Dogged Blog

Counter-Coulter

Being without internet or power or TV, at least I was able to catch up on my reading. (Did you know they still print stuff on paper? Go figure!) One of the things I caught up on was the current issue of Mother Jones magazine, where Brad Friedman took on one of the most loathsome individuals on Planet Earth, Ann Coulter. Seems even her own team doesn't want her:

In September, I announced on my blog that I’d be debating Ann Coulter on an upcoming radio show, and was immediately showered with e-comments, most of them from lefties tired of being kicked around and publicly humiliated by the right-wing political cabal that has usurped virtually every inch of bandwidth on the American broadcast airscape since the Reagan-led dissolution of the Fairness Doctrine in the mid-’80s. Many were eager to tell me that Coulter, to paraphrase Austin Powers, “is a man, baby,” and pointed to a telltale prominent Adam’s apple (the only part of the anatomy, one emailer, a self-described speech therapist, helpfully pointed out, that can’t be reshaped in a sex-change operation). Others referred to her as simply “mAnn Coulter” or, when eloquence deserted them entirely, just “skanky meth whore.” Such is the exquisite refinement of American political discourse in the early 21st century.

Then, into this spectacle of spittle and disputum came an email from the gentlemanly Daniel Borchers, expressing that he was (and notice the archaic restraint) “highly critical of Ann Coulter.” Borchers is, if you will, the anti-Coulter, a position he arrives at from a decidedly unexpected corner. He loathes the queen of contumely not because he’s a liberal who’s taken the bait, but because he’s a conservative who thinks she and her kin are a disgrace to the conservative movement.

Read more here.

All the Way Down the Slippery Slope

There is one thing the right is, well, right about, and that is that if you give gay people an inch, we'll take a mile. I'm talking about the slippery slope argument, where they say if they stop beating the crap out of us in the street the next thing we'll want is the right to not be discriminated against in our jobs, or if they stop throwing us out of the military for no reason other than being queer, we'll decide we ought to be able to have the same civil rights, including the right to marry, as straight Americans.

They're absolutely right. The more we get, the more we want. In fact, in high school I'd have been quite happy just not to have dirty menstrual napkins shoved in my locker, and now I want the right to get married (even though in fact I have no personal desire to get married at all). There's nothing like a taste of freedom to make you want more, and nothing like being told you can't have something to make you incredibly determined to get it.

Pestilence and Flood

So, I got sick. Really sick, the kind where they send you to the ER, which is where I ended up. No sooner do I get home than the flood waters hit - I'm just waiting to be struck by lightning or get the plague.

Focusing my eyes made me throw up, so I couldn't read or write or look at a computer screen. Then the power and my internet service went out due to the floods. A quick trip into town yesterday reminded me that being safe, warm, and dry but bored out of your mind doesn't amount to much when your neighbors' houses are literally under water. I fortunately live on a mountain AND have a generator, so other than the roads and bridges being flooded out and being, you know, TRAPPED here, I was fine.