Thoughts on Ann Coulter's "Guilty"

I consider Ann Coulter to be a guilty pleasure. Like admitting that you listen to Rush Limbaugh, reading Ms. Coulter is viewed as a potentially communicable disease in certain circles. After all, she's a Right-Wing-Jesus-Freak-Lunatic, right? Well, sort of. As a libertarian and an atheist, I find her constant references to God (yes, she differentiates between God and god) occasionally and by turns amusing and grating. Her obvious disdain for her own gender is an issue of much confusion for me (she has on occassion been quoted as wishing women couldn't vote), and her attribution of feminine traits to male politicians is humourous only in a throwaway line kind of way. She isn't shy about accusing people of Godlessness, and considers (with a surprising amount of statistical support) single motherhood the greatest societal scourge since Communism. Her fixation on President Obama's middle name (she refers to him as B. Hussein Obama) wears somewhat thin after a while.

All that being said, I can unabashedly call myself a Coulter fan. She is a polemicist; a term modern society doesn't seem to understand. She is deliberately mean, as that is what polemicists do. She is a Republican who refuses to follow the standard procedure of apologizing for her views in advance. She is undeniably witty, and I find myself frequently laughing out loud at some turn of phrase.

"Guilty" is truly a pleasure to read. With just enough humour to prevent the righteous indignation from becoming crushing, she points out in great detail the hypocrisy of the American left. She makes no effort to be balanced; like Thatcher, she is convinced that the facts of life are conservative. As a thought exercise, I deliberately fact-checked every assertion she made that I instinctively agreed to, beginning with her own endnotes. I stopped trying to find inconsistencies after the first forty minutes. I suspect that her iron-clad arguments are a result of her past as a lawyer. Her ruthless exploitation of LexisNexis can be compared to the Canadian Army's ruthless exploitation of artillery in World War I: it is an awesome thing to behold. I'm glad she doesn't know me personally, as my atheism would probably earn me at least five minutes of "fire for effect".

As for her content, Ms. Coulter aims for the controversial. She deliberately chooses issues that cause Canadians to squirm uncomfortably. Abortion, single motherhood, homosexuality, affirmative action, adultery and premarital sex all feature prominently in "Guilty". It's salacious enough, in an Old Testament kind of way. Ms. Coulter goes for the jugular and the junk simultaneously, and she claims the moral high ground through gutter-fighting. It's wildly entertaining. One of her key assertions is that when a Republican quotes or cites the facts in a political dispute, the Democrats claim it is typical Karl Rove style Attack Machine behaviour. In a stunningly logical move, Coulter decides that if she is going to be convicted of being part of an attack machine, she might as well act like it. On almost every page is a reference to Senatory Ted Kennedy and his love for liquor, and driving women off of bridges (her style is contagious).

Read it. It's good stuff. It's brazen, unapologetically partisan, and surprisingly academically rigourous. I suppose it only makes sense; she'd get her leather dress sued off if she didn't get it exactly right.