Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt, Part 1,390,873: Hackdom Edition:
Let us take a break from protest violence and health care reform stupidity and blizzards and typhoons to enjoy the exquisite thrill of kicking someone when she's down:
How awful it must be to be Ann Coulter, especially right now. On that horrible precipice that, to the disgrace of our sexist society at large, many women face of having to choose between aging gracefully and openly or becoming a Joan Rivers-esque plastic surgery gargoyle. Looking around as she sees that her brand of crazy has been co-opted from her by younger, hotter, and dumber upstarts or one-upped by the even crazier, like Glenn Beck and his conspiracy theories so barking-at-one's-own-shit insane that UFO conspiracy theorists say, "Whoa, motherfucker, that's nuts." Yeah, one might feel pity for Ann Coulter if she didn't have a long, long history of being such a cunt.
For, indeed, in her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "the mangled blood coughs of a rhetorical emphysemic on her last bits of lung"), Coulter, who, as the Rude Pundit demonstrated a few years ago, likes to plagiarize the fuck out of people in order to avoid doing any work, cuts and pastes a large section of one of her "books," which itself was a cut-and-paste job of a column. No, let's put that more clearly: the vast majority of her new column is merely shit she published three years ago.
From her new bit of sputum: "In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the highly regarded economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect." She then goes on to list various incidents, including "In 1998, two students in Craighead County, Arkansas, killed five people, including four little girls, before the killers decided to stop and attempt an escape." Her subject for the piece? How wimpy liberals don't understand the need for high-capacity magazines for guns, even if Jared Loughner used one in Tucson.
From her 2008 tome If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans, page 123-124: "In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the highly regarded economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect on saving lives." She then goes on to list various incidents, including "In 1998, two students in Craighead County, Arkansas, killed five people, including four little girls, before deciding to attempt an escape." Her subject for the chapter? Concealed carry laws.
Again, this ain't about a single line. It's about the majority of the new column.
Oh, wait, speaking of a single line, there's also this from a 2009 piece titled "Liberal Victimhood: A Game You Can Play at Home": "In a comprehensive study of all public multiple shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that the only public policy that reduced both the incidence and casualties of such shootings were concealed-carry laws." The subject of the piece? Oh, who the fuck knows.
And the origin of the whole thing? A 2007 column on gun-free zones around schools, where Coulter "wrote," surprisingly, "In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the inestimable economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect." (By the way, this study has been mostly discredited.)
Gotta say, when this she-beast gets her teeth into a piece of information, she not only doesn't let it go, but she repeats it in the exact same way every goddamn time she uses it. If Coulter were to be held to even the lowest expectations for a supposedly syndicated writer (although, seriously, does anyone's newspaper carry her? Last the Rude Pundit heard, she was in two), she would still be called "a hack." Yeah, you can quote yourself. Yeah, it's might or might not be technically plagiarism. But it's unethical as hell to pass off old work as new, to not even mention that you're just pasting previously published shit and go fuck yourself if you care (which most of her remaining readers won't).
So, one could ask, and one should, "Why the fuck bother? If Coulter's way past her expiration date and getting lumpy and stinky, why not just walk away?" And the answer is simple: because fuck her. Because she's responsible in no small part for our current disgusting state of political argument. Because you don't get a free pass. Even if, sometimes, the only way to get revenge on the monsters in this world is to piss into their graves.
