Tag: Ann Coulter

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Tigers, Redbirds, Trump, Porn, and Co-Yo

What a week it was. The football Tigers beat UCLA using a combination of great offense, timely defense, and good ol’ Mid-South heat and humidity. Those California dudes never knew what hit ’em.

And the Memphis Redbirds won the Pacific Coast League championship, beating out all the other teams on the Pacific Coast, including the Nashville Sounds, El Paso Chihuahuas, Omaha Storm Chasers, and the fearsome New Orleans Baby Cakes.

To sum it up: Memphis 2, “Pacific Coast” 0.

It was a week where I found myself agreeing with Donald Trump, at least for a few hours. After a Wednesday night meeting with Democratic Congressional leaders, “Cryin’ Chuck” Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, Trump began his Thursday morning by tweeting: “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Followed by: “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own — brought in by parents at young age.”

The paleo wing of the GOP went nuts. Ann Coulter tweeted, “Who doesn’t want to impeach Trump?” Sean Hannity blamed it all on Mitch McConnell for “forcing” his hero to “work with Democrats.”

Trump had seemingly done a complete flip-flop on DACA overnight. My guess is that Pelosi shook Trump’s hand and said, “Oh my, it’s so BIG!!” and Trump agreed to everything she asked, including a deal to save the Dreamers and turn the border wall into a cheery Tex-Mex restaurant.

Sadly, the “deal” only lasted a few hours, and Trump quickly deleted his tweets.

So it goes with this guy. Save DACA. Eliminate DACA. Build the wall, and the Mexicans will pay for it. The wall’s already being built, and we’ll bill Mexico later. Wall? What wall? Trump is a presidential pinball, caroming from one “decision” to another, depending on the last player who flips him.

So what else happened? Oh yeah, Ted Cruz got caught watching porn, or better said, “liking” a porn video with his Twitter account. The New Yorker‘s Andy Borowitz tweeted: “Porn Industry Irrevocably Damaged by Association with Ted Cruz.” Cruz blamed it on his staff, of course. His staff. Huh-huh.

The Emmys happened. Alec Baldwin won an award for his Saturday Night Live impression of Trump. Kate McKinnon won for her SNL impression of Hillary Clinton. And America wept, thinking either of these two comedians would probably make a better president than what we’ve got. Then Sean Spicer got up and reprised his acting gig from the actual White House, and the already fuzzy line between reality and comedy was blurred beyond recognition.

What else? Oh yeah, Trump supporters held the “Mother of All Rallies” in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. About 800 people showed up. Which, as someone pointed out on Twitter, is what happens when you name your march after Mike Pence’s wife. The MOAR crowd was outnumbered by a marching contingent of Juggalos, who are fans of the band, Insane Clown Posse. Write your own Trump joke. You can’t make this stuff up. Though I kind of wish you could.

Back in Memphis, 130,000 people attended the Cooper-Young Festival. I heard a record 37,000 windchimes were sold. I also heard we’re supposed to call Cooper-Young “Co-Yo” now. And I got this from a beardy guy drinking a craft beer, so it must be true.

Overton Park Conservancy director Tina Sullivan went to the Co-Yo Fest and tweeted: “Highlight of this year’s CY Fest was the elderly gentleman asking my opinion on public nudity & saying he might organize a Naked Bike Ride.”

First, I’d like to say that I’m not that “elderly.” And second, I think we should do it around the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue as it’s being taken down.

And in a final somber note to a weird week, British writer Kathy Lette wrote: “Sad news. I’ve just heard that the bloke who invented predictive text has pissed away. His funfair is next monkey.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Catching the Big One

There are many life lessons one can take from fly-fishing. I spent last week on vacation in the mountains of Western Pennsylvania relearning many of them. It’s an ancient, historic pastime, more about deception than anything else. Well, deception and tying and untying lots of tiny knots while squinting through your glasses, as you try to determine what wary trout living in crystal clear waters in a small stream will deign to suck into their mouths. The short answer is “not much.”

Sure, one could put a big juicy worm on a hook and probably catch trout all day, but that’s for “meat fishermen,” and bait-fishing isn’t allowed on this little piece of pristine water.

One lesson you quickly learn is that smaller is better. We were often fishing with flies so little you could put three on a dime. The fish are too smart and too wary to take a big, feathery fly, but they’ll occasionally suck in a tiny midge with a barbless hook. Then the battle is on, to try to bring them to the net without breaking the gracile tippet — near-invisible line the diameter of a spider web. The reward lies in the fooling and the catching and the release.

We were without cell phone connection, and so, for four blissful days, we were spared news of President Trump and Russia and presidential tweets and Congressional hearings and all such modern madness. On the plane ride back to Memphis, I read about Stephen Colbert’s insult-filled riff against Trump and the subsequent announcement by the head of the FCC that his agency would “review complaints” against Colbert’s monologue for possible “obscenity” violations.

Puh-leeeze.

May I introduce you to Alex Jones? Or Michelle Malkin? Or Ann Coulter? Or Ted Nugent? The stuff they and other stallions of the right have said about former President Obama make Colbert’s bleeped-out remarks pale in comparison.

Do I think our TV-obsessed president might have made a call to his FCC chairman? Yes, I think that’s quite possible. It would fit Trump’s pattern of using cheap intimidation tactics, as he did in a tweet about former acting Attorney General Sally Yates prior to her testimony before the Senate on Monday. Attempted witness intimidation by the president? Sure, no problem. It’s the new normal. But it didn’t work.

Yates deftly and resolutely held her ground, refusing to let GOP senators divert the issue from her testimony about warning administration officials about former NSA head Michael Flynn’s collusion. Likewise, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was unflappable, and clearly in possession of still-classified information that should terrify any Republican who was involved in communications with Russian operatives. And there are many who were.

Among those appearing terrified was the president himself, who changed the header photo on his Twitter account to read: “Director Clapper reiterated what everybody including the fake media already knows — there is ‘no evidence’ of collusion w/Russia and Trump.”

Very presidential! Because nothing says “I’m innocent!” better than a full-color, Photoshopped lie about testimony that was nationally televised.

Monday’s Senate hearing was the first solid indication in weeks that the Russia connection is not going away, that the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies have much more to reveal: transcripts of phone calls, meeting and travel records, intercepted emails, intel from European allies, etc.

Now, the battle is on to try to bring those who’ve committed possible treason against this country to justice. And as with fly-fishing, patience is everything, and the reward lies in the fooling and the catching.

I think a big one is eventually going to get brought to the net.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Support Trump and Be Mocked by History

The other day I spied a high Republican official walking on the street and called out his name. He stopped, hit his smile app, and exclaimed how glad he was to see me.

“What are you going to do about Trump?” I asked. He paused and then uttered the dreaded word: unity. “We have to have unity,” he said.

I got his message. He’s selling out. In the coming weeks, Republicans everywhere will be seeking unity by embracing their presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. They will be ignoring his utter lack of qualifications for the presidency, his harebrained schemes for controlling migration, his knack for insulting billions people at a time (Muslims, women, the disabled), his gaudy womanizing past, his lying, his exaggerating, his enthusiasm for torture, and his ingenious view of the Constitution as a lease that can be broken.

That paragraph, politically lethal if I were writing about someone else, encapsulates precisely why Trump is so hard to stop. He is, among other things, scandal-proof. At the moment, an army of journalists is scouring the land looking for whatever Trump has done that we might not yet know about. Trouble is, there is little that can be revealed. Call him a womanizer, and he shrugs. Say he lies, and he lies by saying he doesn’t. Confront him with the truth, as when he insisted on having seen nonexistant Muslim revelry in New Jersey following the September 11th attacks, and he just perseveres, creating his own “truth.” He cannot be shamed.

It’s trite to liken Trump to a Kardashian, but I shall do so anyway. What they have in common is the determination to outlast our moral or political revulsion. Kim Kardashian hit the big time with a sex tape. Revolting? Yes. But forgotten? Mostly. What lingers is the name.

It is similar with Trump. The shock of his statements — calling Mexican immigrants “rapists,” for instance — has worn off. The same with his insult to Megyn Kelly or his mocking of a disabled New York Times reporter. All that is now “old news,” blanched of its repellent ugliness by time: Oh, that’s just Trump. He’ll say anything. He doesn’t mean it.

Bit by bit, Trump will accumulate more endorsements. The motley crew that now surrounds him will be supplemented and upgraded by establishment names. They will use the same reasoning that Senator Lindsey Graham did last month when he endorsed Ted Cruz, whom he hates — a higher purpose. In Graham’s case, it was to stop Trump. With others, it will be this thing called party unity or, its functional equivalent, stopping Hillary Clinton.

But what is the point of a party that attempts to unify around a candidate such as Trump? What then does the party stand for? Does the GOP endorse anti-Muslim bigotry? Shall the party have a plank about Mexican rapists or the physical attributes of women? If Trump is its nominee, will the party endorse what are certain to be misogynist and personal attacks on Clinton? (Trump’s campaign boasts he has the endorsement of Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, both associated with Bill Clinton’s sexual rap sheet. This could get ugly.)

Trump’s message, we are incessantly told, is that the GOP has double-crossed its constituency with trade, immigration, and just about anything else you can name. But it will do the Republican Party no good to win back the aggrieved at the cost of everyone else — not to mention what is good for the country. A glance at Trump’s endorsees — check his web page — is an effective appetite suppressant.

Imagine a Republican National Convention’s dais stocked with some of the people who have already endorsed Trump — not just the feckless Chris Christie or the bizarre Sarah Palin, but such figures as the disgraced football player Richie Incognito, Hulk Hogan, and Teresa Giudice from The Real Housewives of New Jersey, a fresh alumna of the federal prison system. A meeting of Trump supporters might have to be sanctioned by a pro wrestling promoter.

When I spotted that Republican official, I did not say what I initially wanted to. I wanted to say that we are taking names — “we” being the American people. We will remember who endorsed a man who took American politics lower than it has ever been, no doubt extracting promises of good behavior that later will be broken. Party unity will not wash. The GOP is going to lose, the only question is how — with some honor, or being deservedly mocked by history?

Richard Cohen writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (May 28, 2015) …

CREDIT: Carrienelson1 | Dreamstime.com

Finally, finally, FINALLY! The Memphis Flyer has had the good sense to curb the liberal writings of old men like Tim Sampson and Randy Haspel and change the back page of this paper to something more sensible by adding some female voices. Thank God — and I’m speaking of the God of Christianity who rules this nation and should rule the rest of the world, instead of these so-called prophets like Mohammed — that the paper has finally come to its senses and is now giving voice to women with some conservative values and extremely long necks like mine.

That Sampson guy has been writing his drivel for this paper for 26 years now, and it’s about time he gets limited to write just one piece of garbage each month from now on. I don’t know how you readers have put up with his left-wing musings for this many years. I hope that you will just skip over his soon-to-be monthly “Last Word” column and pay attention to writers like me, who really have something important to add.

Let’s take a look back: Most recently, Sampson verbally defiled pro-American-values crusader Pamela Geller, just because she had the audacity to host a pro-freedom-of-expression art show in which artists and normal God-fearing American citizens were invited to draw cartoons of the Islamic prophet Mohammed at an art gallery in the great, GREAT state of Texas, which (thank God again) gives criminals the death penalty more than any state in the country. They know how to deal with heathens, and I say more power to them.

It’s still a shame that Texas Governor Rick Perry didn’t beat the communist Barack Obama in the last presidential election. Now look where we are: Our taxes are being used right and left to finance food stamps for poor people who are too lazy to get jobs that would allow them to buy their own food and not put the burden on those of us who need to stockpile our millions for when Obama finally destroys the country, which has been his plan all along, because he is a socialist who was not even born in the United States and is, in fact, a radical Muslim from Africa.

Thank God, again, for people like Sarah Palin and me who aren’t afraid to tell the truth about him. Oh, yeah, you’ll be reading much more about this when Sampson’s “Rant” business is sidelined. You better get down on your knees and pray that this new change lasts for a long, long time.

And, no more will you have to be besieged on such a regular basis with his “ranting” about how gay marriage should be legalized in every state or how he thinks voting rights for impoverished blacks and other Democrats are being jeopardized, or his ongoing babbling about how that Soulsville Charter School’s seniors have all been accepted to college for the past four years that it has had graduations — with their inner-city kids receiving more than $30 million in scholarships. To read his biased (because he works there) views, you’d think white kids from wealthy families, who attend Christian-based private schools, don’t achieve anything. It sickens me, and I know it sickens you.

And then there’s the way he goes on and on and ON about how much he loves Memphis and how it’s the coolest city in the world. Give me a break. Most of you reading this live there and you know what a hellhole Memphis is. There’s nothing but crime and people living on welfare there and one black mayor after another. You all know you live in the poorest, most dangerous, most obese city in the United States and that Memphis has nothing to offer upstanding, conservative people of virtue. He thinks places like Wild Bill’s, Ernestine & Hazel’s, Beale Street, and the Blue Worm are all so great, but he never talks about all the great things on Germantown Parkway or the gated subdivisions in the suburbs, where people exercise their God-given freedom to stay away from all that filth that goes on in the city. He and Haspel are just old, white liberal men who are stuck in their hippie days and don’t see the light of what really matters to true Americans.

And speaking of the great Sarah Palin, it is almost criminal the way this paper has allowed Sampson to criticize her for her beliefs, her animal killing, her beautiful and intelligent children, and her stance on American values. She is a true American hero, but to read Sampson, you’d think she isn’t the genius that she really is, no matter what newspapers she reads. And when she says she can see Russia from Alaska, she is telling the truth. She always has and continues to do so on national Fox News, which Sampson also dismisses as right-wing propaganda, which you all know is not true.

So be very, very happy, people, that “The Rant” will be changing soon, albeit not soon enough for those of you who have had to put up with Sampson’s diatribes for so long. I say, so long to him and pay no attention to what he and Haspel write in their new monthly “Last Word” columns.

This column was actually written by Tim Sampson, of course. No conservative publicity whores were harmed in the writing of this column.

Categories
News

Coulter Wants to FedEx Jews to Perfection-ville

Professional right-wing provocateur and attention-whore Ann Coulter has a new book out, which can only mean one thing: She’ll go on television and say something mind-bogglingly outrageous.

This time, however, she’s outdone herself, and in the process has dragged the name of Memphis’ biggest employer into her self-serving slimelight.

A sample of Coulter’s rhetoric from MSNBC’s Donny Deutsch show, “The Big Idea”:

DEUTSCH (who is Jewish): We should all be Christian?

COULTER: Yes. Would you like to come to church with me, Donny?

DEUTSCH: So I should not be a Jew, I should be a Christian, and this would be a better place? We should just throw Judaism away and we should all be Christians, then, or —

COULTER: Yeah.

DEUTSCH: Really?

COULTER: Do you know what Christianity is? We believe your religion, but you have to obey.

DEUTSCH: No, no, no, but I mean —

COULTER: We have the fast-track program.

COULTER: No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say.

DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn’t really say that, did you?

COULTER: Yes. That is what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws. We know we’re all sinners —

And there you have it, the Christian Gospel according to Ann Coulter, who is no doubt acting just like Jesus (a Jew, by the way) would have wanted her to.

We’d tell you the name of Coulter’s new book, but we forgot what it was. Guess we’re not perfected yet, either.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Meaningful Lives

Ann Coulter, to use one of her favorite words, is a smart “broad” who makes a ton of money out of being controversial. She laughs all the way from her Palm Beach mansion to the bank when Democrats and liberals get outraged by something she says or writes.

A former corporate lawyer, she’s a regular on Fox News and collects big fees for speaking engagements. She’s at the height of her fame. In a way, she’s the Republican equivalent of Michael Moore, who, despite his costume of working man’s clothes, also lives in a mansion. Which proves that if you play your cards right, you can get rich being a polemicist for the poor or a polemicist for the rich.

Calling some of the 9/11 widows harpies and witches who enjoy their husband’s deaths is no more tasteless and cruel than many of the other things Coulter has said or written. She is, after all, a verbal exhibitionist. The fallacy of her vituperation is that the widows did not choose to become celebrities. The media chose them. And who is surprised that people from New York City and the New Jersey suburbs are liberals? Most people who live there are.

The prize for the dumbest remarks, however, goes to Sandy Rios, described as a Fox News contributor, who said that just because the widows lost their husbands to an accidental bombing “does not give them license to then criticize their commander in chief.”

Error number one: It was not accidental. Error number two: It was not a bombing. Error number three: George W. Bush is not their commander in chief (he’s commander in chief only of the armed forces, not of the civilian population). And error number four: Nobody needs a license to criticize any public official. That’s the right of every American citizen.

The real question is: Does all of this vituperation and nasty name-calling contribute to anyone’s understanding of the issues facing this country? I think not. People who are inclined to substitute vituperation for argument — whether from the left or the right — are people who already have their minds made up and believe either no explanation is necessary or that the truth will collapse their position.

The whole talk phenomenon, which includes television and radio, has more to do with entertainment than with politics or public enlightenment. One establishes oneself as a “personality” and plays the role. Who knows what these people really think — or if they think at all — about the topics they are so bombastic about? I suspect they think mostly about book contracts, book sales, and ratings.

Argumentum ad hominem, which is what name-calling is, is a dead giveaway that the person wishes to avoid a rational discussion. We would all do better to ignore the entertainers and concentrate on civil discussions. After all, good people can disagree, and on most issues there are pros and cons. It’s all right to skewer your opponent’s arguments, but personal attacks only reveal you to be a yahoo.

Of course, there has always been a yahoo element in the population, but at least in the past, most of them did not become rich and famous. We have reached a point in our present culture in which if anybody can make money, it’s okay, no matter how the person makes it. That’s probably inevitable in a society in which leadership has nothing to offer but materialism.

Materialism is no good as a life’s philosophy. In the first place, most of us will not accumulate that many toys, and even those who do have to turn them all in at the cemetery gate. Being acquisitive is a poor substitute for a life with meaning.

I suspect that the widows who have been motivated to correct the political errors that led to the 9/11 attacks will have much more meaningful lives than Ann Coulter. Fifteen years from now, nobody will remember her.

Charley Reese writes for Lew Rockwell Syndicate.