CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Ann Coulter and the R-Word

Friday, November 02, 2012

this entry brought to you by shinedown, "diamond eyes (boom-lay boom-lay boom


Ordinarily I don't comment on specific things in the news cycle, particularly in the political arena. I prefer talking more about general or major things, but I thought this one was worth commenting on.

Recently I was scrolling down the Huffington Post and I saw a headline that said that Ann Coulter had referred to Obama as a "slur", and I thought, oh Jesus, what a horrible person. Especially lately, when she's been on a real kick of going from show to show and talking about race in the most horribly offensive way possible. What a jack-ass, I thought.

But then the "slur" I found out she was saying was the word "retard".

There's a few things I should say first. To begin with, I think Ann Coulter is a vile person, and I don't understand why she gets to go on talk shows as an actual political expert just because she's political. I'm not saying she can't be on entertainment shows, but I don't understand how she gets to be on, you know, Sunday Morning sitting next to an actual Congressperson, as if she's anything other than a vile person who says vile things.

I should also say that I've tried my best to eliminate the r-word from my vocabulary. I was hesitant at first, but if it honestly becomes a conversation stopper for so many people who simply will not see past that word, then you know what? I'm a person who can uses words really well. I can simply pick other words, especially if it genuinely hurts people's feelings. Part of me feels like it really is people being too sensitive-- it's not as if people being overly sensitive isn't a problem in our culture right now. On the other hand, that's probably exactly what old, stubborn assholes probably said 40 years ago when we, as a culture, decided that the word "colored" was unfavorable when referring to black folks.

But with all that said, you know what? I'm on Ann Coulter's side on this one.

Firstly, I don't understand how calling Barack Obama the R-word is somehow any fundamentally worse than all the shit she says on a constant basis. In a few months, reading back on this entry no on will remember this specific incident, but trust me future reader: Coulter has been on a tour promoting her book, and her book has said some really offensive things about race. Of course, she didn't use the n-word or anything, nothing that obvious, but she's been willfully misrepresenting racial history, saying that the Southern Strategy was a myth perpetrated by Democrats, and that that racism doesn't really exist in the conservatism, and that the real racists are liberals. It's disgusting. It's vile.

But the r-word?

Furthermore, plenty of people flung the r-word at George W. Bush, including yours truly, and while I understand that was a slightly different time, if I were her, I would definitely be upset that liberals got to use it against her guy for years and years, but now, just a few years later, suddenly that word is off the table and she's being attacked as if she's using the n-word.

Still, I guess what frustrates me is that she's invited to these shows specifically because she is Ann Coulter. She is vile, and they say that she's "provocative". She is offensive, and they say that she's "blunt". She is purposefully misguiding a uneducated audience and people don't call her on it because she is purposefully partisan. She was on television once and called Jews "Unperfected Christians" and seemed upset when someone told her how offensive that was.

Why is it that the r-word, of all things, gets her in trouble? Why invite her in the first place?
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with love from CRS @ 1:06 PM 

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