Donald Trump supporter and conservative pundit extraordinaire Ann Coulter may arguably the most offensive and divisive tweet of her life during the Republican debate last night, slamming the candidates for giving too much attention to the concerns of “f---ing Jews.”
Coulter couldn't stop herself in front of more than a half-million followers.
The whole argument echoes a historic libel against Jews that they hold secret influence.
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Coulter has her own history of making inflammatory comments directed at Jews: she famously told the Jewish interviewer Donny Deutsch that Jews should convert to Christianity because “Jews need to be perfected.”
Full of hate, with an appetite to offend and shock, Coulter is just like Trump.
Coulter has fallen far in the past 10 years. She rose as a text-based corollary to Fox News and in 2005, Time magazine described her as “Ms. Right.” Now she complains she can’t even get on CNN.
Fearful of being forgotten, Coulter has reacted by becoming ever more offensive.
The tragedy is that Coulter did used to actually be quite funny. Her writing was massively provocative, but it was also often clever and witty.
In 2011, for example, she told an interviewer, “A liberal’s idea of being chivalrous is to hold the car door for you before driving you off a bridge. Also, a conservative guy will never ask to ‘role play’ with you as the sexy nurse and him as the senior citizen with a pre-existing medical condition who wants a single-payer government health plan.”
In her 2012 book, Treason, she wrote, “Democrats always assure us that deterrence will work, but when the time comes to deter, they’re against it.”
For a hot minute, it seemed Coulter might one day mature into a provocateur of the P.J. O’Rourke school; love his politics or loathe them, one has to admit that O’Rourke’s word play, gags and vivid evocations of cartoon-like absurdity, e.g. “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.”
Coulter instead seems to be turning into Rush Limbaugh after a David Duke seminar.
