Ann Coulter and the corporate media

As one might expect James Wolcott has one of the best commentaries on the Toxic Twig, Ann Coulter, I have read.

It's not worth wasting any more outrage on the subject of Ann Coulter. We all know what she is, and can hear in the brief quiets between her brash pronouncements the squeal and squeak of mice running wild in the messy hayloft of her mind. She's an empty uproar with long legs and long shiny hair and a reputation for extending the cocktail hour indefinitely that casts her with what Paddy Chayevsky emphemistically "an aura of availability." Middle-aged men and younger can daydream that if they met her under under auspicious circs, as they say in Bertie Wooster novels, they might have a shot, a reverie harder to entertain about Wonkette, whose wedding ring is powered with a special wolf-repellent ray. Coulter may have female fans, I wouldn't know, but her media stardom is primarily a male fantasy that is both sexist and racist. She is the pinup pundit of White Prerogative, her arrogant vanity perfect for a country and a media-political culture that refuse to recognize its postindustrial decline and decay. A country that still thinks it can whip the world into obeying its will.

But as I say, she is what is synthetically is, and is unlikely to change or deepen. Why should she, when mocking a Max Cleland or spouting anti-Muslim hate brings her such reward?

And what has happened to Time Magazine et al.

No, it's the editors of Time who should hide and hang their heads as they perp-walk from corporate HQ to a rented bus. They should go off on a corporate retreat and stay there. Just not come back. Let the junior staffers and interns and messengers put out the magazine--it would probably be an improvement, and even if it weren't, the end-result probably wouldn't gleam with jaded calculation. It might have a smidgen of honest conviction.

A few weeks ago, the legendary stock-market observer and commentator Richard Russell, a bombardier during WWII and hardly a dreamy liberal, said he picked up an issue of Time after not having read it for awhile and wondered what in the hell had happened to the magazine. It was all 'God, let's clean up the airwaves, and Bush-was-right.' (Presumably, Russell was referring to this from--who else?--Charles Krauthammer, who, between his syndicated column and frequent appearances on Fox News, doesn't get near enough exposure for his views.)

And now, a week after including her among the "100 Influentials," Time puts Ann Coulter on the cover, runs a photo from a bogus rally inside to supplement a text better suited to a lad's mag for lads who wear penny loafers.

I don't really have anything to add to that.