Ann Coulter and the Shame of Wretched Rhetoric

I thought that rhetoric was something that was taught in law schools, but perhaps Ann was too busy having a smoke those days. (I'm really looking forward to hearing what her voice is like in ten more years.) Trying to do an analysis of one of her pieces is exhausting, like being confronted with a cesspool and asked to disassemble the structure of its contents. Because I'm a low energy type, I'll just tackle a small fragment. Writing about the Gannon/Guckert business, she attacks Chris Matthews (no favorite of mine) in her usual manner:

With all the subtlety of a gay-bashing skinhead, Matthews spent the rest of the segment seeing how many times he could smear Gannon by mentioning "HotMilitaryStuds.com" and laughing.

First of all, I'd like to know how it's a "smear" to report a fact--the existence of a site that belonged to Gannon/Guckert--and then laugh. It's damned funny. I mean, just the idea of someone characterizing himself as a "hot military stud" is comical. For instance, take your standard steamy romance dialogue, and have someone say to a lover, "Oh, you are my hot military stud!" That's humorously bad. But if someone says it like this--"I'm a hot military stud," it's fall-down-on-the-floor funny-bad. It's the language of parody. Even Chris "My Head Is Exploding" Matthews deserves a license to chuckle at that.

Of course, what is as deft as a meataxe is Coulter's "gay-bashing skinhead" comparison, which is woefully limp but, like all right-wing nutcase rhetoric (Limbaugh, Hannity, et. al.), is applied because merely linking sounds together is what they consider good argumentation. Think of Bush's constant "9/11...Iraq" sound bites (see the previous entry--he did it again in Germany today). Thanks to short attention spans, I guess, that stuff works more than it should.

Of course, Ann is calling the wrong guy a "gay-bashing skinhead." Consider: Jeff Gannon/James Guckert's coiffure is quite "skinhead," and given his insistence that he is a "top" in his escort service, technically, he's is a literal gay basher. Am I wrong here?

But I feel sort of bad for Ann, you see, because, well, she ought to be ashamed to write this dreadful dreck, at least as it reflects on her alma mater. At our local little third-tier university, freshmen receive F's for such argumentation in basic English composition courses. Alas, she makes big bucks peddling this crap in the mainstream press and on Fox "we wish it were news, but our fascist leaders demand obedience to right-wing ideology" TV.

Of course, if we thought that whoring for cash was worth it, even against our professional training and common decency, we'd be right-wing nutcases ourselves.

But I can't imagine a payoff big enough to entice me to become that.