John Vincent Coulter: 1926-2008

The inflamatory columnist Ann Coulter tells us that her father died.

http://www.anncoulter.com/

"The longest baby ever born at the Albany, N.Y., hospital, at least as of May 5, 1926, who grew up to be my strapping father, passed away last Friday morning. As Mother and I stood at Daddy's casket Monday morning, Mother repeated his joke to him, which he said on every wedding anniversary until a few years ago when Lewy bodies dementia prevented him from saying much at all: "54 years, married to the wrong woman." And we laughed."

There is nothing much that I especially like about Ann Coulter's world view except for her courage and the occasional flashes of wit. But the death of a parent is not the place for partisanship. And so, despite her desire to have God smite me, I extend my heartfelt sympathy to the Coulter family.

"Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me. "

Coulter on Jews

I watched the interview with her and was able to stay out of the ER. Those beta-blockers work!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/ann-coulter-thinks-that-j_b_67969.html

Ah, yes, Twiggy with tourettes with the mind of Rush Limbaugh in the body of Lisa Kudrow.

http://mymallandnews.bizland.com/index016.html

Here is the real scoop, counter-intuitive though it may seem.

Ann Coulter is one of us as by her existence she creates what she pretends to despise-- liberals . Ann isn't about politics or propaganda. Rather, she is about $$$s from her books and speeches, none of which could exist unless oxiginated by manufactured outrage amplified by the media. As the (pretend) face of modern conservatism, Ann Coulter is doing the Democratic Party a great service.

I woudn't get worked up about anything she says as everything she does is a fraud to conservatives as she is toiling in the service of leftists everywhere.

Why do others have such a negative opinion of atheists?

Speaking for myself, which is a theist, allow me to make a few points. First, I think you're begging the question. Most people don't work and have fun in the context of only believers in their particular world view or brand of politics. I suspect for most people it's a surprise when they find out that the chap in the cubicle next to them is a Methodist or a Democrat or a Liberterian or an Atheist and the response generally is most likely a shrug of the shoulders and perhaps something along these lines: "Now how about those Cubs?"

As far as being insulting, I've never seen this at all in real life. In forum life, it's happened, but perhaps no more so than on any other forum where folks have strong points of view, and it certainly provides me ironic delight whenever I see people assert their rationality and then demonstrate their irrationality by the low quality of their discourse. Of course, it's no big deal to put the worst offenders on ignore.

It also kills the dialog and any hope of convincing others that our position is the most reasonable.

Sure it can kill the dialogue, but that may be their goal, a kind of Gresham's Law where bad talk drives out good talk. And that may be because those people could be precisely the opposite of what their arguments claim. Just as I think that Coulter, for example, has done much to expand the ranks of liberals by her emotive conservatism, so too do the most rabid atheists reinforce the the preconceptions of those who have never encountered that minority in any meaningful way thus fostering theism.

Having said that, I don't believe the goal of any dialogue should be persuasion, a kind of verbal tennis match where one side wins and the other side loses. And, frankly, it would surprise me if argument either on a forum or in person has changed any minds one way or another. Perhaps a more desirable goal is to engage in dialogue in such a way so that my thoughts sharpen in the termpering fire of rational argument. Proverbs 2:17 is the ideal: "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A mind stretched to a new idea never regains its original dimension" and this has been a mind-stretching greenhouse for new ideas.

Conservatism in Traction

TIME's cover story this week displays a weeping Ronald Reagan on its cover and ponders "How the Right Went Wrong":







"A generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, "The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital."

The failure of the Bush presidency has overshadowed the successes of the conservative movement-- the break up of the Soviet Union, a tax rate half that of Carter's presidency, and welfare and education reform. And so it is the conservatives who are devoid of ideas and who are on the wrong side of the tide of history. Even from conservative blogs and forums, I find it notable how shallow, tiresome, dissicated, demoralized, and unpersuasive conservative apologists have become. And it isn't by accident that the face of modern day conservatism isn't a university or think tank intellectual but Fox news propaganderist Ann Coulter. Conservatives claim that ideas have consequences, but it appears that the only ideas now coming from modern-day conservatists are middle-school taunts. Fighting words such as treason. slander, and godless is now the sum of what passes for deep conservative thought. It's especially rich that a woman with such ambiguous gender-- she with the pronounced Adam's apple-- would call Edwards a faggot to the apprecative laughter of the CPAC audience.

Policies-- and more importantly wars-- are won or lost in the realm of the mind-- ideas and debate. By any measure, conservatives have lost the intellectual argument in the wake of the failure of conservative governance. It can only be a matter of time before they lose in social and political impact.