Marq in the comments below had this to say about Ann’s latest effort to squeeze yet another
“Oh No She DI-uhn’t” from an increasingly blasé constituency:
For someone who exists on a diet of outrage provoked in others,
she’s reached that unfortunate point of rapidly diminishing returns. L’il Awrful Annie will have to reach deeper and deeper into her bucket of muck, searching for some horridly vile term with which to insult people…After all, pointing and yelling, “Faggot!” isn’t all that dangerous. Gays are still a relatively safe minority to mock. A handful of newspapers will end up dropping her “column,” because *this* of all things will finally clue them in to the fact that mAnn’s a hatemonger (!). So, maybe
she’ll progress to calling Governor Richardson a “spic,” or barak Obama the “n”-word. One can only hope.
Well, that’s how Ann keeps her wraith-like, cocktail dress-friendly figure, since the Outrage Diet is low in saturated fat (she’s both The Scarecrow and Mrs. King!). And Marq is exactly right; because “faggot” is still a relatively safe slur in much of the country (and almost a form of punctuation in the average junior high school), Ann’s use of the term will not only slip past without consequences, it will ensure that of the many tedious and tendentious speeches issued at the Conservative Political Action Conference, hers are the only words that will be remembered.
But Marq is also right that Ann may find the Law of Diminishing Returns a bit tougher to flout than, say, the statutes governing voting and registration in Palm Beach County, Florida. She can get away with calling Al Gore “a total fag,” as she did, per Media Matters, on the July 27 edition of Hardball. But raising the rhetorical ante any further will require a bit more finesse than she’s displayed thus far. I don’t believe she can get away with simply calling Barack Obama the N-word, even though that loathsome animadversion also remains in far wider circulation than we care to admit. Instead, I predict she’ll use her patented technique of deploying a racial slur, then accusing the offended parties of racism, and immediately scrambling for the high ground at Golgotha:
I do want to point out one thing that has been driving me crazy with the media, how they keep describing Mitt Romney’s position as being “pro-gays, and that’s going to upset right-wingers.” Well, you know, screw you, I’m not anti-gay. We’re against gay marriage. I don’t want gays to be discriminated against. I mean, I think we have, in addition to blacks, I don’t know why all gays aren’t Republicans.
It’s almost like these nancy-boys can’t figure out who their real friends are. Stupid knob-gobblers.
I think we have the pro-gay position, which is anti-crime and for tax cuts. Gays make a lot of money, and they’re victims of crime.
…primarily commited by the kind of people who vote Republican. But thanks to our tax cuts, they’ll still have plenty of money left over to pay for reconstructive surgery and physical therapy after we eliminate same-sex domestic partner benefits like health insurance
And blacks, as Ann never tires of declaiming, should join the GOP to escape the condescending racism of the Democratic Party. So when the exigencies of the marketplace finally require her to kick it up a notch, she’ll find some way to eat her cake and call someone a nigger, too. “Can you imagine Barack Obama as Vice President to Hillary? They’d treat him like he was the ‘house nigger’ on a plantation, dress him up in a butler suit, call him ‘Uncle Barack,’ and let him answer the front door.”
There would follow the usual expressions of outrage from the left blogosphere, defensive protestations that it was just “a joke!” from Ann and her supporters, and more TV appearances the next time she has a book to flack. But even though there are still a few sensitivities she has yet to trample, I can’t help feeling that Ann has already hit the wall, in much the same way Bill O’Reilly and even Rush Limbaugh has. They’re not growing concerns, they’re providers of a niche fetish. And within their niche, they all do quite well. As do the makers of German schwanger and schiesse videos, but neither one of those seems poised to break out and become a nationwide craze like the hula-hoop.
There was a time when Limbaugh was inescapable; if he wasn’t on the radio in every city he was on TV, either his own syndicated show, or some ostensibly respectable network program. But now, as with Ann, I only remember he exists when he says something unusually stupid. They all have a dedicated fanbase, but that audience is becoming more calcified and impermeable, encouraging their act to become ever more incestuous and Escheresque, until the whole experience for a potential newcomer is pretty much like trying to watch Lost by starting in the middle of the third season.
Or maybe we’re being too cynical. Perhaps there’s some deep-seated trauma in Ann’s past that compels her to act out like the Chris Cooper character in American Beauty. And indeed, a cursory investigation does indicate a common theme to Ann’s cries of “faggot!” In short, her belief that dead children turn you gay.
Edwards has talked about his son’s death in a 1996 car accident on “Good Morning America,” in dozens of profiles and in his new book. (“It was and is the most important fact of my life.”) His 1998 Senate campaign ads featured film footage of Edwards at a learning lab he founded in honor of his son, titled “The Wade Edwards Learning Lab.” He wears his son’s Outward Bound pin on his suit lapel. He was going to wear it on his sleeve, until someone suggested that might be a little too “on the nose.”
If you want points for not using your son’s death politically, don’t you have to take down all those “Ask me about my son’s death in a horrific car accident” bumper stickers? Edwards is like a politician who keeps announcing that he will not use his opponent’s criminal record for partisan political advantage. I absolutely refuse to mention the name of my dearly beloved and recently departed son killed horribly in a car accident, which affected me deeply, to score cheap political points.
Al Gore increased the stakes, becoming not only a faggot, because his son was injured in an accident, but “a total fag” when he added a dead sister to the mix:
Democrats can’t tell us their ideas until after the election. Instead, their version of a political campaign is to stage a “Queen for a Day” extravaganza — which has special resonance in the case of the Democrats.
Al Gore famously inaugurated the family tragedy routine at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, where his idea of an inspiring political speech was to recount the story of his son being hit by a car. At the 1996 convention, Gore told a tear-jerker about his sister’s long, painful death from lung cancer. It got to the point that Gore’s family members had to fear any more runs for higher office.
I haven’t heard of Ann calling Howard Dean a big tinsel-tied sachet of gaywad, but he too had the effrontery to be touched by a death in the family:
Howard Dean talks about his brother Charlie’s murder at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. Bizarrely, after working on the failed George McGovern campaign, Charlie Dean went to Indochina in 1974 to witness the ravages of the war he had opposed. Not long after he arrived, the apparently ungrateful communists captured and killed him. Hey fellas! I’m on your s– CLUNK!
Ann hasn’t yet clarified her position on whether having a dead child turns a woman into a lesbian, but you’ll recall that she’s had it up to here with weeping widows:
“I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much,” Coulter writes in her new book.
“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis,” Coulter writes.
“And by the way, how do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they’d better hurry up and appear in Playboy. . .
Hm. Maybe I should fill out that subscription card. Because while Time, NBC, CNN, and the rest of the MSM routinely fails me, Playboy is the one venue where I can be reasonably sure that I will never see Ann. Unless they do a Girls of Snake Mountain issue…