In the old days, the Rude Pundit would have just titled this "Why Ann Coulter Is a Cunt (Part 120,749)" and been done with it. But since the title of these here posts appear on people's home pages on their work computers, well, perhaps a bit of decorum is called for. "Cunt" is still "The Word That Dare Not Be Spoken or Seen Unless You're from Great Britain or Ireland, Where Everyone Calls Everyone Else 'Cunt' and No One Cares." For what it's worth, the following people are total cunts: Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling, the entire prime time line-up of Fox "news," and Ted Cruz. That is not a complete list.
But Ann Coulter is a cunt because in her latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "rabbit hole of razor blades"), she says something so easily disproven that it took the Rude Pundit about one second to do so. She stays obsessed with the way that death penalty opponents are making a legitimate big deal about the bad execution of Clayton Lockett. As the Rude Pundit pointed out last week, she seems to use the description of Lockett's terrible crimes as foreplay for a savage self-pleasuring. Then she goes off on how perhaps "liberals" (quotation marks since Coulter's fantasy liberals have as much to do with real liberals as Mickey Mouse has to do with real rodents) would be cool if prisoners on death row were executed by the same methods used for abortion.
Oh, ho, she's challenging us there, saying, "Maybe they -- and MSNBC's similarly high-minded Rachel Maddow -- should comfort themselves by thinking of Lockett's execution as a very, very, very late-term abortion. You know, the kind that liberal darling Wendy Davis filibustered for 11 hours to keep legal."
Then she asks, "Would the Times ever give as detailed a description of an abortion as it does for the execution of a remorseless killer?"
And that took about one second to answer in about ten different ways.
Here's the New York Times in 1995, describing so-called "partial-birth abortion": "[A] fetus at 20 weeks of gestation or more is partly delivered, feet first, and then to make it easier for the fetus to pass through the birth canal, the skull is collapsed." Talking about a bill banning the practice, the article says that it doesn't define "the specifics of inserting scissors into the neck to create a hole through which the brains can be suctioned out to collapse the skull."
Not graphic enough? Then check out this 2000 article by Linda Greenhouse on the debate over dilation and evacuation (D&E) and dilation and extraction (D&X) methods of late-term abortion: "In a D & E, the fetus is dismembered before being removed. By contrast, the 'intact D & X' collapses the fetal skull, minimizing possible damage to the woman's uterus and cervix." Oh, sorry. Does that one not work because it cares too much about the health of the woman?
How about we go Gosnell? In the Times' much-maligned-by-the-right coverage of the trial of killer Kermit Gosnell last year, his crime was described as "the murder of a baby born alive in a botched abortion, who prosecutors said would have survived if the doctor had not 'snipped' its neck with scissors."
What makes this notable cuntistry for Coulter is that she asks her question rhetorically, with the same dismissive rage with which she always writes, attitude that is a beard for ignorance. She pretends to be an expert. She pretends to have knowledge. Lots of people hear her and parrot what she says, and thus, once again, a lie becomes the truth no matter how many facts you throw in its path. (Oh, and, obviously, despite the best efforts of some of us, Coulter ain't going away).
There's this attitude towards pro-choice supporters and towards women who have decided to get abortions that we just don't understand what's happening. Missouri's legislature just passed a 72-hour waiting period on abortions. That means an adult woman, making a perfectly legal decision on her pregnancy and her body, has to go home or, if the clinic isn't in her hometown, go to another person's house or a motel, and wait three fucking days because...why? Because she hasn't thought about it? How patronizing can our legislatures get?
But the right wants us to focus on the gory details. For the vast majority of women ending pregnancies in clinics, they're not using third trimester or even late second trimester methods. They are using methods that don't have scissors or forceps or anything. After family planning counselor Emily Letts filmed her abortion, which showed Letts from the waist up and, yes, her smile during the procedure, conservatives were blowing up with rage. Christine Sisto at the National Review said that Letts didn't show us an "abortion." Some don't believe she actually had the procedure.
Sorry, anti-abortion activists, but unless what you wanted to see was a small metal tube inserted in Letts's vagina, most abortion procedures are clean and easy and safe. They don't involve dismembered body parts. They don't involve induced delivery. Most abortion is as simple as a quick procedure or a pill, with perhaps some residual bleeding after.
There's a sick desire from anti-abortion forces to make something grotesque out of something that isn't. It's to add to make women feel shame and stigmatizing them. They so desire to force women back to the era of abortion in the shadows.
Oh, by the way, the New York Times also described those procedures, too.
