerable to terrorist attacks; a balanced federal budget; and, in general, their and their children's future.
These are the things that are going to matter to American voters in November.
So I say to Ann Coulter: BRING IT ON, bitch!
For further reading: "Ann Coulter: Nutcase," Chapter 2 of Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Among many of Coulter's lies, Franken writes about how Coulter lies about even such basic things as her age.
6:59:14 PM 
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