Sobre o fenómeno Ann Coulter

Uma visão parcial mas sem o primarismo da maioria dos críticos esquerdistas de Ann Coulter: Viewpoint: Why Ann Coulter Matters. Por John Cloud.###

In her book, Coulter writes that Democrats “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.” As an example, she cites the Jersey Girls, four World Trade Center widows who argued for the commission to investigate 9/11. Then she directly questions the authenticity of their suffering, saying they are “reveling in their status as celebrities... I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much.” The comments caused an all-too-expected firestorm, even ensnaring Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who should have known better. “Perhaps her book should have been called Heartless,” Senator Clinton said. “I know a lot of the widows and family members who lost loved ones on 9/11. They never wanted to be a member of a group that is defined by the tragedy of what happened.”

Of course they didn't. But Clinton went some way toward confirming the very thing Coulter had alleged: that certain kinds of discourse — caustic, yes; outrageous, yes; illiberal, certainly — are not allowed.

The same day I was reading Ann Coulter's book, I read Margaret Talbot's excellent New Yorker piece from last week on Oriana Fallaci, the Coulteresque Italian journalist who has written that the "art of invading and conquering and subjugating" is "the only art which the sons of Allah have always excelled." Fallaci has said that Muslims "breed like rats," and she has complained that Muslims have left "yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery" in Florence. As it happens, it's illegal in much of Europe to say such outlandish things: Fallaci currently faces trial in Italy for defaming Islam. At least in the U.S., Coulter is not threatened with prosecution for being Coulter, but as I read Talbot's piece I wondered why the de rigueur intellectual response to Coulter in the U.S. is to dismiss her automatically.

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I don't agree with much of what Coulter says, but I find it bracing to read, for example, her cold-eyed assessments of Bill Clinton's treatment of the women in his life. I find her slurs against Muslims offensive, but I do laugh every time she refers to Islam as "the Religion of Peace." In the new book, she is right to belittle the ridiculous overreaction in the press after the mother of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito stated something obvious: "Of course he's against abortion," Mrs. Alito said of her son. Coulter unearths 25 years of public statements by abortion-rights supporters who stipulated that, as a Planned Parenthood official said in 1978, “Strictly speaking, no one is for abortion... We are pro-choice.” But apparently Mrs. Alito shouldn't be allowed to say her son is against abortion, which everyone knows anyway.