The Mysterious Case of the Missing Ann Coulter
Originally published on June 30, 2010 at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
The American Prospect didn’t get much attention for breaking a huge story earlier this month: the mysterious disappearance of Ann Coulter.
Few of us realized she was missing, but luckily crack detective Paul Waldman was on the case. The Media Matters alum was determined to find an answer to the question no one else was asking: “Whatever Happened to Ann Coulter?”
Remember Ann Coulter? Seems like just yesterday she was Queen of the Right, the whole political world hanging on her every bile-laced tirade. Yet she’s all but disappeared.
Waldman’s fantasy that Ann Coulter “all but disappeared” is a deliciously desperate display of magical thinking. He doesn’t have a shred of evidence, but hopes that if he makes the claim over and over while wearing his lucky cardigan, his wish will come true.
Waldman “argues” that Coulter’s “shtick just got old,” and that in the Grand and Civil Age of Obama her “act seems somehow out of place,” even among the hate loving hate lovers on the Right. Oh, and she just can’t serve up piping hot wingnuttery the way Glenn Beck can:
It’s not that there isn’t plenty of hate on the right, but Coulter’s hate was just pure venom, without much point to it. She had none of the crazy conspiracy theories that have become de rigueur. She shot out in all directions, while the people at the top of the heap now, like Glenn Beck, are convinced they are driven by a complex and coherent ideology, complete with a Founding Father fetishism that would sound insincere coming from Coulter.
So she’s been left behind, never to grace the cover of a national newsmagazine again. Tragic.
Note Waldman’s wishful thinking in using the past tense to describe Coulter and her tragic descent into irrelevancy. He might want to have his mojo checked out, because it’s not having the desired effect.
18 months after the debut of Coulter’s Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, the Kindle edition is still ranked #33 on Amazon’s list of top selling conservative books. The hardcover comes in at #43, and Godless: The Church of Liberalism is still in the top 100 more than four years after the initial printing.
In the last year I’ve seen Coulter on CNN, CBS, and ABC just while flipping channels. And of course, she does speaking engagements and makes frequent appearances on Hannity, O’Reilly, Geraldo, Red Eye, and other Fox programs.
For a woman who dropped off the face of the earth, Coulter also keeps her critics busy. A week rarely goes by without multiple Coulter-induced seizures at Media Matters. And in April, she was mocked as a poor role model for girls on the Fox show “Glee.”
But perhaps most telling of all, here’s a screen capture John Hawkins took of the five most popular Townhall columns:
Instead of imagining Ann Coulter into irrelevancy, Paul Waldman might want to hit her up for some career tips.
How to Respond to a New York Times Interview Request
Mr. O’Keefe declined several interview requests, and Mr. Wetmore responded wordlessly to an e-mail message by sending photographs of Jayson Blair, a reporter for The New York Times who resigned after admitting to plagiarism and fabrication.
No wonder James O’Keefe considers Ben Wetmore a mentor.
Republicans for Rape (Now With Push Polls!)
Why did Republicans vote to deny rape victims their day in court? Why do they want women to be raped?
Oh, you haven’t heard? Republicans are pro-rape. At least, that’s the latest sensational charge levied by liberals, and they’re hoping it will stick when voters go to the polls in 2010.
That’s why they’ve started push polling the smear. Here’s a question asked of likely North Carolina voters during a poll commissioned by Change Congress, an organization working against the reelection of Sen. Burr (R-NC).
Jamie Leigh Jones is an American woman who was gang raped by her co-workers while working for a defense contractor in Iraq. Her employer tried to cover up the rape and prevented her from filing charges in court – instead forcing her to use a private arbitrator chosen by the employer. I’m going to ask you a few questions about this.
Congress is considering legislation that would allow victims of rape to bring their case to court instead of being forced by their employers to use private arbitrators. Some businesses oppose this legislation because arbitration costs less money than going to court. Do you favor or oppose this type of legislation?
Subsequent questions focused on how voters would feel about Sen. Burr opposing the legislation. (He and 29 other Republicans voted against the measure.) The poll also implied that the defense industry was buying congressional opposition to the bill at the expense of protections for rape victims.
Understandably, 73 percent of those polled said they would disapprove if Burr voted against the legislation and 74 percent said they favored the legislation. Considering the wording, one wonders what the other 26 percent were thinking.
Why, it’s almost as if they knew they were being hoodwinked by a deceitful push poll.
This current smear campaign began when Sen. Al Franken (D-SNL) proposed S. Amdt. 2588, a measure ostensibly inspired by the horrific gang rape reported by Jamie Leigh Jones while she worked in Baghdad for defense contractor KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. Franken contended that “her KBR contract banned her from taking her case to court, instead forcing her into an ‘arbitration’ process.”
It was a lie.
No employment contract can be used to force criminal complaints into arbitration. Not in America. But that didn’t stop the disingenuous left from immediately seizing upon the talking point that Republican opponents of the amendment want to deny rape survivors their day in court. Commentators pretended to be mystified as to how any rational human being could vote against rape victims.
“We’re still waiting for the screaming-Fox-News-headline: Republican Senators Support Gang-Rape by Three to One Margin,” wrote an ill-informed Huffington Post contributor. “Arbitration for gang-rape? Surely the Republican Party has earned the right to die.”
Daily Show host Jon Stewart called it “the old ‘it’s ok if you get raped’ clause in government contracts” and wondered how anyone could possibly reject the amendment.
And of course, no smear campaign would be complete without its very own Web site: Republicans for Rape.
Hundreds of scathing attacks on Republicans have appeared in major newspapers and blogs. Dependable foot soldiers that they are, the netroots are gleefully promoting the laughable idea that Republicans voted to prevent rape victims from having their criminal cases heard in court. And just this week, video surfaced of a rape survivor accusing Sen. Vitter (R-LA) of trying to silence victims.
In actuality, Jones’ contract required employment disputes, not criminal cases, to be resolved through arbitration, an effective form of alternative dispute resolution that is cheaper, faster, and offers individuals greater access to justice than litigation. The contract she signed limits her litigation options in matters of civil law related to the workplace, but it does not impact her ability to seek redress against her assailants through the criminal courts.
It is the foot dragging of the United States Department of Justice that is keeping Jamie Leigh Jones from facing her attackers in court, not her KBR employment contract and not Republican legislators. Republicans must do a better job articulating the true motivation behind Franken’s amendment.
Franken’s primary objective was not to ensure justice for rape victims, but to strike a blow at the company that sits at the top of every rank and file liberal’s hit list: Halliburton. The legislation is an overly broad political sledgehammer designed to ban the disbursement of federal funds to Halliburton when narrow wording addressing arbitration in assault cases would have received bipartisan support. Franken makes his intentions clear by calling Halliburton out by name in the amendment’s stated purpose:
To prohibit the use of funds for any Federal contract with Halliburton Company, KBR, Inc., any of their subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other contracting party if such contractor or a subcontractor at any tier under such contract requires that employees or independent contractors sign mandatory arbitration clauses regarding certain claims.
Even the Obama administration objected to the amendment as worded, characterizing it as unenforceable.
Franken’s second objective was to assist the trial lawyer lobbyists in their relentless campaign to do away with arbitration, thus lining their pockets with the spoils of litigation. Remember, trial lawyers and their lobbying groups are among the biggest contributors to Democratic Party, and even former DNC chairman and presidential candidate Howard Dean has explicitly said that Democrats are not willing to rub trial lawyers the wrong way.
If Franken’s primary concern was rape victims, why did he risk opposition to his legislation by weighing it down with a hefty gift to trial lawyers? Why does the amendment cover disputes totally unrelated to rape?
Finally, this legislation is Franken’s attempt to curry favor with his fellow Democrats by handing them a giftwrapped smear of Republicans just in time for the 2010 election season. Hence, the propaganda masquerading as an unbiased poll in North Carolina and the absurd allegations nationwide that voting for the falsely labeled anti-rape amendment is a vote in favor of rape.
It is the Democrats who are using an unspeakably atrocious gang rape as a political bludgeon, and Republican senatorial candidates are already feeling the impact. Of course, no one spreading these liberal distortions has addressed why Republicans would invite the nasty political fallout following a vote against an “anti-rape” amendment. Just gluttons for punishment, I guess?
Expect the following senators to be targeted during their 2010 reelection campaigns:
Tom Coburn (R-OK)
Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John McCain (R-AZ)
John Thune (R-SD)
David Vitter (R-LA)
Richard Burr (R-NC)
Must we play politics with rape? Instead of using sexual assault as partisan political ammunition, let’s do something that will really help rape survivors. We need a cooperative effort to find out what’s preventing the DOJ from aggressively pursuing cases of sexual violence among military contractors. Only then will Jamie Leigh Jones’ rapists be brought to justice.
Child Sex Trafficking Is Not A Partisan Issue
The sexual exploitation of children is intolerable. This is a moral absolute from which there can be no deviation. Right, left, and center, we know this to be true.
So when a pair of young muckrakers recorded several employees of the tax-subsidized organization ACORN offering advice to help facilitate child prostitution, it was clearly as newsworthy as it was despicable. However, most national media outlets ignored this outrage when the story broke on September 10, 2009.
Posing as a pimp and prostitute trying to set up a child sex slavery operation, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles visited five ACORN offices. During each encounter, they sought guidance on how to obtain financing for a brothel that would house a dozen or so underage girls smuggled in from El Salvador. On at least two or three occasions, Giles mentioned she was in danger from an abusive ex-pimp.
At all five offices, ACORN staff counseled the pair on a combination of tax evasion, money laundering, staying under law enforcement radar, welfare fraud, and human trafficking. One employee in Baltimore even recommended they claim some of the child sex slaves as dependents. “Honesty is not going to get you the house,” advised another in Brooklyn.
Yes, this is the story that most mainstream media outlets refused to cover as it unfolded over the past week.
If not for relentless airing on Fox News, promotion on the Drudge Report, and viral duplication on the right side of the blogosphere, the damning videos released by Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government might not have received wider circulation than any fleeting Internet meme. Fortunately politicians took notice and quickly moved to defund ACORN, the recipient of at least $53 million in federal funds since 1994.
The mainstream media was finally forced to acknowledge the story, but initially did so with headlines like “Census Bureau Drops Acorn From 2010 Effort” and my personal favorite from Reuters, “U.S. Senate Denies Funds For Poverty Group.” To call that burying the lede would be fantastically inadequate.
Then the usual media suspects moved on to playing the blame game. Five days after the release of the first video, the New York Times published Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, its first original reporting on the scandal. MSNBC ran a segment called “Nuts vs. ACORN.”
Eventually even network television had to admit there was a story. Katie Couric led the national evening news anchors with her broadcast on Tuesday, September 15. NBC’s Meredith Vieira reported the story on Wednesday morning, and after laughing the story off as something better left “to the cables,” ABC World News anchor Charlie Gibson finally aired the story Wednesday evening. His broadcast followed a denouncement of the ACORN staffers by the White House.
Why the delay? Simple. Liberal reporters and producers were unable to ferret out an angle that could exonerate ACORN from culpability. They were stymied. The established media narrative demands ACORN be portrayed as a group of valiant crusaders against poverty. They’re to be hailed as noble community organizers under unfair scrutiny by a racist right wing attack machine.
Even the latest video of a San Diego ACORN employee offering assistance with smuggling child prostitutes into the country hasn’t derailed that narrative. Because the ACORN sting was the brainchild of conservative activists it is considered inherently flawed, unworthy of serious investigation.
BigGovernment.com has released devastating videos of ACORN employees offering to abet child prostitution in five cities – Baltimore, New York, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. – and more are reportedly on the way. The indecency in these videos is not a fluke.
ACORN doesn’t have just a few bad apples, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested. Incriminating videos have implicated nine employees. If ACORN Housing employs 250, as ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis attests, then we have at least 3.6 percent of the ACORN Housing workforce willing to help facilitate a child prostitution ring. Even if we include all 750 full- and part-time ACORN staffers, nine rotten apples would be a noteworthy 1.2 percent of the paid ACORN workforce. And it may well be that we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
It is by the grace of public funding that ACORN’s doors stay open. An estimated 40 percent of ACORN funding comes from government sources, enough that taxpayers have a right and an obligation to demand transparency, accountability, and rigorous oversight. Both houses of Congress agree, and voted this week to bar ACORN from access to federal money. Several states followed suit, withdrawing funds and launching investigations into the group’s practices.
At best, ACORN is an organization with a toxic corporate culture that attracts or fosters morally reprehensible behavior. At worst, it is as corrupt and contemptible as ongoing allegations of widespread voter registration fraud, tax code violations, and contribution fraud would suggest.
Lashing out at everyone from the filmmakers to George Bush, Karl Rove, and the right in general will not make this scandal disappear. And neither will shameful incidents of media malpractice, feminist silence, and false equivalencies from the liberal blogosphere. Any degree of support for child sex slavery is indefensible. Period.
Perhaps I should have titled this piece, “Child Sex Trafficking Shouldn’t Be A Partisan Issue.” It shouldn’t be, and yet, for some, it’s acceptable to look the other way when it threatens to undermine a liberal organization.
Inconvenient Race? Just Edit Accordingly
Imagine for a moment you’re an MSNBC producer. You’ve worked hard to convince viewers that President Obama’s health care reform is being jeopardized by dangerous gun-toting white supremacists who hate the idea of a black man in the White House.
So what do you do when the facts don’t reinforce your carefully crafted narrative? For example, maybe you’ve got prime video footage of a right wing extremist carrying an assault rifle at a protest. I mean, you can’t honestly be expected to have your on-air talent report that he’s a black man, right? And it’s not like this gun-loving wingnut is an authentic African-American, what with his distasteful conservative politics and dislike of Barack Obama. Everyone knows blacks are supposed to be Democrats.
But then you notice. If you get the editing peons to zoom the footage just so, taking care to make sure no exposed skin is visible, a black man and a white man look awfully similar. Why, it’s almost as if you could get away with …
A crop here, a cut there, and presto! You’ve doctored away the inconvenient truth of a black man’s race.
All will go according to plan if you can roll your whitewashed footage as Contessa Brewer and company analyze the “racial overtones” of “white people showing up with guns strapped to their waists.” Kind of like this:
To continue stoking racial animosity, go to page 24.
To get caught out there by NewsBusters, go here.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Military Sexual Assault Statistics
Statistics inspire confidence and can lend an air of legitimacy to anecdotal evidence. But as the saying goes, torture the numbers and they’ll confess to anything.
Torturing the numbers is something Columbia University journalism professor Helen Benedict knows a little something about. She’s got the military sexual assault data on the rack and she’s ratcheting up the tension as high as she can to promote her new book on the abuse of female soldiers.
Consider these statistics published by Benedict in a recent Huffington Post piece:
Nearly a third of military women are raped, some 71 percent are sexually assaulted, and 90 percent are sexually harassed.
Benedict’s piece is entitled, “The Pentagon’s Annual Report on Sexual Assualt [sic] in the Military, or, How to Lie with Statistics,” and how to lie with statistics is exactly what she demonstrates.
The sexual assault figure is the most preposterous, and spelling assault wrong doesn’t get her off the hook. It is an outright lie that some 71 percent of military women are sexually assaulted.
The statistic comes from a study of PTSD sufferers published in Military Medicine in May 2004. The research sample was not, as Benedict would have you believe, culled from a general pool of female veterans or current servicewomen. Instead, participants were selected from “an eligible pool of 4,918 representatively sampled veterans seeking VA disability benefits for PTSD.”
Helen Benedict is fully aware of the proper context for this statistic on sexual assault. In a 2007 Salon essay she noted that the study was limited to veterans “who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder,” but since then she has repeatedly cited the statistic out of context. She mentioned it in a Huffington Post interview this month, a recent BBC News piece called Women at War Face Sexual Violence, and a 2008 essay in which she suggests that soldiers rape because Bush lied to justify the illegal occupation of Iraq.
The data Benedict cites on military rape and sexual harassment are also misleading.
Nearly a third of military women are raped? No. While not as glaring as Benedict’s sexual assault deception, this is, at best, an inaccurate representation of military rape data published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in 2003. Researchers found that 30 percent of a self-selected sample of 558 female veterans reported experiencing one or more rapes or attempted rapes during their military service. The study was limited to women who served between 1961 and 1997, and does not take into account the impact of numerous sexual assault awareness and prevention programs instituted in the last 12 years. And because the study relies on self-reporting of retrospective data, recall bias is of some concern.
I don’t expect Helen Benedict to dissect every flaw each time she cites the study, but how about something like this:
A 2003 survey of female veterans from Vietnam through the first Gulf War found that 30 percent said they were raped in the military.
That quote comes from The Private War of Women Soldiers, an article by none other than Helen Benedict. Yet again, we see that she can indeed place numbers in their proper context when the mood strikes.
The 2003 article from which Benedict gleaned her military rape statistic also indicates that 79 percent of women surveyed recalled being sexually harassed in the military. Benedict frequently cites the rape research in that article, but rejected the companion stat that places sexual harassment at 79 percent in favor of the 90 percent figure reported in a 1995 Archives of Family Medicine study.
Again, Benedict shows a reckless disregard for the truth. In addition to obvious flaws such as the age of the study and recall bias of the participants, Benedict’s readers might find it relevant that the research included rape and attempted rape as types of sexual harassment. But in her Salon article, for which she won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict wrote that the 90 percent figure included “anything from being pressured for sex to being relentlessly teased and stared at.” It should also be noted that the article significantly misquoted one of the subjects, and required several corrections.
What motive could Helen Benedict possibly have for inflating rape and sexual assault statistics at the expense of her reputation and credibility? The more shocking the statistics, the more media coverage Benedict gets for her book. And the more books she sells, the more attention she gets for her anti-war, anti-military agenda. For Benedict, outrageous and dated statistics about military rape are an opportunity to smear American troops and criticize the war.
Do the reasons soldiers rape have anything to do with the nature of the wars we are waging today, particularly in Iraq?
Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychiatry who studies war crimes, theorizes that soldiers are particularly prone to commit atrocities in a war of brutal occupation, where the enemy is civilian resistance, the command sanctions torture, and the war is justified by distorted reasoning and obvious lies.
Thus, many American troops in Iraq have deliberately shot children, raped civilian women and teenagers, tortured prisoners of war, and abused their own comrades because they see no moral justification for the war, and are reduced to nothing but self-loathing, anger, fear and hatred.
She follows with a list of recommended reforms that would presumably stop so “many” troops from committing atrocities. Ending the war in Iraq is “last – but far from least.”
Let me make clear that I find rape an inexcusable atrocity; even one sexual assault is one too many. I fully believe that sexual assault and rape are underreported in both civilian and military life, and understand that reliable data on sex crimes can be elusive. But that doesn’t excuse Helen Benedict’s agenda-driven falsehoods and emotionally manipulative sophistry.
Benedict forces us to spend time disentangling fact from fiction instead of addressing how we can reduce sexual assault. And each time she trots out methodologically questionable rape data and self-serving hyperbole, she undermines the credibility of the publications that carry her writing and the writers who trust her intellectual honesty enough to quote her rape prevalence statistics. Helen Benedict has dragged valid scholarship into a twisted game of telephone, purposefully garbling data into an almost unrecognizable mutation of what the researchers intended.
When assault statistics are manipulated and exaggerated for use as a bludgeon against the American military, actual experiences of rape are trivialized. It sends the message that smearing the troops as rapists is more important than addressing the very real occurrence of rape. At the same time, it creates what may be overblown fear among female soldiers and potential enlistees. We know that there are too many rapes in the military – too many rapes, period – and torturing the numbers harms both women and men in uniform.
Feminists have been accused for years of lying about rape – perhaps it’s time to disown Helen Benedict before she cries wolf again.
___________________________________________
To read the studies referenced by Helen Benedict, see:
Archives of Family Medicine. 1995;4(5):411-418
American Journal of Industrial Medicine. 2003;43(3):262-273
Military Medicine. 2004;169(5):392-395
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