Ms. Right. great read...FOR EVERYBODY!

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Interesting insight into a PERSON...not just a public figure! :nod: I suggest everyone put aside their bias...and read!


Ms. Right

By John Cloud, TIME

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050421115509990001&ncid=NWS00010000000001


Ann Coulter and I were well into a bottle of white Bordeaux—and I believe she was chewing her fourth piece of Nicorette—when it happened. From what little I knew of her—mainly her propensity for declamations such as "liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole"—I thought it impossible for Coulter to blush. Many of her fans would later tell me it was her fearlessness they admired, her fully unburdened sense of outrage against liberalism, against anyone left of Joseph McCarthy (whom Coulter flattered in her best-selling book Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism).

But in person, Coulter is more likely to offer jokes than fury. For instance, you might ask her to name her historical antecedents in the conservative movement, and she'll burst forth, "I'm Attila the Hun," and then break into gales of laughter so forceful you smell the Nicorette. "Genghis Khan!" So finally, I asked that she be serious. I wanted to see the rancor that allegedly is her sole contribution to public discourse (that and being a "lying liar," in Al Franken's estimation, as well as a "telebimbo" [Salon] and a "skank," according to a blog kept by Vanity Fair's James Wolcott). Why, I asked, did she enjoy attacking others and being attacked?

She composed herself and offered a very Ann Coulter answer. "They're terrible people, liberals. They believe—this can really summarize it all—these are people who believe," she said, now raising her voice, "you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all. You don't want such people to like you!"

The couple at an adjacent table—which, this being Manhattan, was a handsbreadth away—visibly stiffened, and the man groaned. The woman looked at Coulter with white-hot hatred, and Coulter ... blushed.

"You're blushing," I marveled. As she continued to pinken and covered her mouth with a delicately thin hand, she giggled and protested, "I am not. I'm laughing. Maybe I'm a little drunk. There are a lot of things that would make me blush. Viciously attacking liberals would not."

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"No, you are."

"I am not! 'And she had had several glasses of wine,'" she told me to write.

O.K., she had, but whether she was truly embarrassed, what I saw of Coulter in that moment was a personality far more labile and human than the umbrageous harridan I had expected. After all, one of her most voluble critics, writer Eric Alterman (What Liberal Media?) told TIME, "The idea that she doesn't coarsen our culture and make it more difficult to speak complicated truths is nonsense."

But while Coulter can occasionally be coarse—she's not one of those conservatives who won't say "f___" two or three times over dinner—she doesn't seem particularly uncomplicated. When I spoke with her friend Miguel Estrada, an attorney and onetime White House nominee for a judgeship (Estrada asked President Bush to withdraw his name in 2003 after a Democratic filibuster targeted Estrada's conservatism), he said Coulter's appeal 15 years ago, when they met, was "the same as it is today. She was lively and funny and engaging and boisterous and outrageous and a little bit of a polemicist ...

Most of the time, people miss her humor and satire and take her way too literally."

I began to wonder, in a moistly liberal formulation, whether Ann Coulter might be ... misunderstood? All her right-wing capering aside ("We've got to attack France!"), Coulter was an Ivy League-educated legal writer before she was a TV pundit. She's an omnivorous reader (everything from her friend Matt Drudge's website to the works of French philosopher Jacques Ellul), and she isn't afraid to begin a column on Bush, as she did in January, "Maybe he is an idiot." (The column pointed out that the most direct way to make abortion illegal would be ... to make abortion illegal—not, as Bush had exhorted that week, "to change hearts.") Although Coulter is often compared to Rush Limbaugh, he is "first a broadcaster," as he described himself in one of his books. He said his show "is, after all else, still entertainment." Coulter, on the other hand, doesn't think of herself as an entertainer but as a public intellectual. Many would say she's more of a shrieking ideologue, but regardless, her paychecks come solely from writing and giving speeches. She earns nothing from TV.......

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......To be sure, Coulter is far from the most accomplished conservative presence in America today. Even post-OxyContin, Limbaugh has greater reach; Sean Hannity has his own TV show; old-guard guys like William Kristol and George Will have more power in Washington. Countless conservative scholars—Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Richard Posner—write with greater intellectual heft.

But no one on the right is so iconic, such a totem of this particular moment. Coulter epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airwaves, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible. No one, right or left, delivers the required apothegmatic commentary on the world with as much glee or effectiveness as Coulter. It is almost impossible to watch her and not be sluiced into rage or elation, depending on your views. As a congressional staff member 10 years ago, Coulter used to help write the nation's laws. Now she is far more powerful: she helps set the nation's tone.

Coulter's ubiquity on political talk shows is exceeded only by her inability to write a book that doesn't become a best seller. Her current effort is titled as churlishly as the three that preceded it: How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter. It recently ended a 16-week run on the New York Times best-seller list even though it's mostly a collection of previously published columns. Despite Coulter's indifference to the online world—she doesn't blog, and until recently she had little direct role in anncoulter.com—she has a staggering presence in cyberspace, where pro- and anti-Coulter forces wage unending battle. Her "official chat" site, which Coulter never visits, draws 1,000 posts a day. A recent documentary, Is It True What They Say About Ann?—co-directed by a friend of Coulter's, journalist Elinor Burkett—has played at film festivals and won some favorable notices.

But Coulter's influence on the culture is both more diaphanous and more significant than the calculations of book sales or Web postings suggest. She is the bogeyman of politics, the figure that liberals use when reaching for the ultimate insult, the way conservatives use Michael Moore. When the New York Times reviewed Michael Crichton's new novel recently, critic Bruce Barcott sneered that it "resembles one of those Ann Coulter 'Liberals Are Stupid' jobs." (After reading that, Coulter e-mailed me: "I AM THE GOLD STANDARD FOR LIBERAL BILE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!") Vanity Fair's Wolcott has called Coulter "the Paris Hilton of postmodern politics"; TIME's own Andrew Sullivan has called her a "huckster of ideological hate" on his blog.

Some conservatives—many of them Coulter's rivals for screen time, as she points out—have also drawn their knives. "Ann's stuff isn't very serious," says a pundit who didn't want to begin a public spat with Coulter. "We have this argument every now and then among our side: whether she is a net minus or net plus to conservatism. I have come to the conclusion that she's a minus." Even fans speak of Coulter in ways that suggest some distance: "I think Ann is a brilliant girl, and she's got the quickest mouth in the East," says the Rev. Jerry Falwell. "Now, I probably won't use her on Sunday morning in my church because she is capable of getting a little aggressive."

That's right: Ann Coulter burns too fiercely for both the temples of the secular left—the New York Times—and of the religious right—Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. But it's suspicious when conventional wisdom ossifies around someone so thoroughly. Why does she make so many people itch?

It's not just that she can be callous and mouthy; as all those he has called "Feminazis" know, Limbaugh has operated in that genre for years. Coulter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine's co-founder, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the '40s with her take-no-prisoners opposition to the New Deal and communism. In her first House floor speech as a Congresswoman representing the Connecticut district where Coulter later grew up, Luce called Vice President Henry Wallace's liberal approach to postwar foreign policy "globaloney," a proto-Coulterism that shocked many in Washington. Today Coulter often speaks under the auspices of a conservative group called the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute that was founded by Luce admirers in 1993.

Vanity Fair once said of Luce, who edited that magazine in the '30s, "She combines a fragile blondness with a will of steel." Similarly, one is astounded to hear from Coulter something like, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity," as she famously wrote of Muslims who were cheering after the Sept. 11 attacks, not least because Coulter might be shrink-wrapped in a black-leather mini as she says it. The combination of hard-charging righteousness and willowy, sex-kitten pulchritude is vertiginous and—for her many young male fans—intoxicating.

In February Coulter went to Washington to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the premier annual event for movement conservatives. When she arrived, the Atrium Hall at the Ronald Reagan Building was hot with anticipation. Activists occupied every inch of available floor space; hundreds stood in the back.

Wearing an ankle-length fur and a wide-eyed expression, Coulter had to be pushed through the crowd by a team of handlers. When she swept past the spot I was wedged into, the young men near me went aflutter.

"Ann Coulter should be staying on our floor!" one said lasciviously.

During a Q&A at a private reception later, another guy raised his hand and asked her out.

Coulter's speech was part right-wing stand-up routine—she called Senator Edward Kennedy "the human dirigible"—and part bloodcurdling agitprop. "Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism," she concluded. "I say, let's give them some. They've had intellectual terror on the campus for years ... It's time for a new McCarthyism."

Curtain.

Liberals who believe that Bush's is the show-no-weakness, make-no-apology presidency see Coulter as its Ur-spokeswoman. That is a facile insult both to Bush, who constantly professes a desire to unite the country, and to Coulter, who wouldn't mind if much of the country moved to Canada. But unlike Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News star, Coulter has never wobbled on Bush's signature deed, the war in Iraq.

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It's not just her rhetoric that draws comment -- her look does, too. See it evolve over the years.</center>

"The invasion of Iraq has gone fabulously well," she wrote last June, a few weeks after O'Reilly suggested the U.S. might need to pull out.

Her only argument with Bush is that he isn't more like President Reagan. "'Compassionate conservative,'" she says, "carries the same negative implications as 'articulate black.'" Coulter believes not just in less government but in almost no government. She would eliminate the departments of Education, Commerce, Agriculture and several others. She opposes abortion rights and has written that court-ordered school-desegregation plans have led to "illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell."

Coulter conveys an aura of privilege, wealth and—above all—certainty. "Would that we all could have the political and moral clarity that seems to come so effortlessly from Ann Coulter," wrote an admiring Lisa De Pasquale of the Luce Policy Institute last year in the conservative publication Human Events. But can it be effortless? One theory about Coulter is that she is less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, acting out a character who utters what the rest of us won't. ("That led him to masturbate into [White House] sinks?" she asked in 1999, when President Clinton's rough childhood was mentioned on Rivera Live.)

"This isn't a game," Coulter said at CPAC. "The fate of our troops isn't a game. The fate of the victims on 9/11 is not a game." But she told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, "most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that."

So which is it? Is she a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Ann Coulter that most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist?

Not long ago, I called Coulter's mother and read her one of her daughter's more rakish lines. Last year, after the New York Times published a Reagan obituary that mentioned the Iran-contra scandal 15 times, Coulter wrote that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is "a little weenie who can't read because he has 'dyslexia.'" "Oh, dear," said Nell Martin Coulter, 76, with a laugh.

"Now, is that the way little girls are brought up to speak in Connecticut?" I asked. Ann Coulter grew up in New Canaan, Conn.; her mother was raised in Paducah, Ky. "I know it's not the way little girls are brought up to talk in Kentucky."

"I think you've got a point there," Nell Coulter said, chuckling, "but that is the way she expresses herself, and she does have obviously strong likes and dislikes. That's just the way she puts things ... I think a person who has strong convictions is more convincing to someone who is wavering."

In other words, it's not an act. But as Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, "I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged ... Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I'd still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs." Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, "I'll ask him, 'But is it funny?' And if he says it's funny, I'll cut an actual fact [instead].".........

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.........People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh. Consider an exchange on Fox News in June 2001 with Peter Fenn, a Democratic strategist. At the time, Barbra Streisand had suggested that Californians practice more conservation, to which Coulter responded:

COULTER: God gave us the earth.
FENN: Oh, O.K.

COULTER: We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas.

FENN: Oh, this is a great idea.

COULTER: God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'

FENN: Oh, terrific. We're Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth's resources--

COULTER: Yes. Yes!

FENN: —as fast as we possibly can.

COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians.

Coulter and Fenn were both laughing. But her rape-the-planet bit would later be wrenched from context and repeatedly quoted as Coulter nuttiness. "What p_____ me off," Coulter says, "is when they don't get the punch line."

But it's possible to get the punch line and not laugh. Last year Coulter wrote a column in which she joked, "Like many of you, I carefully reviewed the lawsuits [alleging bias] against the airlines in order to determine which airlines had engaged in the most egregious discrimination, so I could fly only those airlines ...

Imagine the great slogans the airlines could use: "'Now Frisking All Arabs—Twice!' ...

"'You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin—Not So Fast, Mohammed!'" But that's not (or not only) a joke. Coulter actually favors discrimination based on skin color in airports. She argues that airports should establish a separate line for men and boys whose complexion suggests they could be from the Middle East; they would be screened more thoroughly than other passengers.

"Basically," she says breezily, "aged 15 to 45—12 to 45, say.

Swarthy men ... We'd be searching, you know, Italians, Spanish, Jews, males—but you're excluding the women. You're excluding the old people. You're excluding American blacks."

"Didn't we throw out discrimination based on skin color a long time ago?" I ask.

"This is just safety, and I wouldn't do it for drug dealing," she says. "I wouldn't do it for speeding. I wouldn't do it for a normal crime. It's a serious issue, but it is insane what is going on in the airports right now." Coulter's friends had told me that nothing angers her quite like standing in an airport security line. (She travels frequently to give speeches at $25,000 a pop—up to $50,000 if she must cross the Mississippi River.) Conveniently, her plan would let her glide through a metal detector the pre-9/11 way (shoes on, dignity intact).

Coulter says profiling makes sense when Muslims have committed virtually all the terrorist attacks against Americans for the past 25 years—she begins a terrorism timeline in her latest book with Iranian militants taking Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979. She says of Timothy McVeigh's bombing in Oklahoma City, Okla., "One does not a pattern make." And why wouldn't al-Qaeda recruit white or black Americans? "It's harder than it sounds. You're increasing the transaction costs."

It would be easier to accept Coulter's reasoning if a shadow of bigotry didn't attach to many of her statements about Arabs and Muslims. At the reception after her CPAC speech, she mocked some of the more ornate claims of torture from suspected terrorists detained by the U.S.: "It's completely insane stuff. 'The government flew me to Las Vegas and made me have sex with a horse,'" she said to laughter. But then she added with a grin, "Liberals are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie." How did such a flagrantly impolitic person become such a force in our politics?

Ann Hart Coulter was born in New York City on dec. 8, 1961. (That's according to her Connecticut voter registration. Coulter says she won't confirm the date "for privacy reasons"—she's had several stalkers. "And I'm a girl," she adds.) Her father John, 77, was a G.I. Bill student who became an FBI agent and then a corporate lawyer; Nell Martin, who raised Ann and two boys, is the daughter of a Paducah printmaker. Coulter learned to argue around a dinner table populated by a Catholic father, a Presbyterian mother and two brothers—one of them "a Presbyterian and an anti-Papist," Coulter says with a titter, and the other a Catholic. "And I'm like Hillary with the Mets and the Yankees—I root for both."

The Coulter family argy-bargy was friendly but intense, and formative. "For a younger girl with two older brothers, you've got to learn to mix it up, stand up for yourself," says Merrill Kinstler, 41, a stock trader and close friend. "Older brothers are not going to cut you any slack. If you say something stupid, you figure, next time, I'm going to be better at it." Kinstler, an ex-Democrat who speaks with Coulter virtually every day, describes her as "a cat who thinks she's a dog. She's very much a woman, but she likes ... mixing it up in what I think is a very guy way. Let's put it this way. I have never heard from her, and I know I never will, the following two words: I'm offended."

Indeed, Coulter can be almost as acerbic with herself and her family as she is with liberals. "Because I'm a cranky conservative," Coulter has written, "the world simply reinforces my prejudices on a daily basis." Even her dear mother isn't exempt from her raillery. Last year Nell Coulter learned she had ovarian cancer. She underwent surgery last fall and has had regular chemotherapy this year. She says Ann has taken her to every appointment and remembered every detail for the doctors. But it's not Ann's nature to sound weepy; among her greatest fears—boredom, irrelevance, getting caught on a plane without a nicotine patch—is sentimentalism. For weeks, as we talked for this story, she wouldn't go on the record about her mom's cancer—she half-jokingly said any humanizing detail might slow attacks from liberals, which help sell books. When she finally relented and said I could call her mother, she matter-of-factly told me to do so before the following Wednesday. "She gets the chemo on Wednesday, and once the chemo sets in"—Coulter began to laugh--"for the first week, she gets a little daft from the chemo ... Whenever I call them [her parents], it rings. It rings. It rings. The phone picks up. 'Wait a minute. I have to take my hearing aid out.' 'Find the phone that works.' It's pandemonium calling old people!" Coulter often speaks with great affection for her parents, and she said this with a light, you-know-how-it-is tone. But there's no mistaking: this is a person who will say anything, even when the camera is off.

Coulter got on the honor roll as a kid, fenced and played lacrosse, went to Ramones and Grateful Dead shows (dozens of Dead shows—drug free, she claims). She grew up in a Reagan household and began to explore conservatism on her own at Cornell. There she discovered both liberals, who made her more conservative, and feckless conservatives in the "cigar-smoking, martini-drinking, oh-I-get-drunk-all-the-time libertarian mode," who made her more socially conservative. But there was a twist. In 1984, in an article for the conservative Cornell Review, Coulter attacked its editor for writing, "Statistics are like bikinis: what they show is important, but what they conceal is vital." "The message is clear," Coulter responded in her article.

"The vital parts are the breasts and the vagina, so go get her." I was surprised to find that the piece made a standard feminist argument against pornography (an "atrocity" in which women are "exploited" and "dehumanized"). Its opening lines are: "Conservatives have a difficult time with women. For that matter, all men do."

Coulter—who likes to shock reporters by wondering aloud whether America might be better off if women lost the right to vote—howls at the idea that she was a college feminist. But even today, she can write about gender issues with particular sensitivity. In 2002, after Halle Berry won her Oscar, Coulter said in her column, "Berry's unseemly enthusiasm for displaying 'these babies,' as she genteelly refers to her breasts, reduces the number of roles for any women who lack Berry's beauty-queen features."

And of course the biggest case Coulter ever helped handle as an attorney (she got her law degree from the University of Michigan in 1988) was a sexual-harassment claim of an unsophisticated woman against her powerful former boss. Coulter was one of a handful of informal legal advisers quietly helping Paula Jones, who had alleged in a 1994 lawsuit that she suffered distress and retaliation at her state job after refusing Arkansas Governor Clinton's request for oral sex in 1991. Coulter interviewed Jones and helped write her legal briefs.

Meanwhile, Coulter had emerged as a star in the 24-hour news culture that flowered in the mid-'90s. In 1995, giddy after Republicans took Congress for the first time in 40 years, she had moved from an anonymous corporate-law job in Manhattan to the Washington office of a freshman Republican Senator, Spencer Abraham. Flirty and quick-witted and fun—ex-conservative David Brock says in his book Blinded by the Right that "Ann seemed to live on nothing but chardonnay and cigarettes"—Coulter charmed both Democrats and Republicans. She already knew (or had dated) many young conservatives in college and law school, and just 10 weeks after she arrived in Washington, National Journal named her one of its conservatives under 40 who were "likely to have an impact."........

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.........In 1996, a new cable-news channel asked Coulter to audition for a spot as a commentator. She appeared on MSNBC its first day and quickly became one of its most loved and hated contributors. A few months later, she began writing for Human Events, among the oldest conservative publications in the country. (Coulter jokes in How to Talk to a Liberal that the journal "had to break a half-century 'no girls' rule to hire me.") In 1998, John Kennedy Jr. asked her to write a regular column for George.

Washington wasn't quite sure what to make of the spindle-shanked blond. "When I first met her," says a fellow conservative, "she was walking around with a black miniskirt and a mink stole, making out with Bob Guccione Jr. in the stairwell." (Coulter dated publisher Guccione, son of the porn mogul, for six months. She says the stairwell story "could be" true, although "I make out in public less often now that I'm publicly recognizable." As for living on chardonnay and cigarettes, Coulter says that's "definitely true.") Except for a brief stint in Missouri, where she clerked for a federal judge, Coulter has never lived in a so-called red state; in fact she obliterates the overcooked red-blue distinction. Although beloved in Bush country, Coulter lives in a New York City apartment, loves expensive Manhattan restaurants, chews Nicorette in church and hardly ever misses the drag queens' Halloween parade in Greenwich Village.

She likes to tell people, "I get up at noon and work in my underwear," but it's not actually true—Coulter is rarely up before 1.

MSNBC found Coulter "blunt, rude and just completely over the top," says Stephen Lewis, a former MSNBC producer involved in Coulter's hiring—and firing. The network dismissed her at least twice: first in February 1997, after she insulted the late Pamela Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to France, even as the network was covering her somber memorial service. Coulter said Harriman was one of those women who "used men to work their way up" and suggested "Sharon Stone or Madonna" as her replacement. Even so, the network missed Coulter's jousting and quickly rehired her.

Eight months later, Coulter's relationship with MSNBC ended permanently after she tangled with a disabled Vietnam veteran on the air. Robert Muller, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, asserted that "in 90% of the cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up [in Vietnam]—Ann, are you listening?—they were our own mines." (Muller was misquoting a 1969 Pentagon report that found that 90% of the components used in enemy mines came from U.S. duds and refuse.) Coulter, who found Muller's statement laughable, averted her eyes and responded sarcastically: "No wonder you guys lost." It became an infamous—and oft-misreported—Coulter moment. The Washington Post and others turned the line into a more personal attack: "People like you caused us to lose that war."

But her troubles with MSNBC only freed her to appear on CNN and Fox News Channel, whose producers were often calling. In 1998, Coulter was one of the first pundits to argue forcefully that Clinton should be impeached; she helped lead the charge by writing High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, which became a best seller. When reporters asked David Schippers, the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator, for a "road map" to the impeachment inquiry, he told them, "Read Ann Coulter's book."

After Coulter helped get the President impeached, one might have expected her to follow fellow anti-Clinton machinators—Linda Tripp and her friend Lucianne Goldberg come to mind—into obscurity. But Coulter's second book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, an assault on the media, spent eight weeks at the top of the Times best-seller list and rekindled the debate on whether reporters show a liberal bias. Slander was followed in 2003 by Treason, and by then Coulter had inspired an industry of debunkers, people who scour her every utterance for mistakes large and small. Entire websites were devoted to this purpose.

When I asked Coulter about her mistakes, she responded by e-mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error liberals have produced is that I was wrong when I said the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death. There have been novels and Broadway plays written about Ann Coulter's one mistake, which was pretty minor IMHO [in my humble opinion]—the Times article DID begin: 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.'" Actually, it didn't. The article began, "Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today ..." The article doesn't mention Wal-Mart, although a subsequent piece did.

Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words "Ann Coulter lies," you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors. One of the most popular alleged mistakes pinging around the Web is from her appearance on Canadian TV news in January, when Coulter asserted that "Canada sent troops to Vietnam." Interviewer Bob McKeown said she was wrong.

"Indochina?" Coulter tried. McKeown said no. Finally, Coulter said haltingly, "I'll get back to you." "Coulter never got back to us," McKeown triumphantly noted, "but for the record, like Iraq, Canada sent no troops to Vietnam." What he didn't mention was that Canada did send noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s and again to Vietnam in 1972.

To be sure, Coulter's historical efforts can be highly amateurish.

Her writings on the Civil War—she calls Confederate soldiers "a romantic army of legend"—could only be penned by a (Northern) dilettante. And although she has admiringly cited the work of cold war historian Ronald Radosh, he says she misinterpreted that period in Treason. "There were Soviet spies in postwar America," he says.

"But McCarthy was really a nutcase ... She's like the McCarthy-era journalists in a way. She's just repeating what they said, that the only patriotic Americans are on the right." Radosh, a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, also says Coulter has exaggerated his own troubles as a conservative in academia. "She called me a victim of the left and the academy. That's partially true, but I've had plenty of jobs in academia." Coulter responded that Radosh had complained to reporters in the past about being blacklisted. She also called him "a chickens___."

One consequence of Coulter's feline aggression is that she wins not only enemies (including one who hired a private investigator to look into her past) but creepily devoted fans. She has had discussions with the FBI about her stalkers, one of whom sent flowers every day for six months. Coulter is terrified her address will become public, and she sometimes hides behind a surgical mask when she flies. Ever since two men threw pies at her at the University of Arizona last year, she has traveled with a bodyguard, a bourbon-drinking ex-cop who says, quite believably, that he can kill with his bare hands.

Even so, Coulter told me her most persistent stalker "is the one who will kill me someday."

Meanwhile, she is a single woman in her 40s who has been engaged at least three times--"I don't know, something like that"—but never married. Instead she spends time with a large group of devoted friends, among them a restaurant critic, a children's-book author, an ex-supporter of Lyndon LaRouche's, a liberal P.R. agent, an actress and myriad bankers. She sees her friends for long dinners with lots of laughter and Ann Coulter stories. One friend has dubbed her "the blond-tressed fascist spellbinder."

Although it drives Coulter crazy, even friends sometimes say her public and private personas differ. Kent Brownridge, 63, general manager of Wenner Media and a longtime Democrat who used to work for George McGovern, says, "You couldn't find a nicer friend" than Coulter. But, he adds, "I think she has a professional point of view or a shtick or whatever ... Ann has perfected a thing she does on TV because she is outrageous and funny. That's her business, public commentator."

But I'm not sure the public and private Anns are so different. On TV or in person, you can trust that Coulter will speak from her heart.

The officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire. Which is not to say you don't want to shut her up occasionally. Not long ago, I went to church with Coulter—Redeemer Presbyterian, an evangelical congregation in Manhattan. The actor Ron Silver had also tagged along—Coulter brings lots of people to church, including, at one time, an ex who is Muslim. Pastor Timothy Keller spoke of the importance of allowing one's heart to be "melted by the sense of God's grace because of what he did on the cross for you." After he finished, I asked Coulter whether she had managed to convert her Muslim boyfriend. "No," she answered, her heart apparently not melted: "I was just happy he wasn't killing anyone." With that, she threw her head back and laughed. ******

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Uh..it's good she's trying to quit smoking. :D

awww...see it's in there! :laugh:

yea that is good! I tried the gum too...It didn't work!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Too bad they're not GOOD comments. What a hag.

And as for that tedious article, I'm sorry, all I read was "blah blah blah I'm a dirty tramp."

Well I would expect as much from someone unable to put aside their differences for 5 minutes to read an unbiased article.

I thought it was a nicely written insight about Ms. Coulter, if I do say so myself! :nod:

And it's quite funny because everytime you say such inane, off-the-wall comments...you...prove her points even more!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I think cold turkey works best, because after only three days, the nicotine is out of your system.

Uh....that article is pretty long. Just saying. I read really fast, but it's still really long. Not that I read it. I might, though, after south park. Maybe.

wow...only three days! I can never make it that long though :(

I just really enjoyed the article and wanted to post it! I thought about it before I did...."Now what will the other ledgies think about me posting this?"...I REALLY have no hidden motive for posting it, other than I thought it was a fair and honest look at a person who is often characterized by her public image...and I think that sometimes it's important to realize the person behind the image! Yes it's long...but it is also very good!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Actually, I did "put aside my differences" to read this obese article. It did not change my opinion about Ann one bit. So :shrug:

Ann makes her career on inane comments so I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to reciprocate.

Please tell me how my saying Ann is a "hag" proves any valid point she has ever made.

because she equates liberals to "name callers" and that is exactly what you did! Not only that, but it was THE FIRST thing you did.

"blah blah blah I'm a dirty tramp."

"what a hag"

I didn't post it to try and change any minds. I pretty much know where everyone on The Ledge stands politically and what most think of Ms. Coulter! I just simply thought it was a rather REFRESHING unbiased look at the PERSON and not the CELEBRITY.

[Moony]

because she equates liberals to "name callers" and that is exactly what you did! Not only that, but it was THE FIRST thing you did.

I didn't post it to try and change any minds. I pretty much know where everyone on The Ledge stands politically and what most think of Ms. Coulter! I just simply thought it was a rather REFRESHING unbiased look at the PERSON and not the CELEBRITY.
well actually, the dirty tramp thing is from a movie and I thought it was funny. The "hag" statement came out of the ridiculousness of those pictures and "Ann's evolving look." But it cracks me up that Ann has the never to call anyone a "name caller." I digress, I'm not trying to get into an argument.

Ann Coulter as a person really has no relevance. It's how she presents herself to the public that is important. :shrug:

[seeker007nmss]

I read the whole thing. She's an entertainer with her own act like most of those on TV. eh...... :shrug: If you enjoy the show and are entertained then watch, if not, turn the channel. She is no more thought provoking than any other viewpoint. To be honest, most of the news shows bore me. No real news and politics of the same old games that have been played since the time of the roman senate. We have new technological toys, but man will never change. Power, money, greed, graft, and every once in awhile a small blip of a light that eventually fades. All sides are right/wrong depending on your viewpoint. They both are the same when you get down to it. Just different flavors of the same old crap. JMO.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

well actually, the dirty tramp thing is from a movie and I thought it was funny. The "hag" statement came out of the ridiculousness of those pictures and "Ann's evolving look." But it cracks me up that Ann has the never to call anyone a "name caller." I digress, I'm not trying to get into an argument.

ahhh I see. Sorry I didn't understand the quote from the movie thing! HAHA.
Ann's response to the "How dare you call liberals 'name callers' when you do the same thing yourself" is usually "Well, there is a difference. The things conservatives say about liberals happen to be true."

Ann Coulter as a person really has no relevance. It's how she presents herself to the public that is important. :shrug:

I think her as a person does have relevance as to where exactly she is coming from when she does thrust herself in the public eye. I think it is often beneficial to look at a controversial figure from the viewpoint of a person in order to understand where the controversy stems from.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I read the whole thing. She's an entertainer with her own act like most of those on TV. eh...... :shrug: If you enjoy the show and are entertained then watch, if not, turn the channel. She is no more thought provoking than any other viewpoint. To be honest, most of the news shows bore me. No real news and politics of the same old games that have been played since the time of the roman senate. We have new technological toys, but man will never change. Power, money, greed, graft, and every once in awhile a small blip of a light that eventually fades. All sides are right/wrong depending on your viewpoint. They both are the same when you get down to it. Just different flavors of the same old crap. JMO.

Very respectable opinion, and also glad you read the entire piece. A lot of people just don't GET politics and are sort of turned off by the whole deal! I think that a lot of times people (mostly liberals) take some of the things she says, that are clearly meant to be jokes, to seriously..."Well, what did you mean by that Ms. Coulter...huh?" Her opinions and the message she is trying to convey are VERY SERIOUS, but she approaches things from a place of humor...which I think is brilliant!

For example...When people get the impression that she just HATES all liberals...I mean COME ON this is just silly. The woman has many liberal friends, including very famous ones like Bill Maher. She has also been seen chatting it up with celebrities such as Tim Robbins at various parties as well.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

That's the kind of pompous, condescending stuff that spews from her mouth that makes me loathe her so.

But when you can back these things up with facts (as she does) then it changes from being pompous...to just being...well...right!



Maybe, if the person is of any real importance; like a head of state, for example. Ann is just a political commentator who likes to stir **** up. :shrug:

Well obviously she is doing a good job of that, or she wouldn't attract as much attention as she does.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

C'mon now, let's not get into Ann and her "facts."

Yes lets not...because they could take up a HUGE thread. But just so you know everyone SINGLE last fact that she uses in her writings CAN be defended!


Yes, she does do a good job of it, especially with her racist, hateful, inflammatory marks. Surely something to be proud of.

But anyway, I'll just stop now.

Again, people will continue to take her comments out of context and they will completely lose their true meaning, all for the sake of making her look like an "evil communist". However I am realistic and realize that this isn't going to change, because when you take such a strong opinion and defend it with such zeal you are going to be drug through the mud...it's simply part of the deal! :nod:

[seeker007nmss]

Very respectable opinion, and also glad you read the entire piece. A lot of people just don't GET politics and are sort of turned off by the whole deal! I think that a lot of times people (mostly liberals) take some of the things she says, that are clearly meant to be jokes, to seriously..."Well, what did you mean by that Ms. Coulter...huh?" Her opinions and the message she is trying to convey are VERY SERIOUS, but she approaches things from a place of humor...which I think is brilliant!

Things never change:

Many would agree to this statement:

"Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers."


This is what Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC) said about children of his day over 2000 years ago.


Politics, religion, governments, people in general never change. Just watch the circus and the cycles as they go round and round. If you find an act you like, then enjoy it. None of them are ever going to stay or go away for long. New clothes, same act. The pendulums swing back and forth, left and right...... :nod:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Even so, Coulter told me her most persistent stalker "is the one who will kill me someday."

I found this part really creepy. I hope no one would ever be carried to that madness!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Dude...get a grip and some respectablility....the stuff she says...it doesn't matter if you take them out of context or not. If you agree with her, you better own it, because her positions are UNMISTAKEABLE.

Oh absolutely, I agree with you, I'm not trying to sugarcoat any of her positions! I know exactly where I stand and AM NOT ashamed of it!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

well...okay, but that means, in part, that you are racist,
eh...nope
hateful,

I hope not

and inflammatory.

Ok this one...maybe sometimes

And also that you do not care about facts and instead embrace illogical, fear based rhetoric.
:wavey:

A big no to this one as well...facts are helpful tools that are much needed in political debate! :nod:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I was also trying to point out the FACT that there are always those pulling out her quotes and things and trying desperatly to make it seem like she is either a loon, or just lying!

for example....

Eight months later, Coulter's relationship with MSNBC ended permanently after she tangled with a disabled Vietnam veteran on the air. Robert Muller, co-founder of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, asserted that "in 90% of the cases that U.S. soldiers got blown up [in Vietnam]—Ann, are you listening?—they were our own mines." (Muller was misquoting a 1969 Pentagon report that found that 90% of the components used in enemy mines came from U.S. duds and refuse.) Coulter, who found Muller's statement laughable, averted her eyes and responded sarcastically: "No wonder you guys lost." It became an infamous—and oft-misreported—Coulter moment. The Washington Post and others turned the line into a more personal attack: "People like you caused us to lose that war."

COULTER: God gave us the earth.
FENN: Oh, O.K.

COULTER: We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas.

FENN: Oh, this is a great idea.

COULTER: God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'

FENN: Oh, terrific. We're Americans, so we should consume as much of the earth's resources--

COULTER: Yes. Yes!

FENN: —as fast as we possibly can.

COULTER: As opposed to living like the Indians.

Coulter and Fenn were both laughing. But her rape-the-planet bit would later be wrenched from context and repeatedly quoted as Coulter nuttiness. "What p_____ me off," Coulter says, "is when they don't get the punch line."

Slander was followed in 2003 by Treason, and by then Coulter had inspired an industry of debunkers, people who scour her every utterance for mistakes large and small. Entire websites were devoted to this purpose.

When I asked Coulter about her mistakes, she responded by e-mail: "I think I can save you some time ... The one error liberals have produced is that I was wrong when I said the NYT didn't mention Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page the day after his death. There have been novels and Broadway plays written about Ann Coulter's one mistake, which was pretty minor IMHO [in my humble opinion]—the Times article DID begin: 'His death brought a silence to the Wal-Mart.'" Actually, it didn't. The article began, "Stock car racing's greatest current star and one of its most popular and celebrated figures, Dale Earnhardt, crashed and was killed today ..." The article doesn't mention Wal-Mart, although a subsequent piece did.

Coulter has a reputation for carelessness with facts, and if you Google the words "Ann Coulter lies," you will drown in results. But I didn't find many outright Coulter errors. One of the most popular alleged mistakes pinging around the Web is from her appearance on Canadian TV news in January, when Coulter asserted that "Canada sent troops to Vietnam." Interviewer Bob McKeown said she was wrong.

"Indochina?" Coulter tried. McKeown said no. Finally, Coulter said haltingly, "I'll get back to you." "Coulter never got back to us," McKeown triumphantly noted, "but for the record, like Iraq, Canada sent no troops to Vietnam." What he didn't mention was that Canada did send noncombat troops to Indochina in the 1950s and again to Vietnam in 1972.

[seeker007nmss]

Dude...get a grip and some respectablility....the stuff she says...it doesn't matter if you take them out of context or not. If you agree with her, you better own it, because her positions are UNMISTAKEABLE.


It really doesn't matter what any of them say. The cycles will just continue. Over and over and over. 50 years from now they will only be footnotes. No one remembers history after awhile. Take a sentance from the article itself:

Coulter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine's co-founder, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the '40s .


I guarantee 99.9% of the people never heard of her before. But in her time, she was probally very "Controvercial" . Just ask any person today who Idi Amin was, and what he did. I don't think you will find many, and he was nasty. So these people will fade away also....

And now - Cute critter pic:

<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/sea-otter-800x533-IMG_5365-3-30-05-.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

[Brwn_eyes0511]

It really doesn't matter what any of them say. The cycles will just continue. Over and over and over. 50 years from now they will only be footnotes. No one remembers history after awhile. Take a sentance from the article itself:

Coulter is more like Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of this magazine's co-founder, who rankled the Roosevelt establishment in the '40s .


I guarantee 99.9% of the people never heard of her before. But in her time, she was probally very "Controvercial" . Just ask any person today who Idi Amin was, and what he did. I don't think you will find many, and he was nasty. So these people will fade away also....

And now - Cute critter pic:

<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/sea-otter-800x533-IMG_5365-3-30-05-.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

I dobut it. You also have to take into count the impact that the ever-growing-media has on the world. Ann Coulter has broken into the best-selling-well-known ranks.

BTW...LOVE THE PIC! haha

[Brwn_eyes0511]

If you really believed what you just claimed about yourself, then you should not really agree with Miss Annbug. :shrug: That's my final opinion.

Ann isn't racist or hateful. So...

I really don't see it. :shrug:

[Mari]

I'm really not interested in that woman. I consider this continuous posting about her to be board-pollution... One thread, alright, but how many do we have now? Isn't there some Ann Coulter fan-board you can go to? Thanks!

[seeker007nmss]

I dobut it. You also have to take into count the impact that the ever-growing-media has on the world. Ann Coulter has broken into the best-selling-well-known ranks.

BTW...LOVE THE PIC! haha


The impact of the media has already led to a desensitizing of most people. Can you name any of the best-selling-well-known social commentary writers of the 1930's? or 40's? I can't. And most people can't either. (Actually I can name one, but I read too much as it is.... :D ) and go older. And go to a non-western tradition. Can many name a SINGLE aztec/Inca/Mayan king? A person who shaped and controlled a continent and the world as they knew it? Or who was the leader who consolidsated the chinese providences? That was a world changing event. And now virtually NOONE can name him. (I know- I type too fast and can't spell). Ann Coulter will fade just like the rest. Nothing against her, just the way it is. Unless you build a huge building, tomb, statue, or part of a religious movement...etc. You, as an individual, will NOT be remembered. What was the name of the person who invented the wheel? Or gunpowder? or was the first to use fire? They all changed the world, noone knows who they are. So more minor achievements don't have a chance. (Now, don't go and start collecting to build an Ann Coulter pyramid tomb!)

[seeker007nmss]

Uh..did you read what I said in response to what you said before?
I'm not quite as fatalistic as you, though. And that's because I remember history. I only wish everyone else did.


I am not fatalistic (yes i read your response). I am just saying that what seems very important now (people, events, ...etc) are (except in very few cases) are not going to make much difference in the whole scheme of things. I, like you, remember history. That's why I can see the continuation over and over of the same old stuff, just in a slightly different form.

[seeker007nmss]

Oh, sorry. It seems like it could make a difference, though. And that it might be very important in the scheme of things.
I mean, there has been many, many things that have made differences. :nod: Heck, just 55 years ago, You and I got the best bus seats. ;) Also, would we have known how to build aqueducts (sp) without the Romans? Would the native americans have known about corn if no one showed them? Without Coppernicus, would we still believe the earth was flat? etc.
Basically, although it's "all the same", there is still space and desire for change, so I somewhat keep up with what's going on, and participate to the best of my ability. :woohoo:

Yes, from a technology level we change...but not much from a political level. I should say, not at the same pace. We went from horse and buggy - to the moon in less then 70 years and yet it took the same amount of time to let people sit on a bus seat. Now that's Political progress. :wavey: I am not saying not to keep up with things, just don't let current personalities get you ruffled. (Actually Copernicus got the credit - but many knew thousands of years before him that the world was round and revolved around the sun).

[seeker007nmss]

Good point. Human qualities don't change as fast at all. :nod: Although with the advent of advanced ideas, and people fighting for those ideas, over time humans are forced to change...or they just do. That's what I look toward. :nod: You know, like, if everyone fights, maybe change will come faster!! :D


They only thing that will quickly change us to the better is a possible threat or competition from outside. Bring on the space aliens! (I wonder which seat on the bus they will get?) :D

[seeker007nmss]

err...you mean technologically, I assume. I still don't think that would change human nature.


You are probally right. New toys, same old Humans.

[SuzeQuze]

They only thing that will quickly change us to the better is a possible threat or competition from outside. Bring on the space aliens! (I wonder which seat on the bus they will get?) :D

Us meaning earthlings? Or us meaning Americans? I thought our consciousness was evolving until what all has happened politically here over the last 5 years. I really hope the neo cons have very little influence on the next generation of politicians.

[sara1998]

wow...only three days! I can never make it that long though :(
Get some balls and try it. I went the way of cold turkey 3 weeks ago, and I haven't relapsed once.
I just really enjoyed the article and wanted to post it! I thought about it before I did...."Now what will the other ledgies think about me posting this?"...I REALLY have no hidden motive for posting it, other than I thought it was a fair and honest look at a person who is often characterized by her public image...and I think that sometimes it's important to realize the person behind the image! Yes it's long...but it is also very good!
What you fail to realize is that no one here wants anything to do with Coultergiest. You do have hidden motives. It's to stir the pot. I agree with Mari. Go to a Coultergiest fansite and post your fair and honest article.

[Miss Vicky]

Thank you, Brwn Eyes, for making me lose my breakfast. A bit of nausea is always the best way to start any day. :thumbsup: :rolleyes:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Get some balls and try it. I went the way of cold turkey 3 weeks ago, and I haven't relapsed once.

Who knows maybe I will quit someday. I think you have to REALLY want to though and right now I don't! :shrug:

What you fail to realize is that no one here wants anything to do with Coultergiest. You do have hidden motives. It's to stir the pot. I agree with Mari. Go to a Coultergiest fansite and post your fair and honest article.

Well there was no hidden motive...however you are free to believe so! And yes I am a member of the official Ann Coulter forum! Speaking of...why don't you go and join, the liberals that are over there now are nothing but trolls interested in no real debate! :nod:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Thank you, Brwn Eyes, for making me lose my breakfast. A bit of nausea is always the best way to start any day. :thumbsup: :rolleyes:

your welcome! :D

[Miss Vicky]

nothing but trolls interested in no real debate! :nod:

(Bites tongue and, in a mumbled chant, says to herself "I will be nice, I won't say it, I will be nice, I won't say it.... " )

[sara1998]

Who knows maybe I will quit someday. I think you have to REALLY want to though and right now I don't! :shrug:
Sorry. That was hypocritical. You're right. You have to want to do it.but it does take balls.....

Well there was no hidden motive...however you are free to believe so! And yes I am a member of the official Ann Coulter forum! Speaking of...why don't you go and join, the liberals that are over there now are nothing but trolls interested in no real debate! :nod:
I should, just to be a rose amongst thorns.... and to do some trolling of my own..... :D

[SuzeQuze]

This is just a joke, not to be taken seriously. :)

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a29/SuzeQuze/anncoulter.jpg

[dissention]

She composed herself and offered a very Ann Coulter answer. "They're terrible people, liberals. They believe—this can really summarize it all—these are people who believe," she said, now raising her voice, "you can deliver a baby entirely except for the head, puncture the skull, suck the brains out and pronounce that a constitutional right has just been exercised. That really says it all. You don't want such people to like you!"


I was going to read that article, but then I stumbled upon this and couldn't bring myself to. What a disgusting bitch.

[dissention]

because she equates liberals to "name callers"


I suppose you haven't actually read her books.

She called Katie Couric an "airhead."
She called Susan Collins a "half-wit."
She called Gary Johnson "truly stupid."
She called Adlai Stevenson "a boob."
She called Jim Jeffords "D-U-M-M."
She called Frisky Christie Whitman a "birdbrain."

Shall I go on?

[dissention]

Yes lets not...because they could take up a HUGE thread. But just so you know everyone SINGLE last fact that she uses in her writings CAN be defended!


Ha. She's the Grand Dame of Lying and Misleading Readers with Endnotes (which she mistakenly refers to as "footnotes."). For example:

1. Take your copy of Slander off the shelf and dust it off.
2. Turn to page 134.
3. It reads "Even during the media's nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan's approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent."
4. Flip to the endnote that she refers you to.
5. Read the endnote. It cites an article from a Christian Science Monitor piece from 1/7/87.
6. Here's what that article that she cites actually reads:

Political fallout from the Iran-contra imbroglio continues to rain on President Reagan and the Republicans, but some analysts say the White House may now have seen the worst.

As the crisis passes the two-month mark, this is the damage report as seen from here:

*President Reagan took a 16-point spill in his public-approval ratings during the first weeks of the crisis. That is one of the greatest drops ever recorded by a President, a Gallup Organization official says.

Gage says poll results must be properly analyzed. For example, in last month's Gallup poll, Reagan's approval rating fell from 63 percent to 47 percent. But Reagan's personal popularity fell only from 80 percent to 75 percent. The first figure represents public reaction to the headlines, Gage says. The second reflects the public's actual feelings toward the President.

Even so, a Gallup official notes that the approval-rating drop was ''the biggest ever recorded for Reagan, and I think the biggest for any President in a two-month period.''

Even President Richard Nixon's approval rating fell at a slower rate during Watergate.

[dissention]

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/Polls/reagan_ratings_poll_040607.html
Reagan's Ratings

June 7, 2004— Ronald Reagan is misremembered as one of the most popular presidents, an assessment based more on his skills as a communicator and effectiveness as a campaigner than on public views of his accomplishments while in office.

His job approval ratings, in fact, were mid-tier. Across his tenure an average of 57 percent of Americans approved of Reagan's work as president, tied with Bill Clinton and within a point of Lyndon Johnson. Among postwar presidents, John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush all ran better averages, and George W. Bush has averaged better to date, despite his current slump.

Reagan has done far better in retrospect, as can happen as ex-presidents recede from the fray of day-to-day politics. Asked to think back to when he served, 66 percent in an ABC News/Washington Post poll in 2001 approved of his work, as did still more, 73 percent, in a 2002 Gallup poll. (Jimmy Carter's retrospective rating did the same thing, rising 20 points in the two decades after he left office.)

Reagan's personal ratings also have improved with time. During his presidency an average of 61 percent of Americans reported an overall favorable impression of him, about the same as the career favorable rating for his successor, the first President Bush (63 percent). By 2001, though, more — 69 percent — viewed Reagan favorably.

Reagan's ratings while in office rose and fell sharply with events. Approval peaked at 73 percent after he was wounded in a March 1981 assassination attempt, but tumbled to 42 percent in the early '80s recessions (unemployment hit a 40-year high in 1982). It recovered to 70 percent in early 1986 as the economy improved, but then dived by 26 points in nine months during the Iran-Contra scandal.

While Reagan presided over what was characterized as a go-go economy in the second half of the 1980s, consumer confidence from that period pales compared to its level in the late 1990s — one reason he was not insulated from Iran-Contra the way Clinton was protected (in terms of public opinion) from the Lewinsky scandal. Positive ratings of the economy never exceeded 50 percent (reached once) from December 1985 until the end of Reagan's term. In contrast, 71 percent rated the economy favorably, on average, during the Lewinsky days.

Like many presidents, Reagan inspired substantial polarization. The gender gap became evident in his presidency; he did seven or eight points better among men than among women in the 1980 and 1984 elections alike. And his ratings were sharply divided along political lines: At times ABC News polls found a 50-point gap between Republicans and Democrats in their ratings of Reagan's job performance, compared with a 30- or 35-point gap for his successor.

In an example of that polarization, in a poll in the late '90s, Reagan tied for first as "the best president in your lifetime," cited by 23 percent. But he also tied for second, behind Richard Nixon, as the worst president, chosen by 17 percent.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1192
The Myth of Reagan's "Enormous Popularity"
Extra! March/April 1989
By Michael Benhoff

Reagan left office bolstered by the oft-repeated media myth that he had been far and away the most popular of any president since World War II. But bearing in mind Mark Twain's observation that a lie gets half-way around the world before truth puts its boots on, the US public deserves to know what the polling data actually says.

According to Gallup polls taken throughout his presidency, Reagan was not one of the more popular presidents in the post-Roosevelt pack. At various points during his presidency he rated lower than the other presidents during comparable periods of their terms in office. For instance, during the first two years of Reagan's presidency, the public was giving President Reagan the lowest level of approval of all modern elected presidents. Reagan's average first year approval rating was 58%-- lower than Dwight Eisenhower's 69%, Jack Kennedy's 75%, Richard Nixon's 61% and Jimmy Carter's 62%.

The post-Roosevelt presidents who assumed office through circumstances other than elections scored higher approval ratings during their first months in office than Reagan. In October 1945, six months after FDR died, President Harry Truman received an 82% approval rating, down from 87% the previous June. In December 1963, shortly after JFK's assassination, Lyndon Johnson got a 79% public approval rating, and it stayed in the mid-to-low seventies until December 1964, when he scored 69%. Only Gerald Ford, who received a 71% approval rating in August 1974, declined below Reagan's first-year level.

Nor did the US public give Reagan higher marks in his second year than other post-World War II presidents. Reagan's approval rating at the end of his second year in office was 41%, with an average for that year of 44%. Compare these statistics to Eisenhower, who notched a 69% approval rating at the end of his second year and a 65% year's average; Kennedy's were 76% and 72% respectively; Nixon's 52% and 57%; and Carter's at 51% and 47%.

President Reagan's humdrum approval ratings continued throughout his first and second terms. Averaging 50% for his first term, Reagan fared slightly better than Ford at 47% and Carter at 47%, but with Gallup's 3% margin of error even these differences are not statistically significant. On the other band, Reagan's first term average was much lower than those of Presidents Kennedy (1961-63) who averaged a 70% approval rating, Eisenhower with a 69% average, and Nixon at 56%.

In May of the second year of his second term (1986), Reagan's 68% approval rating surpassed the mid-sixth year figures for two-term presidents. But after the Iran-Contra scnadal broke in the fall of 1986, Reagan's approval raing plummeted to 46%, leaving him wiht an unimpressive average for that year.

Reagan finished strong with a December 1988 Gallup poll recording a 63% approval rating. But given the 3% margin of error, this statistic is not appreciably different than the final ratings of Eisenhower (59%) or Kennedy (58%). Polls showed FDR with a 66% favorable tally at the time of his death.

Reagan's 52% average approval rating for his entire presidency was topped by Kennedy's 70% average, Eisenhower's 66%, Roosevelt's 68%, and even by Johnson (54%), who eschewed running for reelection because of the unpopularity of his Vietnam policy. In short, about half-- and sometimes more than half-- of the US public did not approve of Reagan's presidential performance. His approval index was not much better than the lowest modern presidential averages: Truman's and Ford's, each at 46%; Carter's at 47%; and 48% for Nixon.

Even the notion that the American public likes Ronald Reagan the man (as opposed to some of his policies) has been grossly exaggerated. Overall, his "likeability" percentages have ranged in the low-to-mid seventies, reaching a high of 81% in November 1985, and a low of 50% in August 1983. No other modern president's likeability indexes have generally fluctuated in the mid-to-upper seventies for all of Reagan's modern predecessors.

For example, 84% of Americans liked Ike in February 1956. In August 1964, 89% of Americans liked Johnson. Even in the summer months of Carter's final, unpopular year as president (just before his defeat by Reagan in the 1980 election), Carter scored a higher Gallup personal likeability index at 76% than Reagan's 73% during the comparable period of his Administration.

For anyone who cares to look at the actual polling data, the facts show that Reagan was definitely not the most popular post-war president, and during many comparable periods he was among the most unpopular.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I suppose you haven't actually read her books.

She called Katie Couric an "airhead."
She called Susan Collins a "half-wit."
She called Gary Johnson "truly stupid."
She called Adlai Stevenson "a boob."
She called Jim Jeffords "D-U-M-M."
She called Frisky Christie Whitman a "birdbrain."

Shall I go on?

No I have read her books MORE THAN ONCE! (You know you are a fan when you have BOTH the hardback and paperback editions of her books)

She actually has an overall point in her arguments though, she doesn't just call Katie Couric, for instance, an "airhead" just for the sake of calling her an "airhead."

[dissention]

She actually has an overall point in her arguments though, she doesn't just call Katie Couric, for instance, an "airhead" just for the sake of calling her an "airhead."

I don't call Coulter "stupid" just for the sake of calling her "stupid," I call her that because I have a point in my arguments that she truly is "stupid."

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I don't call Coulter "stupid" just for the sake of calling her "stupid," I call her that because I have a point in my arguments that she truly is "stupid."

Well you are a jewel among many Josh...

Here is a prime example of "name calling" that most liberals result to....

Here is the two most common things Ann gets in the mail from fans....

"You are ugly!"....and I QUOTE NOW! That's it! I mean come on they can do better than that! and here is the other...

"The only reason you get on T.V. is because of your good looks!"

So which is it? Is she ugly or good looking? Even her detractors can't even make up their minds.

[dissention]

Well you are a jewel among many Josh...

Of course I am. Only a truly "stupid" writer would incessantly refer to her endnotes as "footnotes" and refer her readers to articles that prove her wrong.

Here is a prime example of "name calling" that most liberals result to....

Here is the two most common things Ann gets in the mail from fans....

"You are ugly!"....and I QUOTE NOW! That's it! I mean come on they can do better than that! and here is the other...

"The only reason you get on T.V. is because of your good looks!"

So which is it? Is she ugly or good looking? Even her detractors can't even make up their minds.

She is ugly and has a mystifying tranny-esque vibe to her, but Al Franken is no hot stud, either. Looks have nothing to do with it. The reason she's on TV is because she says shocking things and, regardless if anyone agrees or disagrees, people tune in to watch her shoot her mouth off. She's a liar and a cheat, but she makes such a spectacle out of herself that it rakes in the viewers.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Ha. She's the Grand Dame of Lying and Misleading Readers with Endnotes (which she mistakenly refers to as "footnotes."). For example:

1. Take your copy of Slander off the shelf and dust it off.
2. Turn to page 134.
3. It reads "Even during the media's nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan's approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent."
4. Flip to the endnote that she refers you to.
5. Read the endnote. It cites an article from a Christian Science Monitor piece from 1/7/87.
6. Here's what that article that she cites actually reads:

Political fallout from the Iran-contra imbroglio continues to rain on President Reagan and the Republicans, but some analysts say the White House may now have seen the worst.

As the crisis passes the two-month mark, this is the damage report as seen from here:

*President Reagan took a 16-point spill in his public-approval ratings during the first weeks of the crisis. That is one of the greatest drops ever recorded by a President, a Gallup Organization official says.

Gage says poll results must be properly analyzed. For example, in last month's Gallup poll, Reagan's approval rating fell from 63 percent to 47 percent. But Reagan's personal popularity fell only from 80 percent to 75 percent. The first figure represents public reaction to the headlines, Gage says. The second reflects the public's actual feelings toward the President.

Even so, a Gallup official notes that the approval-rating drop was ''the biggest ever recorded for Reagan, and I think the biggest for any President in a two-month period.''

Even President Richard Nixon's approval rating fell at a slower rate during Watergate.

First Josh you have to get the page right if you would like me to respond to this...

and I'm the one who hasn't "read her books"...right! :)

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Josh, you know how much I love you man, but you have to stop listening to Mr. Franken, whose book is just full of those "lies" that he hates so much...

Originally Posted by AL Franken, "LIES. . ."
HOW TO LIE WITH FOOTNOTES #6: JUST MAKE **** UP.
From page 134 of Slander: "Even during the media's nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan's approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent." The endnote cites a Christian Science Monitor article from January7, 1987. The article reports that "in last month's Gallup poll, Reagan's approval rating fell from 63 to 47 percent." And remember, this is from people who are not only Christian, but also scientists.

Again, this seems to be a slam dunk for Al. UNLESS, of course, you happen to own a copy of the book Slander, and cannot believe you were duped that bad, so you check it.

Here's what the endnote actually says:

Originally Posted by Ann Coulter, "Slander", pg 229, endnote #58
John Dillon, "Iran-Contra Crisis May Have Peaked", Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 1987. (Gage says poll results must be properly analyzed. For example, in last months Galllup poll, Reagan's approval rating fell from 63 percent to 47 percent. But Reagans personal popularity fell only from 80 percent to 75 percent. 'The first figure represents public reaction to the headlines,' Gage says. 'The second reflects the public's actual feelings toward the President.'")

And just to be sure that people do not take this entirely out of context, here is the passage that referred to this endnote:

Originally Posted by Ann Coulter, "Slander", pg. 169
The irrevocable fact that the American people adored Reagan posed a problem for liberals. They had very clearly explained that Reagan was dumb, mean-spirited, frightening, and so on. But, still, Americans loved him. Even during the media's nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan's approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent.*

As I said, the way Mr. Franken lies about lying in endnotes is to quote stuff out of context, and omit the pertinent portion of the endnote from his commentary. All in the interest of exposing the truth. Of course, it's kind of hard to do that when you lie by omission, huh?

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Of course I am. Only a truly "stupid" writer would incessantly refer to her endnotes as "footnotes" and refer her readers to articles that prove her wrong.

Let's see what Ms. Coulter herself has to say about this...

Yes, notes at the end of a book are technically "endnotes," not "footnotes." Franken will have to take his case up with the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post and the rest of the universe -- all of which referred to my 780 end-notes as "FOOTNOTES." Also God, for inventing the concept of "colloquial speech."
I don't hear so much about this "lie" anymore.

Yet still there are some...who continue to bring it up.

[strandinthewind]

I don't call Coulter "stupid" just for the sake of calling her "stupid," I call her that because I have a point in my arguments that she truly is "stupid."


This is my fav. :laugh:

Coulter vs. Couric

Thursday, June 27, 2002

By Catherine Donaldson-Evans

NEW YORK — Political commentator and author Ann Coulter and Today show host Katie Couric spiced up morning television Wednesday with a verbal spat.

Couric took issue with the characterization of her as the liberal media's version of Hitler mistress Eva Braun and a Ronald Reagan basher in Coulter's new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.

"You used me as an example of liberal bias against Reagan," Couric said. "I'm just curious why you took it so out of context."

Coulter countered, "I don't think I did — you're taking it out of context."

To clarify, Coulter said that while discussing Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Today show anchors misrepresented the book's message, saying the author called the former president "an airhead" instead of "an apparent airhead," which was Morris' actual phrase.

"You make it sound as if I was saying that rather than Edmund Morris," Couric said. "I really conducted an extremely challenging interview with him because he did eviscerate Ronald Reagan in his book."

She said after the interview was over, Morris was unhappy but former first lady Nancy Reagan called to thank her for her line of questioning.

"I'm just wondering how that jibes with your contention that somehow I'm a Ronald Reagan basher," Couric said. Coulter denied having characterized her that way.

. . . .

www.foxnews.com

I mean Nancy Reagan, who is hardly liberal, likes Katie C. and considers and considered Katie C. fair in her work :eek: But, Ann the sow knows better :rolleyes:

She would not know a fact if it bit her bony a$$ :laugh:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

This is my fav. :laugh:

Coulter vs. Couric

Thursday, June 27, 2002

By Catherine Donaldson-Evans

NEW YORK — Political commentator and author Ann Coulter and Today show host Katie Couric spiced up morning television Wednesday with a verbal spat.

Couric took issue with the characterization of her as the liberal media's version of Hitler mistress Eva Braun and a Ronald Reagan basher in Coulter's new book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.

"You used me as an example of liberal bias against Reagan," Couric said. "I'm just curious why you took it so out of context."

Coulter countered, "I don't think I did — you're taking it out of context."

To clarify, Coulter said that while discussing Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, Today show anchors misrepresented the book's message, saying the author called the former president "an airhead" instead of "an apparent airhead," which was Morris' actual phrase.

"You make it sound as if I was saying that rather than Edmund Morris," Couric said. "I really conducted an extremely challenging interview with him because he did eviscerate Ronald Reagan in his book."

She said after the interview was over, Morris was unhappy but former first lady Nancy Reagan called to thank her for her line of questioning.

"I'm just wondering how that jibes with your contention that somehow I'm a Ronald Reagan basher," Couric said. Coulter denied having characterized her that way.

. . . .

www.foxnews.com

I mean Nancy Reagan, who is hardly liberal, likes Katie C. and considers and considered Katie C. fair in her work :eek: But, Ann the sow knows better :rolleyes:

She would not know a fact if it bit her bony a$$ :laugh:

Actually the media pretty much all agreed that Ann one that fight! So if you are resulting to the Couric vs. Coulter fight...I know you are running low on material!

AND THE REAL FUNNY PART IS...

That night Katie had a date with one of Ann's ex-boyfriends (and still good friends) and when they went out to dinner...Katie ordered a glass of wine right away and looked really stressed. When he asked her what was wrong she said "I had a really hard day today...Ann Coulter kicked my ass in an interview!"

I KID YOU NOT! This is from the man's own lips!

:lol: :lol: :lol:

[SuzeQuze]

Josh, you know how much I love you man, but you have to stop listening to Mr. Franken, whose book is just full of those "lies" that he hates so much...

Again, this seems to be a slam dunk for Al. UNLESS, of course, you happen to own a copy of the book Slander, and cannot believe you were duped that bad, so you check it.

Here's what the endnote actually says:

And just to be sure that people do not take this entirely out of context, here is the passage that referred to this endnote:

As I said, the way Mr. Franken lies about lying in endnotes is to quote stuff out of context, and omit the pertinent portion of the endnote from his commentary. All in the interest of exposing the truth. Of course, it's kind of hard to do that when you lie by omission, huh?

Okay, you just proved Josh's point. Al mentions that people aren't going to flip to the end notes. So when Ann says that "Even during the media's nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan's approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent." She is lying because his approval ratings actually "fell from 63 percent to 47 percent." It was his "personal popularity" that "fell only from 80 percent to 75 percent.", NOT HIS APPROVAL RATING. Do you see this distinction and why she isn't being honest?

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Okay, you just proved Josh's point. Al mentions that people aren't going to flip to the end notes. So when Ann says that "Even during the media's nightly flogging of Iran-Contra, Reagan's approval ratings fell only 5 percentage points, from 80 percent to 75 percent." She is lying because his approval ratings actually "fell from 63 percent to 47 percent." It was his "personal popularity" that "fell only from 80 percent to 75 percent.", NOT HIS APPROVAL RATING. Do you see this distinction and why she isn't being honest?

Yeah, I did note the words approval rating.

However, now I point out to you. . .note that she did NOT say "JOB approval rating", which is what the 63 to 47 percent numbers tracked.

Now note the full context of the paragraph in which she cited this datum. She was talking about how much the general public loved Reagan. Now note the rest of the endnote, i.e. - 'The second reflects the public's actual feelings toward the President.' Since she was talking about how much the public loved Reagan, not Reagan's policies and performance, she used the second set of numbers from that poll. Which showed a personal popularity decline of 5%, from 80 to 75.

The only thing Coulter was guilty of was assuming that people would understand the context of her premise here. Or, put more simply, she was guilty of poor wording, and therefore being (slightly) unclear. Not lying. And the fact that people "don't check endnotes" is her fault how?

Al is not a stupid man - I doubt that he could have missed this. So, since the full quote would have left people scratching their heads and wondering where she lied, he twisted the passage and the endnote by taking it out of context. And I submit that he did so KNOWINGLY; that's lying through commission (knowingly out of context) and omission (not giving the full quote). Wow, a twofer. In a book that purports to face down a bunch of liars with the truth. Yeahhhh. . .ummmmm. . .does anyone else see the irony here?

Now in his defense, I do find endnotes to be rather irritating. Footnotes ARE much easier to follow. But he really cannot complain because Ms. Coulter prefers endnotes, most likely because it is an easier format to work with.

[SuzeQuze]

Yeah, I did note the words approval rating.

However, now I point out to you. . .note that she did NOT say "JOB approval rating", which is what the 63 to 47 percent numbers tracked.

Now note the full context of the paragraph in which she cited this datum. She was talking about how much the general public loved Reagan. Now note the rest of the endnote, i.e. - 'The second reflects the public's actual feelings toward the President.' Since she was talking about how much the public loved Reagan, not Reagan's policies and performance, she used the second set of numbers from that poll. Which showed a personal popularity decline of 5%, from 80 to 75.

The only thing Coulter was guilty of was assuming that people would understand the context of her premise here. Or, put more simply, she was guilty of poor wording, and therefore being (slightly) unclear. Not lying. And the fact that people "don't check endnotes" is her fault how?

Al is not a stupid man - I doubt that he could have missed this. So, since the full quote would have left people scratching their heads and wondering where she lied, he twisted the passage and the endnote by taking it out of context. And I submit that he did so KNOWINGLY; that's lying through commission (knowingly out of context) and omission (not giving the full quote). Wow, a twofer. In a book that purports to face down a bunch of liars with the truth. Yeahhhh. . .ummmmm. . .does anyone else see the irony here?

Now in his defense, I do find endnotes to be rather irritating. Footnotes ARE much easier to follow. But he really cannot complain because Ms. Coulter prefers endnotes, most likely because it is an easier format to work with.

I think his contention is that Ann intentionally distorted the truth (lied using a strict definition) to make her point.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I think his contention is that Ann intentionally distorted the truth (lied using a strict definition) to make her point.

But I don't understand where this notion of her "lying" is coming from. She stated exactly what the article said and gave note to EXACTLY what it meant! Again, like I said before, if she is going to be accused of anything then it could possibly be her wording, but that does not constitute a lie.

If you are going to accuse anyone of lying shouldn't it be Mr. Franken who deliberately left out pertinent information to make Ann look like a fool!

The Gallup poll routinely tracks BOTH job approval, and personal approval (aka: popularity). She used the numbers for personal approval/popularity, and then made the mistake of not being CLEAR enough about which numbers she was using, because she assumed that the context would make that clear enough. That's not lying, per se. The context of her paragraph made it abundantly clear which numbers from that poll she was citing. You don't talk about how much people love a guy, then cite his JOB approval numbers from a Gallup poll, you cite his PERSONAL approval numbers (from that SAME Gallup poll).

[SuzeQuze]

But I don't understand where this notion of her "lying" is coming from. She stated exactly what the article said and gave note to EXACTLY what it meant! Again, like I said before, if she is going to be accused of anything then it could possibly be her wording, but that does not constitute a lie.

If you are going to accuse anyone of lying shouldn't it be Mr. Franken who deliberately left out pertinent information to make Ann look like a fool!

The Gallup poll routinely tracks BOTH job approval, and personal approval (aka: popularity). She used the numbers for personal approval/popularity, and then made the mistake of not being CLEAR enough about which numbers she was using, because she assumed that the context would make that clear enough. That's not lying, per se. The context of her paragraph made it abundantly clear which numbers from that poll she was citing. You don't talk about how much people love a guy, then cite his JOB approval numbers from a Gallup poll, you cite his PERSONAL approval numbers (from that SAME Gallup poll).

Part of me can't believe that you don't see our point. But then the rational part of me does believe. Maybe when you meet some poor people and some homeless people your views will change a bit. Don't you still live at home? Your political views are likely to mature as you do. Although that may mean solidifying your conservative view. If so, then so be it.

I mean, Diss posted an article about why people "loving" Reagan was a myth. It was the actor they liked, the president was not well liked by everyone but liberals as Ann asserts. That "personal" number has nothing to do with politics if you can make that distinction.

[dissention]

Josh, you know how much I love you man, but you have to stop listening to Mr. Franken, whose book is just full of those "lies" that he hates so much...

Again, this seems to be a slam dunk for Al. UNLESS, of course, you happen to own a copy of the book Slander, and cannot believe you were duped that bad, so you check it.

Here's what the endnote actually says:

And just to be sure that people do not take this entirely out of context, here is the passage that referred to this endnote:

As I said, the way Mr. Franken lies about lying in endnotes is to quote stuff out of context, and omit the pertinent portion of the endnote from his commentary. All in the interest of exposing the truth. Of course, it's kind of hard to do that when you lie by omission, huh?

I'm looking at my hardcover copy and it's clearly page 134.

In any case, you fail to see the point, dear. She lies to her audience by misleading them. There is quite a marked difference between personality popularity poll numbers and job approval ratings. She writes in her book that his "approval ratings" never got lower than 75 percentage points during the Iran-Contra scandal; that is incorrect. She refers to approval ratings when she should be referring to his personality popularity numbers. Another misleading fact is that she never tells the reader that his personality popularity numbers were wildly all over the map during both of his terms and once dropped to 50%. She lies by misleading, it's as simple as that. If she were to say flat-out that the public's opinion of him as person was much better than how they actually felt about his administration and policies, her argument would lack punch and show her hero to be a likable man who was ineffectual as president. She couldn't possibly concede that, silly boy, and instead has to puff his presidency up as the greatest we've had and perpetuate the myth that he ended the cold war. Funny thing is that Clinton left office with higher job approval ratings than Reagan did.

[seeker007nmss]

Okay, we all know what this means......All this "discussion" means you get puppied!


<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/Dulcie20sweetface20small.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

[SuzeQuze]

Well, I am here to seal the deal. :D

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a29/SuzeQuze/F-Baby_Seal0302p1_xlg.jpg

[dissention]

This is just a joke, not to be taken seriously. :)

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a29/SuzeQuze/anncoulter.jpg

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

Ohhhhhhhhhh, Suze. Oh, Suze. It's a shame I'm not wearing a diaper, I have quite the mess to clean up now.

[estranged4life]

no thanks, I'll pass on the both of 'em...Rather listen to a piece of lint instead.

[seeker007nmss]

I couldn't have said it better!



<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/history_1996e_baby_seal.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

[estranged4life]

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a29/SuzeQuze/F-Baby_Seal0302p1_xlg.jpg

Shatner (Or is that Oprah) sure lost a lotta weight...

[seeker007nmss]

no thanks, I'll pass on the both of 'em...Rather listen to a piece of lint instead.


Did someone mention "Lint?"

<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/3dfluffl.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

[dissention]

Shatner (Or is that Oprah) sure lost a lotta weight...

I thought it was Scalia.

[estranged4life]

Did someone mention "Lint?"

<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/3dfluffl.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

looks like Al Gore really did have a brain afterall...Too bad his personality was that of a "doodie nugget".

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I'm looking at my hardcover copy and it's clearly page 134.

That you are correct about sorry. I took my paperback...it was closer than my hardcover! Sorry.

In any case, you fail to see the point, dear. She lies to her audience by misleading them. There is quite a marked difference between personality popularity poll numbers and job approval ratings. She writes in her book that his "approval ratings" never got lower than 75 percentage points during the Iran-Contra scandal; that is incorrect. She refers to approval ratings when she should be referring to his personality popularity numbers. Another misleading fact is that she never tells the reader that his personality popularity numbers were wildly all over the map during both of his terms and once dropped to 50%. She lies by misleading, it's as simple as that. If she were to say flat-out that the public's opinion of him as person was much better than how they actually felt about his administration and policies, her argument would lack punch and show her hero to be a likable man who was ineffectual as president. She couldn't possibly concede that, silly boy, and instead has to puff his presidency up as the greatest we've had and perpetuate the myth that he ended the cold war. Funny thing is that Clinton left office with higher job approval ratings than Reagan did.


I am NOT, going to let Mr. Franken get away with BLATENT lies and half-truths, especially given the TITLE of the book.

Don't you understand the only one who was lying in this whole thing was Mr. Franken for not stating THE FULL "endnote?" He lied in order to make Ann seem like a liar, but she clearly did not lie about this (or any of the other inane things he claims of her). She stated a fact and backed it up. I will say though that Mr. Franken is correct about people not checking endnotes...PEOPLE that read his books that is! People who read his books and buy into what he says are not interested in fact but only sensationalism, which is why they don't bother to check endnotes. Excuse Ann for assuming that her readers are smart enough to pick up on her obvious meaning. The context clearly shows that she was talking about his personal popularity not his job approval rating, as we said before.

[dissention]

That you are correct about sorry. I took my paperback...it was closer than my hardcover! Sorry.




I am NOT, going to let Mr. Franken get away with BLATENT lies and half-truths, especially given the TITLE of the book.

Don't you understand the only one who was lying in this whole thing was Mr. Franken for not stating THE FULL "endnote?" He lied in order to make Ann seem like a liar, but she clearly did not lie about this (or any of the other inane things he claims of her). She stated a fact and backed it up. I will say though that Mr. Franken is correct about people not checking endnotes...PEOPLE that read his books that is! People who read his books and buy into what he says are not interested in fact but only sensationalism, which is why they don't bother to check endnotes. Excuse Ann for assuming that her readers are smart enough to pick up on her obvious meaning. The context clearly shows that she was talking about his personal popularity not his job approval rating, as we said before.

Blah blah blah. And why, might I ask, did she refer to his personality popularity numbers as his approval ratings? Language is everything and she uses it to intentionally mislead.

And Ann doesn't have smart readers. That's like saying the Khmer Rouges had capitalists.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Blah blah blah. And why, might I ask, did she refer to his personality popularity numbers as his approval ratings? Language is everything and she uses it to intentionally mislead.

So Mr. Franken is innocent of that...when he completely left out an entire part of the "endnote?"

And Ann doesn't have smart readers. That's like saying the Khmer Rouges had capitalists.

Again, prove her point by implying that her readers are stupid?

Didn't you say that you own the book and have read it?

[dissention]

So Mr. Franken is innocent of that...when he completely left out an entire part of the "endnote?"

He is innocent of it. She referred to his approval ratings and she was incorrect.

Again, prove her point by implying that her readers are stupid?

They are stupid, as evidenced by the fact that most of them believe what she spews.

Didn't you say that you own the book and have read it?

I'm obviously the exception to the rule.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

He is innocent of it. She referred to his approval ratings and she was incorrect.

I see now you have a weakness when it comes to Mr. Franken! You are incapable of seeing the truth here. Ann makes it obvious what she was referring to. Too bad you just can't see it.


They are stupid, as evidenced by the fact that most of them believe what she spews.

Thanks for defining me and other conservatives.



I'm obviously the exception to the rule.

Ok...if that was a joke then it was funny! :thumbsup:

If not...then.... :rolleyes:

[strandinthewind]

Blah blah blah. And why, might I ask, did she refer to his personality popularity numbers as his approval ratings? Language is everything and she uses it to intentionally mislead.

And Ann doesn't have smart readers. That's like saying the Khmer Rouges had capitalists.


And - don't forget Katie C. called Ronald Reagan an [apparent] airhead :laugh: :rolleyes:

I wonder why Nancy R. likes Katie C. so much :rolleyes:

Also, (on edit) I forgot to mention Sen. Joe McCarthy was a true American hero who never had any hand in maliciously maligning innocent people for political gain :laugh:

Trust me - its all been "proven" in Ann the sow's books :rolleyes:

Ann the sow is a sham.

[Serrart]

I still don't get how she can have the Time cover story. No offense but is it frequent for a politics commentator?

Romy

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I still don't get how she can have the Time cover story. No offense but is it frequent for a politics commentator?

Romy

No actually it isn't something that happens that often.

[dissention]

And - don't forget Katie C. called Ronald Reagan an [apparent] airhead :laugh: :rolleyes:

I think that's my favorite lie from Coultergeist. It's such an absurd and pointless one that it's truly funny.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I think that's my favorite lie from Coultergeist. It's such an absurd and pointless one that it's truly funny.

Couric didn't call him an "airhead"? I could have sworn that she did, and not just once. But of course she was using someone else's quote (which she didn't fully quote, by the way)...so that makes it OK, right? :rolleyes:

[dissention]

Couric didn't call him an "airhead"? I could have sworn that she did, and not just once. But of course she was using someone else's quote (which she didn't fully quote, by the way)...so that makes it OK, right? :rolleyes:

No, Katie Couric never called Reagan an "airhead." The actual quote from the 9/27/99 Today transcript is:

Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999.

She attributed it to Edmund Morris, doll, the man who wrote the biography on Reagan. And Sean Hannity, that pillar of integrity, even said the same thing on that very date, 9/27/99 on his show:

Welcome back to Hannity & Colmes. I’m Sean Hannity. Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead. And it is upsetting a lot of the former president’s supporters.

She also claimed on page 134 of Slander that the New York Times called Bush an "airhead" in a piece that ran on 3/12/00, but that's another lie.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

No, Katie Couric never called Reagan an "airhead." The actual quote from the 9/27/99 Today transcript is:

Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999.

She attributed it to Edmund Morris, doll, the man who wrote the biography on Reagan. And Sean Hannity, that pillar of integrity, even said the same thing on that very date, 9/27/99 on his show:

Welcome back to Hannity & Colmes. I’m Sean Hannity. Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead. And it is upsetting a lot of the former president’s supporters.

She also claimed on page 134 of Slander that the New York Times called Bush an "airhead" in a piece that ran on 3/12/00, but that's another lie.

I was aware of her using the quote from Edmund Morris' book. Do you happen to notice the difference in approach as to the way it was used on the Today show and how it was used on Hannity & Colmes? "The Gipper was an airhead" were the opening remarks. Not to mention it was incorrectly quoted, leaving out the word "apparent" which can make a world of difference. As it did in the case of Mr. Morris' quote, which he brought to task whenever he appeared on the Today show saying that it was "brutal and grossly unfair. I did not call him an airhead." He explained that he had simply written that based on his first impression of meeting Reagan.

Also it is important to note that Hannity & Colmes did not consistently open their shows with the same inane assertion.

Coulter: So for the Today show to be opening three days in a row, Ronald Reagan was an airhead, I'm sorry, that's dishonest.

Couric: It was one day. And also, just for your information it, was one day.

Coulter: No, you said it one day. Matt Lauer said it another day.

Couric: No, it was just one day, and we'll get the transcripts for you

Let's go to NEXIS! Answer: Two days, three times (plus once on "Later Today"). Couric said it on Sept. 27, 1999. The next day, as charged, Lauer opened the show by talking about "the author's assertion that Reagan was a great president but an airhead." NBC's Jamie Gangel repeated the "airhead" charge without the "apparent" later that day in a Today interview with ex-President George H.W. Bush. The winner: Coulter on points. She was closer to the truth than Couric, who picked this particular fact fight and was wrong. ... The account in Coulter's book (which doesn't make the "three days" charge) appears to be completely accurate

[Brwn_eyes0511]

for all those interested in seeing part of the "cat fight" in question...

HERE IT IS! (rtsp://63.66.59.40/mrc/couric062602.rm )

[dissention]

"The Gipper was an airhead" were the opening remarks.

The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today

Not to mention it was incorrectly quoted, leaving out the word "apparent" which can make a world of difference.

Hannity never used the word "apparent."

Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead.

Let's go to NEXIS! Answer: Two days, three times (plus once on "Later Today"). Couric said it on Sept. 27, 1999. The next day, as charged, Lauer opened the show by talking about "the author's assertion that Reagan was a great president but an airhead." NBC's Jamie Gangel repeated the "airhead" charge without the "apparent" later that day in a Today interview with ex-President George H.W. Bush. The winner: Coulter on points. She was closer to the truth than Couric, who picked this particular fact fight and was wrong. ... The account in Coulter's book (which doesn't make the "three days" charge) appears to be completely accurate

You make such a fool out of yourself. :laugh:

Not once did anyone from the Today show call Reagan an "airhead," but you're too blind to see it.

[seeker007nmss]

for all those interested in seeing part of the "cat fight" in question...

HERE IT IS! (rtsp://63.66.59.40/mrc/couric062602.rm )


Did someone say "catfight?" :D


<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/catfight.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Did someone say "catfight?" :D


<img src="http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a88/Dreamtimezzz/catfight.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

The one taking the chunk out of the other's skin...HAS TO BE COULTER! :laugh: :thumbsup:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today

Exactly! But they opened WITH "The Gipper was an airhead..."



Hannity never used the word "apparent."

Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead.

But read how Hannity phrased his statement and how Couric did. You don't see bias there?

You make such a fool out of yourself. :laugh:

Not once did anyone from the Today show call Reagan an "airhead," but you're too blind to see it.

Why is that? Because I quoted facts and transcripts? I see. ;)

Morris didn't call Reagan an airhead but the Today show did -- and not just once. Also note that Ms. Couric introduced Coulter as a "telebimbo" -- quoting someone else, of course.

[dissention]

Exactly! But they opened WITH "The Gipper was an airhead..."

Actually, she opened with "Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999." There was no bias, she clearly attributed it to the book that Edmund Morris was there to promote and she never personally called Reagan an "airhead" as Coultergeist likes to say.

But read how Hannity phrased his statement and how Couric did. You don't see bias there?

Hannity never used the word "apparent." He said the same thing Couric did; that Morris called him an "airhead."

You sure are thick.

Why is that? Because I quoted facts and transcripts? I see. ;)

Because you quoted transcripts that obviously show that no one on the Today show called him an "airhead."

Morris didn't call Reagan an airhead but the Today show did -- and not just once.

Then why did Hannity state that Morris called Reagan an "airhead"?

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Actually, she opened with "Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That’s one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that’s drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999." There was no bias, she clearly attributed it to the book that Edmund Morris was there to promote and she never personally called Reagan an "airhead" as Coultergeist likes to say.

She attributed it to the book AFTER saying "The Gipper was an airhead." Picking up on a bias requires that you not have the bias yourself, I suppose.



Hannity never used the word "apparent." He said the same thing Couric did; that Morris called him an "airhead."

You sure are thick.

Josh, stay focused here. I'm aware of the fact that Hannity didn't use the word apparent either. But he did not say the same thing Couric did.

Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead.

Hannity makes it clear that "airhead" was a quote from Morris' book. Whereas Couric and the Today show made it seem that it was "the conclusion" of his book.

Because you quoted transcripts that obviously show that no one on the Today show called him an "airhead."

Because I quoted transcripts that prove that Couric lied on national television.

"Actually it was only one day..." :rolleyes:

And then she quickly tries to change the subject!

[dissention]

She attributed it to the book AFTER saying "The Gipper was an airhead." Picking up on a bias requires that you not have the bias yourself, I suppose.

:laugh:

Josh, stay focused here. I'm aware of the fact that Hannity didn't use the word apparent either. But he did not say the same thing Couric did.

Coming up, the authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead.

Hannity makes it clear that "airhead" was a quote from Morris' book. Whereas Couric and the Today show made it seem that it was "the conclusion" of his book.

Couric and the Today show made it just as "apparent." ;)

You simply can't see that because picking up on a lack of bias requires that you not have any bias yourself...

Because I quoted transcripts that prove that Couric lied on national television.

"Actually it was only one day..." :rolleyes:

And then she quickly tries to change the subject!

Again: :laugh:

The crux of Coulter's argument is that the on-air staff of Today personally called Reagan an "airhead." They did not. She is arguing that they referred to him as an "airhead," when what they did was refer to the book's author who called him an "airhead." The same thing Hannity did, but for some reason, you're incapable of seeing it. Logic goes out the window when conservatives try to make any points, so I suppose it's just natural.

And you've yet to actually quote the Today show for all three of those days they supposedly opened with the "airhead" story. I'm the only one who actually posted a quote from a transcript. Pony up or don't play.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Couric and the Today show made it just as "apparent." ;)

Except for the fact that they don't! They use it as a charactarization of Morris' entire book.

The crux of Coulter's argument is that the on-air staff of Today personally called Reagan an "airhead." They did not. She is arguing that they referred to him as an "airhead," when what they did was refer to the book's author who called him an "airhead." The same thing Hannity did, but for some reason, you're incapable of seeing it. Logic goes out the window when conservatives try to make any points, so I suppose it's just natural.

Again, Edmund Morris didn't call Ronald Reagan an airhead, the today show did.

Oh come now Josh, we both know (edit * READ BRANDON READ *) that logic + liberals = oxymoron

And you've yet to actually quote the Today show for all three of those days they supposedly opened with the "airhead" story. I'm the only one who actually posted a quote from a transcript. Pony up or don't play.

Actually they opened with it twice, but refer to it three times. Why is it that you have trouble of taking what I say at face value. I can't remember the last time you posted links and sources. But being the conservative, the facts are on my side so.....

Today opened with the “airhead” terminology on two different mornings. First, Couric used it on Monday, September 27, 1999.

“Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That's one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that's drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999."

Second, here’s how Matt Lauer began the broadcast the next day:

“Good morning. For the first time President Bush is responding to the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan. And in particular the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead."
George H.W. Bush: "And it's brutal and grossly unfair and untrue.”
Lauer: “And Mr. Bush has more to say today, Tuesday, September 28th, 1999.”

[dissention]

Except for the fact that they don't! They use it as a charactarization of Morris' entire book.

Sean Hannity does the same thing, then.

Again, Edmund Morris didn't call Ronald Reagan an airhead, the today show did.

According to Sean Hannity, Morris' "authorized biography of Ronald Reagan calls him, quote, an airhead."

Oh come now Josh, we both no that logic + liberals = oxymoron

That's what conservatives say, but we've already established that they don't employ logic, so nothing they say really has much merit.

Actually they opened with it twice, but refer to it three times.

Ah, so Ann was lying when she said they opened with it three times?

http://www.geocities.com/rnareau/3540608.gif

But being the conservative, the facts are on my side so.....

:laugh:

Today opened with the “airhead” terminology on two different mornings. First, Couric used it on Monday, September 27, 1999.

“Good morning. The Gipper was an airhead. That's one of the conclusions of a new biography of Ronald Reagan that's drawing a tremendous amount of interest and fire today, Monday, September the 27th, 1999."

Second, here’s how Matt Lauer began the broadcast the next day:

“Good morning. For the first time President Bush is responding to the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan. And in particular the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead."
George H.W. Bush: "And it's brutal and grossly unfair and untrue.”
Lauer: “And Mr. Bush has more to say today, Tuesday, September 28th, 1999.”

“Good morning. For the first time President Bush is responding to the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan. And in particular the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead."

What is wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. He notes that it is "the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead."

Spin spin spin. You're going to puke one of these days from all that spinning.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Sean Hannity does the same thing, then.

Sean doesn't say that it is a "conclusion" of the Morris book.

[dissention]

Sean doesn't say that it is a "conclusion" of the Morris book.

:lol:

You're losing it, honey.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Ah, so Ann was lying when she said they opened with it three times?

No, Ann just didn't have the exact transcripts in front of her. She knew that they opened the show with "airhead" more than once and that is what's important. In her book she says "twice" which is what is correct.

Couric who WORKS on the show and made the statement, LIED and said it was only one day.



“Good morning. For the first time President Bush is responding to the controversial new biography of Ronald Reagan. And in particular the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead."

What is wrong with that? Absolutely nothing. He notes that it is "the author's assertion that Reagan was a great President but an airhead."

Spin spin spin. You're going to puke one of these days from all that spinning.

I notice how you are more quick to defend the quote made my Matt but a little unsure about the first one made by Couric.

[Brwn_eyes0511]

:lol:

You're losing it, honey.

Know I'm pointing out the very obvious difference in the introductions by Hannity and Couric!

Come on now Josh, you should know that taunting doesn't work! :nod:

[dissention]

Come on now Josh, you should know that taunting doesn't work! :nod:

Nor do your illogical arguments. :o

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Nor do your illogical arguments. :o

<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/1003/p3chrmd/dont_mess_with_me.jpg" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

:lol:



In the words of Ann herself...

"I don't think we are going to resolve this!"

So let's just agree to disagree O.K? You see it your way and I see it mine.

No hard feelings of course. :nod:

[dissention]

No, Ann just didn't have the exact transcripts in front of her. She knew that they opened the show with "airhead" more than once and that is what's important. In her book she says "twice" which is what is correct.

She said they opened with it thrice. Given her propensity for lying, it's understandable, though.

Couric who WORKS on the show and made the statement, LIED and said it was only one day.

Truthfully, it was only one day. The second day was opened with Bush's reaction to the "airhead" accusation.

I notice how you are more quick to defend the quote made my Matt but a little unsure about the first one made by Couric.

I was the first to post Couric's quote and have been defending it for the past page and a half. Where have you been? :shrug:

[Brwn_eyes0511]

She said they opened with it thrice. Given her propensity for lying, it's understandable, though.

...because she didn't have the facts in readily in front of her. And she was right in so much as they use it THREE times. Her book states the facts about the openings.

If you would go back and read where Ann states this in "Slander" you would see. You would also see that she quotes Couric’s entire opening phrase from September 27, 1999 and even states to the reader that Couric WAS referring to the Edmund Morris book...which we know already! But it all has to do with wording and tone my friend.



Truthfully, it was only one day. The second day was opened with Bush's reaction to the "airhead" accusation.

Like I said, it was two days...



I was the first to post Couric's quote and have been defending it for the past page and a half. Where have you been? :shrug:

ahh...never mind just read the post above you!

[dissention]

...because she didn't have the facts in readily in front of her. And she was right in so much as they use it THREE times. Her book states the facts about the openings.

If you would go back and read where Ann states this in "Slander" you would see. You would also see that she quotes Couric’s entire opening phrase from September 27, 1999 and even states to the reader that Couric WAS referring to the Edmund Morris book...which we know already! But it all has to do with wording and tone my friend.

Like I said, it was two days...

ahh...never mind just read the post above you!

This is boring me now. I can only run in circles with someone a few times before I get tired of doing so. The only thing left for me to do is to combat that scary pic of Coultergeist with a lovely one of Anderson Cooper in the hopes that it nullifies the bad karma that her pic is emanating:

http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/02/63/49/image_1849632.jpg

[Brwn_eyes0511]

This is boring me now. I can only run in circles with someone a few times before I get tired of doing so. The only thing left for me to do is to combat that scary pic of Coultergeist with a lovely one of Anderson Cooper in the hopes that it nullifies the bad karma that her pic is emanating:

http://img.coxnewsweb.com/B/02/63/49/image_1849632.jpg

Hey, I already said we are not going to agree on this...So I ended it before you did. :p :lol:

So let's just agree to disagree OK?


oh and...

<img src="http://we-know-whats-right.blogspot.com/ann-bang.jpg">

[dissention]

<img src="http://we-know-whats-right.blogspot.com/ann-bang.jpg">

I don't believe I'll ever get my wang up again after seeing that.

I wonder what Jerry Garcia would think...

[Brwn_eyes0511]

I don't believe I'll ever get my wang up again after seeing that.

I wonder what Jerry Garcia would think...

Ohhh poor "won't be able to perform" Josh!

Thank God mine is still in working order! :nod: :laugh: :wavey:

[dissention]

Whatever happened to reading comprehension skills? :shrug: What a shame.

Cold weather makes people stupid and that's a fact.

[Johnny Stew]

http://cagle.msnbc.com/working/030803/marlette.gif

[Brwn_eyes0511]

http://cagle.msnbc.com/working/030803/marlette.gif

That is quite funny...

But everyone knows that Nessa Rose was a real peach!

[Brwn_eyes0511]

Cold weather makes people stupid and that's a fact.

Come on Josh you know you enjoy political arguments with me! Go ahead and fess up to it. :wavey: ;)