Ann Coulter

Coulter on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

Ann Hart Coulter (b. 1961) is an attorney, legal affairs correspondent, social commentator and a well known political pundit. She has written five bestselling books on U.S. politics. U.S. Federal Judge Richard Posner called her one of America's top public intellectuals.

Coulter's primary focus is exposing the faults of liberalism, and she has enjoyed a popular following for her strong defense of family values against abortion and same-sex marriage. She is well known for her forthright statements against those who wish to hurt the United States.

Coulter is a movement conservative, in line with Phyllis Schlafly. Her books and strong speaking style have endeared her to fans and infuriated opponents.

As a Christian, Coulter adheres to the Judeo-Christian tradition the view that human beings are utterly and distinctly apart from other species.

Being an unabashedly conservative pundit, Coulter's social commentaries often draw the ire of liberals. Her comments are frequently controversial and her critics often feign being offended.

Coulter made headlines during the 2008 Presidential primaries by endorsing Hillary Rodham Clinton for President instead of John McCain. Coulter asserted that McCain is not conservative, but liberal.

Background

Coulter grew up in New Caanan, Connecticut. She fondly recollects arguing with her family about politics and religion as a form of entertainment, sometimes around the dinner table. She also recalls her first encounter with liberal politics:

"I was in kindergarten and the teacher was trying to read us the story of Bambi. She was wearing a black armband, and one kid asked why. So she gave this speech against the Vietnam War. I raised my little paw and started arguing what I'd heard at home; that you stand by your allies and that we'd be breaking a promise. We never got to Bambi that day."

Coulter received an undergraduate degree from Cornell University, where she helped found the conservative Cornell Review, and a law degree from the University of Michigan Law School. In 1989 she served as a clerk for a federal appeals circuit judge in Kansas City.

Columns

In the late 1990s, Coulter's weekly (biweekly from 1999-2000) syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate began appearing. Her column is featured on six conservative websites: Human Events Online, WorldNetDaily, Townhall.com, FrontPageMag, Jewish World Review and her own website. In 1999, Coulter worked as a regular columnist for George magazine Coulter also wrote exclusive weekly columns between 1998 and 2003 and with occasional columns thereafter for the conservative magazine Human Events.

Books

Some of her books include

• High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (2002)
• Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (2003)
• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2004)
• How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) (2005)
• Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2007)
• If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans (2007)
• Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (2009)

In Godless, Coulter illustrates how liberals make a religion out of their beliefs, which they follow with the sort of intolerant zeal which they claim fundamentalists do. "Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian belief in man's immortal soul [and] that we are moral beings in God's image." (pg. 3)

Quotes

• "Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots ... "
• "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building." She later clarified "Of course I regret [saying] it. I should have added, 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters."

• "We just want Jews to be perfected, as they say." (The view that Christians are perfected Jews is a common belief among Jewish converts to Christianity, who view Christianity as a natural continuation of Judaism.

• "Saddam's barbaric rape rooms, chemical attacks and torture — those, liberals could live with. But now they want us to send troops to Darfur, a country from which no one anticipates terrorism anytime in the next millennium. If you're looking for a good definition of "no imminent threat," Darfur is it... These people can't even wrap up genocide. We've been hearing about this slaughter in Darfur forever — and they still haven't finished. The aggressors are moving like termites across that country. It's like genocide by committee. Who's running this holocaust in Darfur, FEMA?...Darfur is not the threat... though a hostage-taking, Holocaust-denying lunatic who doesn't own a necktie but is within two years of having a nuclear bomb comes to mind. You can already hear Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi saying, "If the Democrats were in charge, the use of military force wouldn't be necessary because we'd constructively engage them and appease their stated desire to kill us."

• "If you want a shorter rebuilding process, then we're going to have to wage less humane wars. The enemy — as well as innocent civilians — must be bombed into quivering terror. Otherwise, we displace aggression but don't destroy it. Americans are weaker for having seen that kind of carnage in World War II. Recall that the Worst Generation was raised by the Greatest Generation. That tells you how awful war is. The Greatest Generation was so exhausted by the war, it didn't have the spine to stand up to pot-smoking, draft-dodging hippies occupying administration buildings."

• "I think [women] should be armed but should not vote. No, they all have to give up their vote, not just, you know, the lady clapping and me. The problem with women voting -- and your Communists will back me up on this -- is that, you know, women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it. And when they take these polls, it's always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care."

• "...a cruise missile is more important than Head Start."

• On Sept. 13, 2001 she wrote this about the Sept. 11 terrorist attack: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

• "We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors," Conservative Political Action Conference, January 2002. Coulter later clarified what she meant; "when I said we should "execute" John Walker Lindh, I mis-spoke. What I meant to say was 'We should burn John Walker Lindh alive and televise it on prime-time network TV'. My apologies for any misunderstanding that might have occurred."

• "Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly.

• "Every concrete example of the racism allegedly sweeping the nation's campuses keeps turning out to be a fraud. Far from "institutional racism," there is "institutional racial hoaxism" run amok in this country."

• "Rather than own up to their moral blindness to Soviet espionage, Democrats fired up the liberal slander machine, which would be deployed again and again over the next half century to the present day.

• "By exposing the Democrats' absolute blindness to Soviet totalitarianism, McCarthy shattered forever the nation's confidence in the Democrats' capacity to govern. For that, the Stalinist hate machine attacked him viciously and has never let up."

• "How about having Tim Russert ask Hillary if she believes the New Testament is the perfection of the Old Testament? She claims to be a Christian. Let's get it on the table: Is she or isn't she? It doesn't get any more bare-bones than that.

• "[The New York Times'] reaction to al-Zarqawi's death was to lower the U.S. flag at the Times building to half-staff. (Ha ha — just kidding! Everybody knows there aren't any American flags at The New York Times.)"

• "I think our motto should be post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'"

• "I was going to have a few comments about John Edwards but you have to go into rehab if you use the word f****t."

See Also

• Articles about Ann Coulter from previous "Breaking News"
• Wikiproject:News by Subject- Ann Coulter
• Conservative Links
• Lou Dobbs

External Links

• AnnCoulter.com
• RealClearPolitcs.com Poll: Most Americans Love Coulter Columns, accessed 6 May 2007.
• The Long Fuse on Ann Coulter's Bomb - Washington Post - March 6, 2007
• Media Research Center 'Funny Video's from 2007' Watch Ann Coulter present funny videos from 2007 at the 2008 MRC DisHonors Awards in DC.