The Fifth Stupidest Thing

I’ve heard in the last week.

From HuffPo

Steve Young

Media Matters Needs To Lay Off Ann Coulter
READ MORE: Ann Coulter, Steve Young, David Brock

Already I need to take a shower, and I've barely gotten out of my headline. I have this tightness thing happening in my neck and a scaly rash seems to be spreading right next to what might be real nice case of TMJ.

Thank you very much, Media Matters.

That's Mediamatters.org, David Brock's progressive website that regularly takes on the right wing and so-called liberal media for any dishonesty, mistakes and good ole-fashioned hypocrisy in their work, always backed up by actual transcripts and sound checks Good stuff.

Until yesterday.

That's when, Jamison Foser, Media Matters of America Managing Director, emailed out a call to arms for all good Mediamatter fans to contact newspapers and remind them that they might want to drop Ann Coulter's column.

Holey Goebbels, folks. Are we now handing the good fight right over to a far-right's cocktail-dress laden Adam's apple. What's next? Calling up Nancy Pelosi and having her increase the reach of the Patriot act? Award the Medal of Freedom to Michael Savage?

Of course Media Matters is not exactly asking for us to demand paper to pull Ann's column. That would be anti-what-we're-supposed-to-be. Instead they just want us to whine. Liberals are allowed to whine. We've been swell at it for the past six years. Then again, if the paper happens to pull her column, as nine have to date, well, that is the paper's choice. Not our pressure to drop her.

But truth be known, it is all about just that pressure. Pressure to keep someone who we dislike from writing for people who - for some unfathomable reason - enjoy Ann's, choke, work. Only we can't. Hideous demagogues fall from grace at a pace of their own making. We have to let her continue to spread her abominations until she crumbles is under the weight of their own turpitude. If not we become more like her and her ilk.

Oy. Defending someone as contemptible as Ann Coulter makes one feel some sense of camaraderie with the public defender who is obligated to take on Jeffery Dahmer's case even though you know damn well he's guilty. You know he's reprehensible but the law says he has a right to a trial. Or maybe it's closer to the ACLU defending the Nazi Party's right to march in Skokie. But defending her right to write we must.

I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

…

It goes on like that.

And as much as it pains me to point out the obvious, sometimes the openmindedness-to-the-point-of-ejecting-your-cerebellum-like- a-spent-cartridge-ness of the kids on my side of the hedge requires a firm wallop upside the head.

Or maybe Mr. Young just needs one of those new Curry’s Brains:


Because no one is saying that Disco Andy Coulter cannot write whatever she wants to write.

No one is implying it.

No one is Dremelling out a special exception nook in the Constitution for her plague-frosted hate-gobbets. See, that’s what Wingnuts do, because they loathe the tolerant, quarrelsome country that we are right down to the stinky wattle floor of the crawlspace of their souls. Loathe it, which is why they love torture and secret prisons. Love warrantless domestic spying. Love the military commissions act and the suspension of habeus corpus.

Love love love their Patriot Act and the “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!" that reeks out of every page.

Which is why – with the exception of 1/2 of the Second Amendment -- they are forever busy militating to shutter, raze or outsource every one of those basic rights great men and women have shed blood to secure for us.

Which is why their instant and predictable reaction to any and every crisis is to immediately sprint like Hell for this

with pruning shears, flame throwers and White Out and try to figure out en route which bits they can demand be gouged out this time.

Because when the only synapse you have is firing “Fascism!Fascism!Fascism!” with every fucking heartbeat, then every problem in the world looks like a fat, juicy Reichstag Fire.


Hell, Ann Coulter can pee-and-spell out whatever she wants in the snow bank of her choice. And if climate changes make snow banks a rarity, I’m sure a for the right number of magic beans exchanged behind the Tastee-Freez, NTodd’d build her a soft-serve bank into which she can wiz out her scalding venom.

(Sorry. That’s so inside it bends light, but now I can say that, yes, I have linked to NTodd and can now die happy and blog-shriven.)

And, hey, here’s a bit of breaking news for Mr. Young: within some very generous Constitutional parameters, I too am completely free to write whatever I want.

Even as you are, Mr. Young. And NTodd. And David Brooks. And Jurassic Pork.

Even as are the morally hydroencephalic gas sippers who take valuable time away from collecting, date stamping and naming jars of their own urine to email Bill O’Reilly to thank him for telling them sweet, comforting lies.

Even as is any jeremiad-to-the-editor author, any Chicago Reader Personal's Ad taker outer, or Penthouse Forum letter writer.

Even as is Regina Spektor.


Even as are any of the approximately 175,000 humans that start a new blog every single day.

But conflating that bedrock right of free expression with some wholly fictional right to get paid for that expression is surely the base camp en route to the very pinnacle of irresponsible stupid.

Because the Hustling of the Buck is not a sanctified stall inside the Marketplace of Ideas just because you make your living with a pen instead of a pick-axe; it’s the engine driving that regular ol’ free fire zone called the Marketplace of Dinero. The same bruising, contingent, employment-at-will jungle in which we all live and from which we all try to glean a living.

Mr. Young seems to forget that the reason the Nazi’s got to march in Skokie was that beyond First Amendment issues, demonstrations are also matters of permits and insurance and the use of public land. And at any time, Disco Andy Coulter is free to take to her orange crate in Bughouse Square and bay at the moon until her meth runs out and she starts coughing up ichor, because that is one of the things the public square is meant to be; a deliberately neutral sanctuary set aside as a venue for the clash of ideas.

But if the Nazis had tried to conduct their march across private land that day, property owners would have been completely within their rights to set the dogs on them.

When Judge Bernard M. Decker wrote about why the court eventually struck down the ordinances that Skokie residents had enacted to block these fuckers from goose-stepping through their predominantly Jewish town, he said:

"It is better to allow those who preach racial hatred to expend their venom in rhetoric rather than to be panicked into embarking on the dangerous course of permitting the government to decide what its citizens may say and hear...”

Again, what Mr. Young conspicuously omits in his reference to that incident is that it was an attempt to use the government to muzzle free speech, and nowhere is Media Matters suggesting that a special law be written to force Coulter to shut the fuck up.

But Coulter is emphatically not pamphleteering out of conscience or blogging gratis. She’s getting paid very well – a straight fee-for-service – which moves the whole question from the altar of Democracy’s Temple, to the table of the Money Changer.

And in that domain, every action involves making investment decisions on which influence can quite legitimately be brought to bear.

First decision: as a business, a newspaper makes a free choice. To hire Coulter or not. They are not obligated to, but in the marketplace they act in their own financial interest by offering Coulter’s vile yipping to some demographic they see as an important source of readership and revenue.

Which they are perfectly free to do.

Second decision: as an employer, that newspaper continues to revisit that choice with every column she writes. To decide if she is an asset or a liability, or if they just don’t like her anymore.

Which they are also perfectly free to do.

Third decision: every other citizen’s right to express themselves is every bit as sacred as Coulter’s. So if a citizen chooses to tell a newspaper that as long as they keep furnishing this harpy with a paycheck, he/she will never, ever buy another copy of their rag again -- that they will make it a point to tell everyone they know to dump them – well, the Constitution says they have every right to do that.

Far from being some perversion of our rights, if they choose to organize and ask their friends and fellow travelers to spread the word that the product the newspaper is selling is as toxic to public discourse as Iams Euthanasia 'N Bits is to kitties, that is about as pure and clean an example of active, democratic citizenship as one could imagine.

And if they choose to picket the newspaper? Welcome to the Right of Free Assembly, Mr. Young.

So, does the odious Coulter have every right to say what she wants within the loose strictures of the law? Absolutely.

And does any publication of any kind have every right to publish her poison? Absolutely.

But when they pay her for her words, Mr. Young, it becomes a matter of Commercial, and not Constitutional question. And as such, free citizens have every right in the world to fully exercise their free speech by marching, speaking, blogging, striking, organizing, boycotting, penning letters to advertisers, etc.

And a publication that subsidizes Coulter’s hatespeech has every right to ignore the protestors and keep right on churning out her repellent nazisms.

And if they and their shareholders choose to ignore their balance sheet hemorrhaging money, credibility and readership to keep Ann Coulter on stage as a matter of some bizarre principle, well God bless ‘em, every one. For as long as they choose to burn through their reserves and allow Coulter to make a comfortable living by working every day to exterminate what is best and most noble about this country at the peril of their solvency, I will applaud their adherence to their own, warped values even as the machinery of the marketplace in which they choose to operate eradicates them.

But remember, Mr. Young, if they choose to throw her skeletal ass under the bus, that is a decision they will make for financial reasons and has nothing whatsoever to do with the Constitution. Because the day after they decide to Rumsfeld her into the corn, she remains every bit as free to blog her thoughts, speak her thoughts or scrawls her thoughts on her rec room wall in her own feces as she was the day before.

And to whatever extent you do not comprehend these simple, crucial distinctions, that is the extent to which you fail both Democracy 101 and Capitalism 101.