Tag: Ann Coulter

How Not to Refute Ann Coulter

I have absolutely no use for shock columnist Ann Coulter who this week writes — among others — of Max Cleland,

Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman – or what Cleland sneeringly calls “weekend warriors.” Luckily for Cleland’s political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.

Ugh. Completely inappropriate.

But so is the reaction of Dan Gillmor and the Center for American Progress. Gillmor writes that,

The Center for American Progress shreds her misrepresentations, and wonders why Bush has no problem with this kind of shameless behavior by big-time supporters.

But Dan hasn’t bothered to do any fact checking and, in fact, the Center for American Progress doesn’t appear to know what it’s talking about, at least when it comes to training for Vietnam. According to CAP’s “shredding” of Coulter,

SAYING CLELAND WAS “LUCKY” TO HAVE LIMBS BLOWN OFF: Coulter said, “Luckily for ClelandÂ…he happened to [lose his limbs] while in Vietnam” and said that had he been injured “at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator.” Of course, Cleland probably would not have been dealing with live grenades and enemy fire in the save haven of Ft. Dix. But, then, many top conservatives might not know this because they do not have firsthand knowledge of a combat zone.

What are they smoking? Fort Dix was a major training area for soldiers headed for Vietnam. The military constructed a mock Vietnamese village there and trained American soldiers to assault it in live fire exercises featuring small arms and explosives. People can get killed during such exercises (in fact the military generally has an extremely high accidental death rate even during peace time precisely because training for combat is itself extremely dangerous). Does CAP think that soldiers train to use grenades by simply reading the manuals?

I also find it absurd to refer, as Gillmor does, to Coulter as a “thug.” Referring to writers as thugs crosses the line straight into Coulter territory, in my opinion. That sort of characterization is something I’d expect to see in Newsmax.

Sources:

Will President Bush Tolerate This? Press Release, Center for American Progress, February 13, 2004.

Cleland drops a political grenade. Ann Coulter, TownHall.Com, February 12, 2004

Ann Coulter Off the Deep End (Again)

Okay, admittedly Ted Rall and Michael Moore give her a run, but for my money there is no bigger idiot in the punditocracy these days than Ann Coulter. Coulter’s column on the Central Park jogger case is simply reprehensible. It’s right up there with Ted Rall’s neverending screed about how the war in Afghanistan is about oil — except that Coulter is a better writer and makes her insanity seem halfway reasonable, whereas Rall writes like the crank that he is.

The short version is five several young men were sent to jail for the rape and near murder of a Central Park jogger in an incident that garnered national attention. Several of the men gave videotaped confessions, witnesses placed them at the scene, and in at least some of the cases, physical evidence such as hair samples, linked the young men to the crime.

None of the young men was helped by the fact that their main defense was a veiled argument that they were busy committing other crimes at the time of the rape (they had apparently gone to Central Park to mug people).

Over the past couple months, however, the case against the men has completely unraveled. Matias Reyes, 31, came forward recently and claimed that he, and he alone, raped the Central Park jogger. Reyes is already in jail on murder and serial rape charges — rapes that took place in Central Park.

It was then a simple matter to compare Reyes DNA to that of the only semen sample obtained from the jogger which had never before been linked to anyone. And it came back that Reyes was telling the truth — he had raped the Central Park jogger.

Similarly, a strand of blond hair was found on one of the men and at trial introduced as possibly belonging to the jogger. But more sophisticated DNA tests have since proved that it did not belong to her at all.

That is more than enough evidence to warrant overturning the verdicts of the five men convicted of the rape — something that even the woman who prosecuted them and still thinks they played some role in the attacks agrees with. But not Coulter. According to Coulter, this is just a case of the liberal media run amok. According to Coulter,

The odds of an innocent man being found guilty by a unanimous jury are basically nil. When the media assert a convict was “exonerated,” they mean his conviction was thrown out on a technicality. Up and down the criminal justice system, guilty criminals are constantly being set free. Evidence of guilt is thrown out at the drop of a hat. Not so, evidence of innocence. The criminal justice system is a one-way, pro-defendant ratchet. So is the media, the difference being, in court, evidence of guilt is not actually prohibited.

The odds of a jury making a mistake are “basically nil”? What planet is she living on? Coulter slams Barry Scheck’s Innocence Project but fails to note they have found numerous examples of people being sentenced to death who were actually innocent. In non-capital cases, dozens of inmates around the country have been released from prison thanks to DNA tests that showed their convictions were flawed (such evidence is especially useful in rape cases, where more sophisticated DNA tests available today have freed an unsettling number of men falsely imprisoned for crimes they did not commit).

Coulter focuses on the confession of the young men, claiming that,

Consider only the odds of a false confession leading to a conviction. If the judge believes a confession is not an expression of free will, the confession will be thrown out. If the jury believes a confession is not an expression of free will, the confession will be thrown out. If an appeals court finds the confession was not voluntary, it will be thrown out. If the police fail to read the suspect his Miranda rights, the confession will be thrown out. If the defendant lyingly claims he was not read his Miranda rights and gets some appeals court to believe him, the confession will be thrown out. If the police question a juvenile outside the presence of his parents, the confession will be thrown out.

And yet there are plenty of examples of people confessing to crimes they did not commit. In fact she might wish to read up about the Satanic conspiracy prosecutions of the 1980s where numerous defendants confessed to crimes they could not possibly have committed (and in all too many cases, juries convicted based on these ludicrous confessions).

One of the major problems is that police videotape the final confession, but rarely videotape the questioning period leading up to the confession (some jurisdictions require videotaping of all questioning — this should be mandatory nationwide). So jurors get to see a very accurate depiction of the 30 minute confession, but no such record exists of the previous 14 hours (or longer) of questioning.

Much the same problem exists with eyewitness testimony. People like to imagine that they know what they’ve seen and they like to grant the same courtesy to others, but the reality is that confessions and eyewitness testimony is often extremely unreliable due to the way that police collect such information. A recent study of police suspect lineup and photo lineup techniques, for example, noted that such techniques were often set up in such a way as to dramatically increase the risk of a false positive.

But Coulter dismisses any such consideration with nonsensical claims like, “It is more likely that the Central Park jogger was raped by space aliens than that Matias Reyes acted alone.” Why this idiot is so popular with some conservatives and right wingers continues to amaze me.

Source:

Media support citizenship awards for Central Park rapists. Ann Coulter, WorldNetDaily, December 4, 2002.

Ann Coulter Mocks Clinton

As much as I disagree with pretty much everything she’s ever written, I laughed out loud at Ann Coulter mocking Bill Clinton’s recent speech at Georgetown. According to Coulter,

Initial reports from National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration officials investigating the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 are now ruling out slavery or Indian dispossession as the cause.

Of course, Coulter conveniently forgot to mention whether or not the NTSB has ruled out “swarthy males.”

EFF’s Odd Idea of “Chilling Effects of Terrorism”

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has an interesting web page that “attempts to convey the chilling effect that responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have had on information availability on the Internet as well as some sense of the effect on people trying to provide this information.”

The page lists web sites that have been taken down as well as firings and pressure applied to traditional media outlets as well. What I thought was interesting, however, is that EFF apparently has its ideological blinders on — there isn’t any mention of censorship efforts directed at people who have been perceived as too gung ho about the war against Afghanistan.

The EFF notes, for example, that Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” was pulled by some stations because of his comments, but doesn’t note that Ann Coulter was let go by National Review for her bellicose columns. And not a word about Arizona State University where officials removed an American flag from a cafeteria out of “concerns for the feelings of international students on campus.”

Memo to EFF: censorship works both ways.

Hypocrisy at National Review

National Review Online recently fired columnist dropped syndicated columnist Ann Coulter’s column, whose post-9/11 columns were getting increasingly bizarre. For example, in one column discussing what should be done about the Arabs who were taped celebrating the attack, she suggested that the United States should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, is quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “We didn’t feel we wanted to be associated with the comments expressed in those two columns.”

Which would be understandable if Goldberg himself wasn’t in the habit of penning bizarre, borderline racist lines in his own NRO columns. For example, when there was much controversy between the United States and China over the fate of a downed spy plane, Goldberg published a column in which he actually wrote that,

In fact, I’ve got considerable sympathy for the Red Chinese — despite the fact that if my dog were a member of the American crew Jiang Zemin would have eaten him by now.

Apparently Goldberg has never heard of leading by example.