Ann Coulter is trending on Twitter because of this tweet of hers.

To Trump:
You had your chance, with a Republican House and Senate. You handed domestic policy to your son-in-law and Gary Cohn. You handed foreign policy to your son-in-law and a country that gave your son-in-law $2 billion.

Shut the fuck up, forever.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 11, 2022

Why Ann Coulter is trending on Twitter this morning (no, she didn't die).

ann coulter unintentionally endorsing elizabeth warren is the most hilarious thing i've seen this morning pic.twitter.com/aw14VPeJk4

— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) February 26, 2020

"Cheap labor isn't so bad for me... My landscaping is beautiful. There's not a bit of slime on my pool. It's good for me, but I care about my fellow Americans," says Ann Coulter.

And then hearing some muttered snark from Bill Maher about the pool, she rises to the comic occasion, leans forward, and confides, "He doesn't come to my pool."



The part I'm quoting begins around 6:00. Bill Maher's effort at a retort is, "I'm sorry, I'll make it up to you in bed tonight." What? She got off a good punchline, so he's the one who's suffered the conversational damage? He should have let his guest have the glory of a good joke.

And by the way, can a man go sexual with a woman like that, in the era of #MeToo? The knee-jerk answer is that when it's left against right, it's still just fine, but I don't buy that. And Maher's audience gives him a much bigger laugh for his line — his sexist line.

Her joke was fantastic — "He doesn't come to my pool." She had been delivering some great substantive material about cheap labor and how it benefits the rich, but she repositions to take advantage of the "slime on my pool" imagery that Maher called attention to, and she takes a shot at Trump. She's flexible enough to do that. I don't like Maher going for a cheap sex joke to top her.

Talk about slime on the pool. That's some toxic masculinity.

ADDED: In the comments, rhhardin says, "I didn't get the joke or the rejoinder. Does pool mean vagina? Is it a wetback joke? Mexican in pool leaves scum? And why wouldn't the Mexican come to the pool. You need to skim off leaves and so forth."

I don't normally interfere with rh's musings, but I had to say:

The first meaning related to the ordinary algae that forms in a pool.

The second meaning referred to Donald Trump.

A third meaning — never intended or explored — would be to characterize immigrants as slimy. The potential for seeing that meaning made the original use of the word "slime" inadvisable. It's possible that Maher was pushing that meaning onto her to get her in trouble, but Coulter's joke was to accept the Trump-hater's idea of Trump as slimy.

Let's all reread "Being and Nothingness"...

AND: A fourth meaning, offered by AZ Bob in the comments, has Maher as the "he" in "He doesn't come to my pool." If that's the meaning — and I don't think it is — then Maher's riposte is less sexist. She called him slimy, and somehow to bring his sliminess to a sexual encounter would pay her back.

"Ann Coulter said Wednesday that she was forced to cancel her speaking event Thursday at the University of California, Berkeley amid concerns of violence..."

"... calling it 'a dark day for free speech in America.'"

"I have my flights, so I thought I might stroll around the graveyard of the First Amendment," Coulter said in an emailed message when asked if she was still coming to Berkeley.

"Ann Coulter rejected an offer to speak at the University of California at Berkeley on a new date..."

"... after the university canceled her event because of safety concerns, then quickly reversed itself, saying it would reschedule her speech," WaPo reports.

In a series of tweets Thursday night, Coulter criticized the university, saying Berkeley officials were adding “burdensome” conditions to her speech. She said she had already spent money to hold the event on April 27 and was not available to appear May 2. She also pointed out that the later date would coincide with a reading period before final exams, when there are no classes on campus and fewer students are around. Instead, she vowed to speak in Berkeley on April 27 whether the university approves or not.

Berkeley is making a fool of itself. I laughed out loud when I heard the spokesperson on TV:

University spokesman Dan Mogulof responded to the lawsuit threat, saying, “We are confident that we are on very solid legal grounds.... We are concerned about her disregard for the assessment and recommendations of law enforcement professionals whose primary focus is the safety and well-being of our students and other members of our campus community"... 

Pathetic. At best, "confident that we are on very solid legal grounds" is a bald-faced lie.

"... Ann Coulter writes the following words on page 3 of her new book about how Trump is awesome: 'there’s nothing Trump can do that won’t be forgiven. Except change his immigration policies.'"

"Given Trump’s gyrations on immigration this week, this is such an unfortunate sentence. It leads to sad headlines like, 'Trump Betrayal of Ann Coulter Timed Perfectly to Release of Ann Coulter Book About Always Trusting Trump' and sad pictures of Coulter steeling herself to give book talks and angry Coulter tweets at Trump.... Like Rush Limbaugh (words I never thought I would type in that order), my first reaction upon hearing that sentence was [hysterical laughter]. Watching Coulter go through the five stages of grief in the span of 24 hours has also been a gift from the schadenfreude gods. Yet as Coulter has finally arrived at the realization that she can’t abandon Trump, I can’t fully commit to savoring her discomfort...."

Writes Dan Drezner (at WaPo) in "Ann Coulter is currently experiencing every nonfiction author’s nightmare/Sympathy for the devil in Prada."

One more reason to blog instead of writing a book.

But I'm not sure Coulter is a big loser here. Her book is getting a lot of attention because people who love to hate her see a hilariously colossal clash between her book — "In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!" — and Trump's supposed "softening." There's so much more reason now to bring her on the shows — where she can continue to promote herself — than there might have been if this was just another book by Ann Coulter. There are so many! Don't all the liberal (and conservative) show hosts want to needle her about her dramatic experience in publishing timing. And suddenly she's leveraged as the expert on how Trumpsters feel when he flips on their favorite issue.

"The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s 'Girls,' light-rail, Beyonce, and Hillary Clinton."

"The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is 'catching on' is exceeded only by the ones pretending women’s basketball is fascinating. I note that we don’t have to be endlessly told how exciting football is."

Says Ann Coulter, in my favorite of her 9 objections to soccer.

AND: By "football," she means football.

Predicting the 2016 candidates: Rahm Emanuel vs. Rand Paul.

That's Meade's prediction. I'm delighted by that prospect, because I'd like to see these 2 highly verbal guys tearing into the issues.

I see that back in March, Ann Coulter said Rand Paul could not be the GOP candidate because "You can't run a short candidate," which may or may not be true, but both Rahm and Rand are short(ish). Rahm is 5'7" and Rand is 5'8". I don't think that's actually short, but there is a tendency among male politicians to be tall. We could speculate about the personality traits that are linked with male tallness/shortness and what that entails in their politics.

Wikipedia has a nice article on "Human Height," which includes a chart of the average heights in all the different countries. For the United States, the average height for men is 5'9.5" (5'10" if you restrict it to men in their 20s, and 5'10.5" if you restrict it to white men 20-30).

I see that the average height for females is 5'4", which makes me taller than average, even though I have had people refer to me as "short," to which I've always responded "Actually, I'm exactly average." I will change that to "Actually, I'm taller than average." (I'm 5'5".)

Now, Ann Coulter is 6 feet tall, so we might speculate about the personality traits of very tall women and the politics that ensue, but I'll just say perhaps contempt toward less tall men seems likely.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 22, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" [Hardcover] Ann Coulter (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.00)

Honorable mention:

Educational Products - SET Zimbabawe 10, 50, 100 Trillions Collection / Hyperinflation Money - (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.96)

... and 52 other items purchased through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Althouse portal users: brainy, frugal, value-smart.

Thank you all who read this blog.

"Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth."

Says Greg Lukianoff:

But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.

"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."

Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes....

At Western Michigan University, it is considered harassment to hold a "condescending sex-based attitude." That just about sums up the line "I think of all Harvard men as sissies" (from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 novel "This Side of Paradise"), a quote that was banned at Yale when students put it on a T-shirt. 

More examples like that at the link — which goes to the Wall Street Journal — and in Lukianoff's book "Unlearning Liberty." There's video too at the link, displayed with this unintended freeze-frame humor:

“Why does Ann Coulter call Todd Akin ‘a selfish swine?’”

Asked Lawrence O’Donnell (who, strangely, looks almost exactly like Todd Akin).

“Because Todd Akin’s bat-crap crazy ideas on rape are going to make it so much harder for [R]epublicans to win control of the Senate. Right now, Democrats hold 51 Senate seats, Republicans 47, independents 2. Republicans would need to pick up four seats to gain control of the Senate. They would need only three seats if Mitt Romney actually won the election, because then the vice president, Paul Ryan, would be able to cast a tie-breaking votes.”

But according to Coulter, O’Donnell['s] failure to invite her to appear on his show makes him “a complete pussy”....

The link goes to The Daily Caller (which badly needs proofreading — I had to fix 2 things in this short cut-and-paste). The main reason I'm linking to this item is that the picture of O'Donnell looks so much like Akin.

I looked for a picture of Akin to make my point and got distracted by — speaking of "a complete pussy" — this.

ADDED: Selfish swine or kind toad?

Rich Lowry is keeping it short.

"Needless to say, no one at National Review shares Derb’s appalling view of what parents supposedly should tell their kids about blacks in this instantly notorious piece here."

That's the whole item. Should he have said more?

For links to more commentary on the abysmally bad John Derbyshire piece, go here.

IN THE COMMENTS: Patrick said:

He should have added another line, informing NRO readers that Derbyshire is no longer an NR contributor.

Remember when National Review fired Ann Coulter?

UPDATE: Rich Lowry announces that NR has fired Derbyshire. After some nice compliments — "he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer" — and some half-compliments — he's "maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative" — Lowry calls the new piece "nasty and indefensible." NR would never have published it, yet the name, National Review, is getting used to inflate its prominence. "Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise." Lowry calls the article "so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation." Perhaps it is what Derbyshire wanted, and now he's got a powerful send-off.

"Santorum... is more of a Catholic than a conservative..."

"... which means he's good on 60 percent of the issues, but bad on others, such as big government social programs. He'd be Ted Kennedy if he didn't believe in God."

Quips Ann Coulter, via  WaPo's "On Faith... Conversation about Religion and Politics."

"Woo Hoo! Feingold at Walkerville tonight, maybe my other honey Jon Erpenbach will be there too!"

"I do love rubbing up against those two!"

In light of Weiner's Twitter troubles, it's fascinating to read a tweet like that.

ADDED: "A 5pm visit by former WI Sen/rockstar Russ Feingold will result in streets overflowing w/adulation."

So it's at 5. I'll try to get some pics of the idolators... and the rubbers-up-against.

IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas said:

Haven't read it, but this brings to mind the theme of Ann Coulter's new book, Demonic.

Having heard Coulter discuss this book on the radio the other day, I'd had the same thought as I was writing this post. So I bought the book — you can buy it here — to extract some relevant material.

Manifestly, liberals fanatically worship their leaders. FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama, even Hillary, Liz Holtzman, and John Lindsay—they’re all “rock stars” to Democrats. They’re the Beatles, Elvis, or Jesus, depending on which cliché liberals are searching for. As Le Bon says, the “primitive” black-and-white emotions of a crowd slip easily into “infatuation for an individual.”

Le Bon is Gustave Le Bon, who wrote a book "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" (1895), which Coulter relies on heavily. Back to Coulter:

The most Reagan-besotted conservative would never seriously refer to his presidency with something as hokey as “Camelot.” But in the bizarro-world of the Democrats’ Camelot cult, all we ever hear about is the youth, the vigor, the glamour, the “Kennedy mystique,” and the rest of the cant.... Bill Clinton was called a rock star often, the expression “rock star” [is] the most irritating cliché of the century....

Eleanor Clift described the doughy Clinton-Gore team as “the all-beefcake ticket,” gasping that she was “struck by the expanse of their chests”... The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn said women identified with Clinton because of “the softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing.”... An infatuated Jonathan Alter babbled in Newsweek about the Clinton hug: “Bill Clinton hugs other men. It’s not a bear hug, usually—more like a Full Shoulder Squeeze. Women get it, too, but the gesture is more striking in its generational freshness when applied to the same sex....”

When Obama came along, guess who liberals started having sex dreams about?... The New York Times’s Judith Warner reported, “Many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president.”... The Obamas, Warner wrote, were “a beacon of hope, inspiration and ‘demigodlikeness.’ ”...

NBC’s Matt Lauer noted that “people” have called Obama “ ‘The Savior,’ ‘The Messiah,’ ‘The Messenger of Change.’ ” Try to imagine conservatives coming up with such honorifics for Dwight Eisenhower. Being rational individuals, conservatives don’t turn their political leaders into religious icons. Liberals, by contrast, having all the primitive behaviors of a mob, idolize politicians. 

"To know what Ann Coulter writes in her books, they’d have to know what’s in her books."

"That would require reading Ann Coulter’s books — and worse yet, admitting it in print, which no self-respecting Timesian would do. Far better to make a major embarrassing error... and thus actually score points when busted by Mickey, since this makes it clear to the NYT crowd that your mind is unpolluted by contact with Coulter’s writing."

"I like gays. I like all gays. And not just the ones who are Ann Coulter drag queens."

Said Ann Coulter in 2006, quoted today, by Mickey Kaus, who's defending her against the NYT, which has a big article on her saying she's "taking some surprising new positions" now that "the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder." One of the supposedly "surprising new positions" she's taken is pro-gay. Mickey says:

Coulter has a whole chapter in her [2007] book If Democrats Had Any Brains They'd Be Republicans on why gays should join the GOP. The chapter is called "No Gays Left Behind!"... Pretty shrewd of her to realize in 2007 that in two years the Tea Parties would rise up and steal her "thunder"—so she'd better start going for the gays!

Ha ha.

Was it "racially insensitive" to say to gay people — as Ann Coulter did — "Marriage is not a civil right. You're not black"?

That's what Talking Points Memo says. I'm trying to understand the theory by which it's racially insensitive. The only thing close, in my view, and I know it's not TPM's, is that the remark contains the unwitting assumption that gay people are white. TMP notes Coulter's explanation:

It was part of a larger argument on which she later elaborated, telling the crowd that the 14th Amendment only applies to African-Americans and that it does not, in fact, apply to women, LGBT people or other minorities.

Can I get a quote? I don't trust this paraphrasing. She said the 14th Amendment only applies to black people? Or did she say that the 14th Amendment should be understood with some reference to its historical context of insuring rights for the freed slaves? It's not the same thing, TPM.

Wow, the Canadians are really helping Ann Coulter with her PR!

"This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university. . . . Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada!"

Ann Coulter has her mouth wired shut.

After breaking her jaw.

I hope no one breaks any bones in the rush to crack jokes about it.

"Okay, I'm putting my Nicorette back in."

You know, I like all of these individuals better in their off-camera stuff than what they do when they think a million people are looking.