MICK FARREN: Ann Coulter, Princess of the Stiletto-Cons (Jan. 15, 2004)

Anyone remember Mick Farren, that great writer from the NME in the
1970s? Well, he's still around, working for LA Citybeat, and as sharp
as ever. Recently the poor fellow had the distasteful assignment of
interviewing that humourless, ignorant bimbo Ann Coulter.  Like anyone
with a bit of sense and common decency, Farren was appalled....

Princess of the Stiletto-Cons 
by MICK FARREN
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=208&IssueNum=13

"Conservatives believe man was created in God's image, while
liberals believe they are gods.  All of the behavioral tics of the
liberals proceed from their godless belief that they can murder
the unborn because they are gods. They try to forcibly create
"equality" through affirmative action and wealth redistribution
because they are gods. They flat-out lie, with no higher power
to constrain them, because they are gods. They adore pornography
and the mechanization of sex because man is just an animal, and
they are gods. They revere the United Nations and not the United
States because they aren't Americans – they are gods."
                           
Thus wrote Ann Coulter in her recent book, Treason: Liberal Treachery
from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. Later, she supports her
point with retail humor, quoting neo-con Irving Kristol: "A liberal is
a person who sees a 14-year-old girl performing live sex acts on stage
and wonders if she's being paid the minimum wage." She wraps the
entire book with the pronouncement: "The inevitable logic of the
liberal position is to be for treason."

Hyperbole is Ann Coulter's business, and, as with many conservatives,
money is the ultimate validation. Extremism has placed her in the
forefront of gladiatorial TV pundits and moved a mess of her books out
of Barnes & Noble. When faced with the prospect of meeting and talking
to this woman who judges Bill Clinton's sex life as the criminal equal
of 9/11, I take consolation in another pronouncement from Treason:
"... they [liberals] instinctively root for anarchy and against
civilization."

More sympathetic to anarchy than liberalism, and not over-impressed
with civilization as we know it, I have few illusions about where I
will stand in her estimation. About the only thing Coulter and I have
in common is admitting to sleeping past noon and writing in our
underwear. Friends ask me why I should want to interview or even give
space to someone like her. I can only reply, "What the hell? I'm tired
of facing the enemy to find that he is us. Let's for once meet with an
enemy and find that he is her."

To ease into Coulter, I have arranged to watch her live on the set of
the TV show Real Time with Bill Maher, because, I contend, that's her
home turf. She's billed on the jacket of Treason as a "best-selling
author" and "constitutional attorney," named by Federal Judge Richard
Posner as "one of the top 100 public intellectuals," and later
confides to me, "I think my TV performances, radio, books, columns,
private conversations are all one. The same person, saying the same
things, making the same points."

But, to me, in a world where everything emanates from the tube, she is
primarily a television phenomenon, a product of cable TV, the 24-hour
news channels, all the way back to ramshackle debates on the old
Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central, when Lemmy from Motorhead
might be a featured guest. Is this what Posner meant by a "public
intellectual"?

At first she was anonymous, an equine face in an angry gang of
irritating, near-fascist young women with short skirts and web columns
who described themselves as "pollsters" or "Republican strategists."
Mentally dubbing them "right-wing harpies," I entertained a theory
that they were grown in tanks at a hidden installation just outside
Stepford, then instructed in shrill interruption and an unwavering
hatred of all things Clinton at secret training camps in darkest
Connecticut. I rather hoped these babes-of-the-right – sexy by
Washington standards, but decrying sex out of wedlock – would never
acquire names, but remain in my mind as just the blonde one, the black
one, and the born-again Christian, who claimed still to be a virgin in
her mid-20s.

Then George W. Bush took the White House. All political debate ran off
and joined the circus, and a circus needs its dancing girls. Despite
myself, I learned their names: Kellyanne Conway, Tara Setmeyer, Kim
Serafin. But the clear winner of the Hanna Reich Alpha-Absolutist
Award was the tall one with the long legs and very long blonde hair
called Ann Coulter.

A Certain Need to Dominate

On my way in to the CBS campus at Beverly and Fairfax, where HBO
shoots Real Time, I checked with the security guard that all was cool.
He nodded. "You're with Ann Coulter, right?"

The words sounded just a touch eerie. "Uh, right."

My hopes had been high for this edition of Real Time. An HBO press
release had touted it as a grudge match between Coulter and Arianna
Huffington, who had just declared her gubernatorial intentions. As it
turned out, Huffington's candidacy had elevated her to a solo slot,
leaving Coulter – in white capri pants and a tight, white,
long-sleeved T-shirt – trading polite repartee with Orange County's
surfing Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher and comic Orlando
Jones. The result was tepid, but, when we finally meet, Coulter is
unconcerned. "I said to my friend that I really liked Friday's show,"
she says. "The comedian got in with his jokes, which were good, and
the congressman couldn't say much because he's a congressman. I like
it with two quiet guests, because I get to dominate." Á

Research indicates the need to dominate has played a major role in
Coulter's background. She grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her
father was a union-busting lawyer for the mighty Phelps Dodge mining
company. Her mother was a Daughter of the American Revolution, and Ann
herself joined the DAR when of age. In a recent Elle profile, her
brother Jim is quoted: "At family dinners, we'd get into
knock-down-drag-out fights about politics and religion. People would
leave the table."

Studying law at Cornell University, early in the Gordon Gecko 1980s,
she earned her rep as a "stiletto conservative" by dominating at the
right-wing campus paper, Cornell Review. After Cornell, she saw her
mission: "If things are going to change, then people like me are
needed in Washington." She worked for Sen. Spencer Abraham, founder of
the Federalist Society, a conservative law group, but showbiz came
upon her in the mid-1990s, when the newly launched MSNBC needed a
right-wing female commentator.

After poor Monica Lewinsky's White House blow job became public
domain, Coulter teamed with other young stiletto-cons (including Matt
Drudge) who saw a chance to actually take down Bill Clinton in a
media-fueled coup d'etat. What better cause for a blonde political
dominant than the breaking of the President? She joined the Paula
Jones defense team. Perhaps her abiding hatred of the Clintons stems
from Bill serving out his second term, despite her efforts, while
Paula Jones wound up on Fox Celebrity Boxing fighting Tonya Harding.

Domination on Real Time comes in the form of her oft-repeated current
catchphrase: "drain off the malarial swamps in the Middle East." This
is a softened version of the post-9/11 pronouncement – "invade their
countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" –
that caused the National Review to drop her magazine column. She lauds
GWB's courage to fly fighter jets during the Vietnam War, even if it
was only over Texas, and she offers a prepared-sounding routine about
how sex among married conservatives is better than the orgasms of
loveless liberals.

"There is a study ... ," she repeats over and over. But my own
thoughts are of another recent study, "Conservatism as Motivated
Social Cognition," published in Psychological Bulletin (and reported
in "Please Tell Me You Made This Up," CityBeat No. 11), which
concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set
of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the
intolerance of ambiguity … desiring a return to an idealized past and
condoned inequality."

McCarthyism Revised

So, is Coulter really a psycho? Part of my mission is to find out –
and maybe also divine how much of her vitriolic act is career-serving
shtick. At times, she sounds like a political standup, except she has
failed to crack the old Sam Kinison secret that, in order to make
psychotic pronouncements funny, the artist has to reveal a measure of
her own psychosis.

The following week, we meet at LA Farm restaurant on Beverly Drive,
close to where Coulter is staying, in the flatlands of Beverly Hills.
When I arrive, she is being photographed by CityBeat. She seems to
enjoy this. A fan is fawning. We move to a sidewalk table, and she
presents me with a copy of her book. I tell her I already have one.
(Did she seriously imagine I'd turn up without reading Treason?) I
feel a friendly warning is in order and tell her, "I pretty much
disagree with everything in the book."

Coulter laughs and gives the spare to the astonished fan. We start
with small talk – the California recall. These are the early days.
Bill Simon is still in the race. I ask for her take on Candidate
Arnold and find she has yet to formulate an opinion. Like Arnold
himself, she seems to be looking into it. Being anti-abortion has
always been one of Coulter's areas of non-negotiation, but she appears
to be giving Arnold a pass.

"I'm not happy with the Warren Buffet thing." She pushes back the
trademark hair. "He's a big tax-raiser, and he's pro-abortion. He buys
the equipment to perform the abortions."

I light a cigarette. "Arnold himself claims to be pro-choice."

Surprisingly, she shrugs this off. "There's not much a governor can do
about abortion." (A few days later, she is on MSNBC's Scarborough
Country, and her positioned has hardened. She no longer talks up Tom
McClintock and appears to have more or less joined the Arnold camp,
seemingly drawn by the moth-attraction of crude star power. But the
recall is not why we're at this sidewalk table.)

Ann Coulter has repeatedly decried the coarsening of contemporary
culture, something she blames on liberals, gay marriage, and Howard
Stern, if I can piece together her varied pronouncements. Is she
concerned about perhaps being a contributing factor herself? To ease
into the subject, I recall a time, a quarter of a century earlier,
when TV political comment was a gentlemanly affair between William F.
Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith, rather than inflexible ideologues
screaming overtop each other.

She pounces on a word. (She is, after all, a lawyer.) "I don't think I
scream," she barks. "I think that is sexist."

"Okay, shouting at each other."

"I don't shout," she says. "TiVo my performances."

"So, how would you describe what you do?"

"I don't sit down, shut up, and be barefoot and pregnant in the
kitchen the way liberal men would like, and when they hear a woman
with an opinion, they say I'm shouting, but I do not shout."

There has to be more. She almost pouts. "A lot of people are shouting
at me," she adds.

Surely, to be shouted at must go with the territory after producing a
book like Treason? The book's starting point is the Venona cables,
handily nutshelled by the PBS program Nova: "In 1995, the U.S.
National Security Agency broke a half century of silence by releasing
translations of Soviet diplomatic cables decrypted back in the 1940s.
Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages
sent in the 1940s by agents of the KGB. The cables revealed the
identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union.
By cracking the code, the FBI was able to hunt down ‘atom spies' such
as Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg."

Since 1995, the right has greeted these revelations with unseemly but
understandable glee, indicating as they do that Joe McCarthy and the
commie hunters of the 1950s may have been right, whether they knew it
or not. Useful Idiots

Coulter might have further tortured the liberals with a retelling of
how one of their favorite domestic atrocities – McCarthyism – turned
out to have a measure of validation. (The story of the decrypted
Venona cables is fully told in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in
America, by John E. Haynes and Harvey Klehr.) But, instead, in
Treason, she uses Venona merely as the launch pad for an epic flight
of advanced extremism. McCarthy was right, she argues, and his methods
were justified because liberals in general and the Democratic Party in
particular are all but agents of foreign enemies, and have been for
the last 60 or more years, and the ones who aren't are "just useful
idiots – just stupid." Truman was a dupe, Kennedy was a coward, Jimmy
Carter was a bigger coward, and if the American people had elected
Barry Goldwater in 1964, instead of the corrupt and incompetent Lyndon
Johnson, Goldwater would have ended the Vietnam War in about a week by
first issuing a warning and then nuking Hanoi. In her book, Bill
Clinton appears as little short of the Antichrist, and the
rehabilitation of McCarthy becomes an equally stirring defense of Ken
Starr.

In the face of this thrill-ride overkill, I might argue that, at the
end of World War II, the USSR, though still a U.S. ally, would have
been crazy not to explore every possible intelligence asset while the
CIA was importing the best and brightest of the Gestapo and the SS in
preparation for the Cold War. Moving up the Treason timeline, I might
question her statement, "the Cuban Missile Crisis was a humiliating
defeat for the United States" and recount how, as a worried teenager
who did not want to be flash-fried with his life still in front of
him, I saw it as a mighty triumph for humanity when Jack Kennedy and
Nikita Khrushchev had the courage and subtlety to avert a
thermonuclear global holocaust. Like many, I wonder about the CIA's
role in Vietnam, and also that of barking-mad generals like LeMay and
Westmoreland.

I could counterpunch with hapless Republican adventures: Jeanne
Kirkpatrick's death-squad policy in Central America; the Iran-Contra
affair, with guns going south and cocaine going north; the Reagan CIA
cozying up to the mujaheddin and a young Osama Bin Laden; or Don
Rumsfeld doing the same with Saddam Hussein when Iran was America's
most wanted. Or, should God come into the argument, I could even go
back to St. Augustine's concept of the just war, and how the Emperor
Constantine used Christianity to impose conformity on the Roman war
machine.

But I don't.

That would only start a pointless tit for tat, with Coulter tossing
her blonde mane and employing confirm-and-deny mannerisms, alternately
shaking and nodding her head and then suddenly making eye contact as
though I were a camera lens. I have formalized a strategy: not to play
by her rules. This is print, not television, and I have the final cut.
I will write the story as I see it. I can simply relax like a
gentleman and let her talk, watching for insights into whatever abyss
might be the source of her fury. Let the New York Observer's Joe
Conason whine on Hardball that Coulter won't debate him. Me? I don't
have to bother, but I do remind myself that she started out as a
lawyer. In the middle of a diatribe about how liberals, rather than
conservatives, are the true homophobes, J. Edgar Hoover is mentioned,
and I can't resist a joke about the legendary cocktail-dress
photographs. Again, she jumps.

"There were no photographs!" she says. "If they had photographs, I'd
concede the point. And the idea that the most hated man in America
could be going to drag-queen orgies at the Waldorf, without anyone in
the press noticing until 20 years later, and he's dead and
libel-proof. ‘Yeah, I saw him in a dress.' They could never produce
any photographs. It's completely apocryphal."

I fluff my memory. Did I really see the picture? And if I did, was it
real or Photoshop? On the spot, I'm damned if I know. But now I'm
falling into the trap, and will lose the thread of what I really want
to know. In Treason, Coulter has put liberals on trial and presented a
case to the jury. I wonder out loud, if she's found the liberals
guilty, what do we have in store in the penalty phase?

She laughs, and then there is a long silence. I don't exactly expect
her to smile and tell me we'll all be rounded up and incarcerated – or
worse – but the eventual response is well below what I might expect.
"The penalty should be the penalty of the ballot box," she says.

Victim Mentality

I've been entertaining the idea that I'm dealing with an Elmer Gantry,
a cynical and successful media opportunist making her way through the
book and TV circus, and doing very well by going to extremes. But, at
one point, she becomes very animated, as if she really believes she is
the victim, threatened by a ruthless liberal elite.

"My enemies are accusing me of saying dissent is treason," she
bristles. "Of course I'm not saying that, but in point of fact, you
know, there were massive antiwar protests across the country. The only
dissent that anyone is trying to squelch here is my dissent from the
proposition that liberals love their country. You can't say that. How
dare you? Everyone is trying to intimidate me, and they've used the
myth of McCarthyism, McCarthyism! McCarthyism … to prevent anyone from
asking this question. Do liberals love their country? That's
off-limits. That's the one thing you can't ask.

"I'm the one people are trying to silence," she goes on. "Not the
antiwar protesters. People burning the American flag, denouncing our
war aims. Flying to Baghdad. They're invited on Fox News, even; they
see O'Reilly, Hannity, and they're all saying, ‘You have a First
Amendment right to dissent.' Well, so does David Duke. We don't slap
him on the back. I want to start arguing about this again. They need a
little tough love right now. I'm the one people are trying to silence,
not antiwar protesters. It's a taboo to question them. They're like
children who need discipline. So, I'm applying the tough love."

I can only blink through a silence of my own. Ann Coulter is white,
wealthy, and successful. She has her health, and she dines with people
who at least advise those who rule the world. She has personally
assisted in an attempt to bring down a president. If any woman is part
of the elite, she is. And yet, when the hyperbole approaches outburst,
I am almost convinced she truly thinks she's victimized.

And she has come to this victim conclusion while George W. Bush, to
whom she demonstrates unwavering loyalty and who she places beyond
criticism, has been riding high. As the guerrilla war drags on in
Iraq, the deficits become unmanageable, and Bush may face being forced
to ignominiously pull out or hand over control to the U.N., I don't
like to speculate how Coulter and her kind will react. Fear tends to
beget hate, and, at least for the moment, she has enough media access
to communicate this hate to a public that is pretty damned confused
already.

For conservatives, these have been the good times. If we traitors have
our way, it will all be downhill from here, and I'll guarantee that
the likes of Ann Coulter will descend with neither grace nor
equanimity.

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=208&IssueNum=13