Ann Coulter

For a time Scaife employed lawyer Ann Coulter at the Center for Individual Rights, where she drafted legal material for Paula Jone’s, who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. Coulter bragged that there indeed was “a small, intricately knit right-wing conspiracy” to nail Clinton in the Jone’s case. Also involved were the so-called “Elves,” right-wing lawyers, some of whom were prominent and highly placed, who secretly were doing legal work for the Jone’s legal team. While Coulter was denouncing the president for his immoral conduct, she was involved in an affair with the heir to a pornography fortune who was fighting sexual harassment charges. Scaife also funded Jone’s’s case through the Landmark Foundation. Coulter was to appear regularly on many talk shows, criticizing Clinton’s hijinks and Congressman Gary Condit for their sexual morality. When she appeared on Rivera Live! On CNBC, she announced that other interns had been sexually involved with Clinton, but she produced no evidence to support the claim but said someone had DNA evidence to this effect. When a Texas black man was dragged to death by racists in a pickup truck, she said “everyone has a right to not only hate people, but to express the hate.” On MSNBC, she once denounced a disabled veteran because “People like you caused us to lose” the Vietnam War. She strongly defended George W. Bush’s right to refuse to say whether he had used drugs. After Democrat W. Averell Harriman died, she opined that Pamela Harriman had slept her way to political influence. To her, Bill Clinton was “white trash” and claimed that women who were disturbed by Princess Anne’s death were Apathetic loser soccer moms.” After the tragedy of September 11, 2001, when Muslim terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers and damaged the Pentagon, she wrote on her web site that “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” This darling of the Right called all liberals “no Good” in a late August 2002 column and claimed that the Kennedy klan was a bunch of “heroin addicts, convicted killers, cheaters, bootleggers and dissolute drunks.”

In August 2002, Coulter’s book Slander led the non-fiction best sellers list. Her thesis was that liberals are intolerant, dominate the media, and are given to slandering conservatives. The latter, on the other hand, “are the most tolerant (and long suffering) people in the world.” She called Christie Todd Whitman a “birdbrain” and “dimwit” and charged that Katie Couric resembled Eva Braun. Gloria Steinem was portrayed as a “deeply ridiculous figure” Senator Jim Jeffords was called a “half-wit.” In a subsequent work, she identified liberals with treason: “ Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self﷓preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." She claimed a good argument for executing an American who joined the Taliban was “in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too.”

The demagoguery and anger she assigns to liberals can best be seen as a projection of her mind set and that of the many readers who brought her book to the top of the best-sellers list. Her best-selling Treason ( 2003) claimed that the Democrats were the party of treason and that they had a habit of supporting the nation’s enemies. Her outrageous claims find a large audience because so many rural and religiously conservative Americans accept the claim that there are two Americas, and that liberal America is committed to destroying the nation’s traditional morality and attacking God-fearing Christians. Convinced that liberals are an elite that sneers at them, they share her blind rage.



Sherman has written African American Baseball: A brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum