Ann Coulter Attacks 9/11 Widows

I've read four of Ms. (!!!) Coulter's books and I have to admit that I guess I have a masochistic streak, 'cause I've also caught her on all her Bill Maher appearances (no choice, I like watching Bill and he's coming back to HBO on the 25th), her apperances on many other TV shows (including the grilling Matt Lauer gave her on the Today Show) That still outnumbers what Mr. Tico has read.

So I will still criticize those who haven't seen movies they haven't even seen.

They are slaves to the conservative peers. If you had really read what I've stated about Michael Moore in other discussions on this forum, you'd know he would not want me as a supporter even if I still support the majority of his projects as a buffer against the radical right. Hypocrites usually use the tactic of accusing others of being hypocrites.

Not only that but he still has Ahnold as his avatar while Ahnold, obviously to gain politically and with some influence of his wife, is gradually turning into a raging liberal. You don't follow California politics too closely I guess.

Tico, your comment about the film comes across as homophobic. I can't imagine any homophobes wasting their time seeing the film.

Yeah, geekaphobic.

Touche, really. No, really - rapier wit.

A personal attack on whose family? I had quite a few weekend leaves in Raleigh. The people I met there were just a few degrees above moronic. Perhaps I went to the wrong neighborhood. I do know, however, that the people I met, at a YMCA no less, made the characters in Smokey and the Bandit look like geniuses. With the possible exception of Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina is an intellectual desert. And its inhabitants know it.( or maybe they don't since most of them are so stupid)[/quote

Well massagato I will say I'm not surprised to learn you spent your time hanging around at the YMCA. The Cowboy or the Construction Worker?

Read it, if you can, Snood. There are few polysyllabic words in the paragraph so you should be able to understand it>


A personal attack on whose family? I had quite a few weekend leaves in Raleigh. The people I met there were just a few degrees above moronic. Perhaps I went to the wrong neighborhood. I do know, however, that the people I met, at a YMCA no less, made the characters in Smokey and the Bandit look like geniuses. With the possible exception of Chapel Hill and Durham. North Carolina is an intellectual desert. And its inhabitants know it.( or maybe they don't since most of them are so stupid)


What it means( if I was in the hood) is:

Dem dudes in Raleigh are not cool. They tried to diss me!!

Godless: The Church of Liberalism
by Ann Coulter
Coultergeist
A Review by Jerry Coyne

H. L. Mencken once responded to a question asked by many of his readers: "If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here?" His answer was, "Why do men go to zoos?" Sadly, Mencken is not here to ogle the newest creature in the American Zoo: the Bleached Flamingo, otherwise known as Ann Coulter. This beast draws crowds by its frequent, raucous calls, eerily resembling a human voice, and its unearthly appearance, scrawny and pallid. (Wikipedia notes that "a white or pale flamingo ... is usually unhealthy or suffering from a lack of food.") The etiolated Coulter issued a piercing squawk this spring with her now-notorious book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Its thesis, harebrained even by her standards, is that liberals are an atheistic lot who have devised a substitute religion, replete with the sacraments of abortion, feminism, coddling of criminals, and -- you guessed it -- bestiality. Liberals also have their god, who, like Coulter's, is bearded and imposing. He is none other than Charles Darwin. But the left-wing god is malevolent, for Coulter sees Darwin as the root cause of every ill afflicting our society, not to mention being responsible for the historical atrocities of Hitler and Stalin.

The furor caused by her vicious remarks about the 9/11 widows ("I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.") has distracted people from the main topic of her book: evolutionary biology, or rather the pathetic pseudoscientific arguments of its modern fundamentalist challenger, Intelligent Design (ID). This occupies four of Coulter's eleven chapters. Enamored of ID, and unable to fathom a scientific reason why biologists don't buy it, Coulter suggests that scientists are an evil sub-cabal of atheist liberals, a group so addicted to godlessness that they must hide at all costs the awful "truth" that evolution didn't happen. She accuses evolutionists of brainwashing children with phony fossils and made-up "evidence," turning the kids into "Darwiniacs" stripped of all moral (i.e., biblical) grounding and prone to become beasts and genocidal lunatics. To Coulter, biologists are folks who, when not playing with test tubes or warping children's minds, encourage people to have sex with dogs. (I am not making this up.)

Any sane person who starts reading Godless will soon ask, Does Coulter really believe this stuff? The answer is that it doesn't much matter. What's far more disturbing than Coulter herself (and she's plenty disturbing: On the cover photo she has the scariest eyes since Rasputin) is the fact that Americans are lapping up her latest prose like a pack of starved cats. The buyers cannot be political opponents who just want to enjoy her "humor"; like me, those people wouldn't enrich her by a dime. (I didn't pay for my copy.) Rather, a lot of folks apparently like her ravings -- suggesting that, on some level at least, they must agree with her. And this means that the hundreds of thousands of Americans who put Coulter at the top of the best-seller lists see evolution as a national menace.

Well, that's hardly news. We've known for years that nearly half of all Americans believe in the Genesis account of creation, and only about 10 percent want evolution taught in public schools without mentioning ID or other forms of creationism. But it's worth taking up the cudgels once again, if only to show that, contrary to Coulter's claim, accepting Darwinism is not tantamount to endorsing immorality and genocide.


First, one has to ask whether Coulter (who, by the way, attacks me in her book) really understands the Darwinism she rejects. The answer is a resounding No. According to the book's acknowledgments, Coulter was tutored in the "complex ideas" of evolution by David Berlinski, a science writer; Michael Behe, a third-rate biologist at Lehigh University (whose own department's website disowns his bizarre ideas); and William Dembski, a fairly bright theologian who went off the intellectual rails and now peddles creationism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. These are the "giants" of the ID movement, which shows how retarded it really is. Learning biology from this lot is like learning elocution from George W. Bush.

As expected with such tutors, the Darwinism decried by Coulter is the usual distorted cardboard cut-out. All she does is parrot the ID line: There are no transitional fossils; natural selection can't create true novelty; some features of organisms could not have evolved and therefore must have been designed by an unspecified supernatural agent. And her "research" method consists of using quotes taken out of context, scouring biased secondary sources, and distorting what appears in the scientific literature. Judging by the shoddy documentation of the evolution section, I'm not convinced that the rest of the book isn't based on equally shoddy research. At any rate, I won't belabor the case that Coulter makes for ID, as I've already shown in TNR that her arguments are completely bogus.

What is especially striking is Coulter's failure to tell us what she really believes about how the earth's species got here. It's clear that she thinks God had a direct hand in it, but beyond that we remain unenlightened. IDers believe in limited amounts of evolution. Does Coulter think that mammals evolved from reptiles? If not, what are those curious mammal-like reptiles that appear exactly at the right time in the fossil record? Did humans evolve from ape-like primates, or did the Designer conjure us into existence all at once? How did all those annoying fossils get there, in remarkable evolutionary order?

And, when faced with the real evidence that shows how strongly evolution trumps ID, she clams up completely. What about the massive fossil evidence for human evolution -- what exactly were those creatures 2 million years ago that had human-like skeletons but ape-like brains? Did a race of Limbaughs walk the earth? And why did God -- sorry, the Intelligent Designer -- give whales a vestigial pelvis, and the flightless kiwi bird tiny, nonfunctional wings? Why do we carry around in our DNA useless genes that are functional in similar species? Did the Designer decide to make the world look as though life had evolved? What a joker! And the Designer doesn't seem all that intelligent, either. He must have been asleep at the wheel when he designed our appendix, back, and prostate gland.

There are none so blind as those who will not see, and Coulter knows that myopia about evolution is a lucrative game. After all, she is a millionaire, reveling in her status as a celebrity and stalked by ignorazzis. I have never seen anyone enjoy her own inanity so much.

But after ranting for nearly a hundred pages about evolution, Coulter finally gives away the game on page 277: "God exists whether or not archaeopteryx ever evolved into something better. If evolution is true, then God created evolution." Gee. Evolution might be true after all! But she's just spent a hundred pages telling us it isn't! What gives? As Tennessee Williams's Big Daddy said, there's a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room.

What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her "alternative hypothesis." She repeatedly assures us that God exists (not just any God -- the Christian God), that there is only one God (she's no Hindu, folks), that we are made in the image of said God, that the Christian Bible, like Antonin Scalia's Constitution, "is not a 'living' document" (that is, not susceptible to changing interpretation; so does she think that Genesis is literally true?), and that God just might have used evolution as part of His plan. What makes her so sure about all this? And how does she know that the Supreme Being, even if It exists, goes by the name of Yahweh, rather than Allah, Wotan, Zeus, or Mabel? If Coulter just knows these things by faith alone, she should say so, and then tell us why she's so sure that what Parsees or Zunis just know is wrong. I, for one, am not prepared to believe that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof.

Moreover, if evolution is wrong, why is it the central paradigm of biology? According to Coulter, it's all a big con game. In smoky back rooms at annual meetings, evolutionists plot ways to jam Darwin down America's throat, knowing that even though it is scientifically incorrect, Darwinism (Coulter says) "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing -- screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child -- Darwin says it will benefit humanity!"

Unfortunately for Coulter (but fortunately for humanity), science doesn't work this way. Scientists gain fame and high reputation not for propping up their personal prejudices, but for finding out facts about nature. And if evolution really were wrong, the renegade scientist who disproved it -- and showed that generations of his predecessors were misled -- would reach the top of the scientific ladder in one leap, gaining fame and riches. All it would take to trash Darwinism is a simple demonstration that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, or that our closest genetic relative is the rabbit. There is no cabal, no back-room conspiracy. Instead, the empirical evidence for evolution just keeps piling up, year after year.

As for biologists' supposed agenda of godlessness -- how ridiculous! Yes, a lot of scientists are atheists, but most have better things to do than deliberately destroy people's faith. This goes doubly for the many scientists -- roughly a third of them -- who are religious. After all, one of the most vocal (and effective) opponents of ID is Ken Miller of Brown University, a devout Catholic.

The real reason Coulter goes after evolution is not because it's wrong, but because she doesn't like it -- it doesn't accord with how she thinks the world should be. That's because she feels, along with many Americans, that "Darwin's theory overturned every aspect of Biblical morality." What's so sad -- not so much for Coulter as for Americans as a whole -- is that this idea is simply wrong. Darwinism, after all, is just a body of thought about the origin and change of biological diversity, not a handbook of ethics. (I just consulted my copy of The Origin of Species, and I swear that there's nothing in there about abortion or eugenics, much less about shtupping one's secretary.)

If Coulter were right, evolutionists would be the most beastly people on earth, not to be trusted in the vicinity of a goat. But I've been around biologists all of my adult life, and I can tell you that they're a lot more civil than, say, Coulter. It's a simple fact that you don't need the Bible -- or even religion -- to be moral. Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, who don't follow the New Testament, usually behave responsibly despite this problem; and atheists and agnostics derive morality from non-biblical philosophy. In fact, one of the most ethical people I know is Coulter's version of the Antichrist: the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (more about that below). Dawkins would never say -- as Coulter does -- that Cindy Sheehan doesn't look good in shorts, that Al Franken resembles a monkey, or that 9/11 widows enjoyed the deaths of their husbands. Isn't there something in the Bible about doing unto others?

The mistake of equating Darwinism with a code of behavior leads Coulter into her most idiotic accusation: that the Holocaust and numberless murders of Stalin can be laid at Darwin's door. "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." Anyone who is religious should be very careful about saying something like this, because, throughout history, more killings have been done in the name of religion than of anything else. What's going on in the Middle East, and what happened in Serbia and Northern Ireland? What was the Inquisition about, and the Crusades, and the slaughter following the partition of India? Religion, of course -- or rather, religiously inspired killing. (Come to think of it, the reason Hitler singled out the Jews is that Christians regarded them for centuries as the killers of Christ. And I don't remember any mention of Darwinism in the Moscow Doctors' Trial.) If Darwin is guilty of genocide, then so are God, Jesus, Brahma, Martin Luther, and countless popes.

As Coulter well knows, the misuse of an idea for evil purposes does not mean that idea is wrong. In fact, she accuses liberals of making this very error: She attacks them for worrying that the message of racial inequality conveyed by the book The Bell Curve could promote genocide: "Only liberals could interpret a statement that people have varying IQs as a call to start killing people." Back at you, Ann: Only conservatives could interpret a statement that species evolved as a call to start killing people.

Coulter clearly knows better. I conclude that the trash-talking blonde bit is just a shtick (admittedly, a clever one) calculated to make her rich and famous. (Look at her website, where she whines regularly that she is not getting enough notice.) Her hyper-conservativism seems no more grounded than her faith. She has claimed that the Bible is her favorite book, she is rumored to go to church, and on the cover of Godless you see a cross dangling tantalizingly in her décolletage. But could anybody who absorbed the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.

Jerry Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago.

Coulter Attacks the Cult of Liberalism
by Lisa De Pasquale
Posted Jun 05, 2006

In Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum, 2006), HUMAN EVENTS legal affairs correspondent Ann Coulter lays out one of the most original and perceptive philosophies on the cult of liberalism.

She states, "Under the guise of not favoring religion, liberals favor one cosmology over another and demand total indoctrination into theirs. The state religion of liberalism demands obeisance (to the National Organization for Women), tithing (to teachers' unions), reverence (for abortion), and formulaic imprecations ('Bush lied, kids died!'' 'Keep your laws off my body!' 'Arms for hostages!'). Everyone is taxed to support indoctrination into the state religion through public schools where innocent children are taught a specific belief system, rather than, say, math."

For years liberals have relied on a strategy of faking out the American public in order to win elections. Instead of accurately articulating their beliefs and engaging in an honest debate, they scour the nation for the perfect patsy. A hysterical mother who is willing to go on national television and call the President a "fuhrer" and "evil maniac" is akin to seeing the stigmata. Liberals' ecstasy over Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and the widows who made a spectacle of themselves in the midst of the 9/11 Commission epitomizes their secret weapon for winning back America -- a doctrine of infallibility in which victory goes to the most hysterical.

As Coulter writes:

[i]Finally, the Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to. That's why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can't respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering. Liberals haven't changed the message, just the messenger. All the most prominent liberal spokesmen are people with "absolute moral authority" -- Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, terminal illness, or as a last resort, being on a first-name basis with Nelson Mandela. Like Oprah during Sweeps Week, liberals have come to rely exclusively on people with sad stories to improve their Q rating. They've become the "Lifetime" TV Network of political parties. Liberals prey on people at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability and offer them fame and fortune to be that month's purveyor of hate. Victory goes to the most hysterical.[/i]

By embracing phony prophets, liberals strip away any honesty and credibility they may have once had with the public. Unlike Christians, liberals can't shield themselves from criticism by referring to their most outspoken nuts as just a small group of fringe leaders. On the contrary, their leaders are writing curriculum for public schools, cloning obnoxious "apple-polishers" at colleges and universities and intimidating small towns with baseless lawsuits.

In the aptly titled chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," Coulter peels back the political correctness surrounding the public education bureaucracy, "We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?"

Books like The Professors, Brainwashed and The Shadow University, exposed liberals' stranglehold on college campuses. But it wasn't until 10th-grader Sean Allen taped his world geography teacher's rant against President Bush that many Americans woke up to the reality of what is going on in K-12 public schools. During his world geography class, Jay Bennish engaged in a 20 minute tirade against President Bush and America, leading to the unoriginal conclusion that Bush is like Hitler. Coulter writes, "Anyone who uses this adolescent cliché should not be in the tenth grade, much less teaching it." Congratulations, Jay Bennish, this clever observation makes you qualified to replace a nose-pierced barista at Starbucks!

Comparing priests and teachers, Coulter notes, "The worst scandal to hit the real churches in 20 years is the priest child-molestation scandal -- which pales in comparison to the teacher child-molestation problem." By comparing studies done on the number of children sexually abused by priests and those sexually abused by teachers and accounting for unreported cases, Coulter concludes that there are roughly 821 children abused by priests per year and 32,000 children abused by educators per year. Given the increasingly explicit sex-education curriculum foisted on children and the incessant assurance from "experts" like Dr. Jocelyn Elders and U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that it's OK for children to be sexual beings, it's no wonder that predatory teachers treat them as such.

Much of Godless exposes the contempt that liberals have for science, especially as it relates to disproving their religious doctrine. Using their strategy of capitalizing on sympathetic messengers, liberals counter science by parading Christopher Reeves, Michael J. Fox and the Reagan family in order to distract from the evidence favoring adult stem cell research over embryonic stem cell research. Coulter puts together an impressive list of successful achievements using adult stem cells, including repairing spinal cord injuries, treating sickle-cell anemia, restoring bone marrow in cancer patients, restoring eye sight and repairing weakened heart muscles. However, adult stem cell research does lack one crucial element -- it doesn't involve the destruction of life. Coulter writes, "At least embryonic stem-cell researchers have a clear financial incentive to lie about adult stem-cell research. Liberals just want to kill humans. … Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time."

The final chapters of Godless should be required reading for all science classes, much like Treason should be required for all American history classes. Coulter illustrates why evolution is so important to the church of liberalism, "Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record -- and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals' think evolution disproves God."

With the help of the ACLU, liberals and their lawsuits have intimidated school districts into teaching evolution or what Coulter calls -- quoting mathematician David Berlinski -- "the last of the 19th century mystery religions." It's the equivalent of pointing and yelling, "Witch!" In Dover, Pa., a small group of parents backed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the school district to prevent the teaching of intelligent design in a high school biology class. The judge ruled in their favor and the school district was ordered to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees, in excess of $1 million. Coulter explains, "After Dover, no school district will dare breathe a word about 'intelligent design,' unless they want to risk being bankrupted by ACLU lawsuits. The Darwinists have saved the secular sanctity of their temples: the public schools. They didn't win on science, persuasion, or the evidence. They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter."

For those of us who had to endure countless viewings of "Inherit the Wind" when biology teachers had a hangover and needed the lights off, Coulter gives the true history behind the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. This phony trial was conceived by civic leaders and the ACLU, who agreed upfront to pay for costs incurred by the defense and the prosecution. Coulter writes, "The rest of Tennessee was not so thrilled with Dayton's public relations stunt. Chattanooga Congressman Foster V. Brown summarized the whole affair when he said the trial was 'not a fight for evolution or against evolution, but a fight against obscurity.'"

Liberals weren't the first to use Darwinism to justify a political movement. After reading "The Origin of Species," Karl Marx wrote, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views." Coulter writes, "While Marx saw the 'struggle' as among classes, Hitler conceived of the struggle as among the races. 'Mein Kampf' means 'My Struggle,' which Hitler described in unmistakably Darwinian terms."

From Darwinism to Nazism to Liberalism -- finally, some proof in favor of evolution!

In the mockumentary, "This is Spinal Tap," one of the band members points out to a journalist that while most amp volume knobs go to 10, theirs go to 11. To borrow from the philosophy of Spinal Tap, Godless is Coulter at 11 -- at her funniest and most insightful. In How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must), Coulter writes, "People don't get angry when lies are told about them; they get angry when the truth is told about them." Perhaps the best compliment one can give to Godless is that it will totally enrage liberals.

I am in North Carolina this very moment. I do not believe people here are any more or less stupid then they are everywhere else. It's just the accent makes them sound stupid. But, you will find stupid people all around the globe, the US or NC hardly have a monopoly.

It must really be eating at you that her latest book debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.

I usually don't disagree with you, Ticomaya, but now I must.

Waste time on Brokeback Mountain? You read about the millions of straight women who attended. Don't you keep up on things? I would have gone to see it a second time but I was really disappointed with its lack of connection with reality. I was expecting at least one scene( even if done in semi-darkness) of real "fisting". I guess the actors didn't have it in them!!!!

Your avatar is a fictitious blue monster named Sully. What does that say about you?

Ticomaya wrote:

It must really be eating at you that her latest book debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.

The only surprise is that it was classified as non-fiction!