When right-wing fembots attack

Ann Coulter dishes out a fresh bookful of hypocrisy, distortion and half-crazed rants. Can't conservatives find a better champion than this?

By Charles Taylor

Jun 27, 2002 | Golly, it's tough being a conservative! Here's a typical day that a member of the American right must endure as imagined by Ann Coulter in her new screed "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right." Wake up to Katie Couric haranguing Charlton Heston about gun control or claiming hate speech is what killed Matthew Shephard. Flip the channel to Bryant Gumbel -- but not before you put Aunt Tillie back to bed to keep her from seeing "smut peddler" Hugh Hefner asked his views on the presidential campaign. Pick up the New York Times and read trumped-up articles about the alleged threat of the religious right or something derogatory about President Bush.

If that doesn't have you ready to crawl back in the hay with Aunt Tillie and you still manage to summon the strength to make it through the day, there's more to be endured at the end of it. In the evening, you've got to face Dan Rather "falsely accusing Republicans of all manner of malfeasance." If you decide to relax by taking in a movie you'll see "kind-hearted abortionists, Nazi priests, rich preppie Republican bigots, and the dark night of fascism under Senator Joe McCarthy." Gee willikers, what's a right-winger to do?

Coulter could probably have a day much more to her liking by skipping the TV and heading straight for the radio, tuning in to hear Rush Limbaugh talking about "feminazis" or G. Gordon Liddy giving instruction on the most effective way to kill federal agents ("aim for the head"). She could pick up the Washington Times or the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal. She could change channels to Fox News and listen to the headlines of the day from Brit Hume. Or tune in to Alan Keyes on MSNBC or Bill O'Reilly (though, Coulter tells us, he's not really a conservative since he's against the death penalty). If she felt like an evening out, she could go see "The Sum of All Fears" and relive the thrill of the Russian threat, or rent "The Patriot" and groove to its vision of government as an alien force that will burn your home and kill your children. Or, if a quiet evening is more to her taste, she could relax with her vintage collection of Everett Dirksen records, or perhaps peruse such literary classics as "Six Crises" or "God and Man at Yale." It's her choice.

But just like the liberals she hates -- the ones who think Fox News is a threat to the nation or who want to keep Eminem's "hate speech" off the radio and MTV -- Coulter knows the rhetorical value of crying coercion. The easiest way to protest speech that offends you is to act as if you are forced to listen to it. Rather than doing the work of finding media in tune with your views -- not especially hard for either a conservative or a liberal -- it's more dramatic to portray yourself as an oppressed victim à la "1984" enduring the lies of "newspeak."

Coulter, an attorney and one of the "elves" who aided Paula Jones in her lawsuit against Bill Clinton, is too combative to ever envision herself as a hapless Orwellian drone. The self-portrait that emerges from "Slander" and from her regular TV appearances (which must have somehow been arranged when the liberal ayatollahs who control the media were asleep on the job) is of a freedom fighter in Manolo Blahniks, tirelessly pointing out the liberal propaganda that threatens free speech and the Republic itself, preferably in a chic and simple outfit that will take her from policy meetings to television interviews to cocktail parties without missing a beat of her busy day.

Coulter is the most visible and vociferous of the conservative fembots (hereafter known as the CFs) who have emerged in the last few years. Her mob-hit style of discourse is captured by David Brock in his tinny, gossipy mea culpa "Blinded by the Right" when he quotes her, speaking in reference to Bill Clinton, wondering whether it would be better "to impeach or assassinate." Some of her colleagues seem to have fallen out of the spotlight, depriving conservatives of media heroes and liberals of favored targets ("Coo, coo, ca-choo, Laura Ingraham, the Nation turns its lonely eyes to you"). But there are still enough around to make the soon-to-be-late "Politically Incorrect" look like "The Dating Game" as fantasized by the Young Americans for Freedom.

Besides Coulter there's the likes of Kellyanne Conway (nee Fitzpatrick), Lisa Pinto of the Oxygen Channel's "SheSpan" (catchy) and Dr. Monica Crowley. We have yet to see their glamorous equivalent among young male conservatives where the closest thing to a star is Tucker Carlson on "Crossfire," playing Jimmy Olsen to Robert Novak's cranky Perry White ("Great Goldwater's Ghost!"), who in turn is on guard against James Carville's Lex Luthor.

The media stardom of the CFs is a perfectly logical phenomenon, one that actually started before the trend of TV news outlets (like CNN and CNN Headline News) making the move to younger, "camera-friendly" anchors. The CFs' demeanor and presentation is carefully calculated to counter the traditional image of Republicans as uptight, cigar-chomping fat cats. And probably some of the resentment against these young women has come from liberals who wish that the left could be represented by their own spangly equivalents. (To anybody who doesn't think liberals could use some pizazz, I offer these four words: Sex God Warren Christopher.) Be careful what you wish for.

The views of the CFs emulsify like a perfect mayonnaise, but what they share apart from ideological consistency is a uniformity of attitude. I don't know the social background of Coulter, Ingraham, Conway or Pinto, but I've encountered their type before. They are the essence of the white, privileged kids at the small New England college I attended during the conservative heyday of the early Reagan years. What characterized those kids and what characterizes the CFs is that they seem unaware that not everyone shares their privileged existence, or seem to believe that anyone who doesn't has only themselves to blame. It's a small world, after all, and the CFs are absolutely secure about their place in it and the rightness of their views.

Next Page: Nobody does sorority-girl smug like Coulter

• View blog reactions