Ann Coulter is the Paris Hilton of Conservative Politics

Most elementary school teachers will tell you a simple fact about the relationship between positive and negative attention and the continuation of behavior, good and bad. When you acknowledge and give attention to negative behavior as much as you do to positive behavior, you tacitly endorse negative behavior. In the end, the child becomes disinterested in the exact nature of attention, and simply pursues attention for its own sake.

Enter Paris Hilton and Ann Coulter, the quintessential attention whores. While Hilton has the predisposition to open her legs on the moments notice of being in the proximity of a flash bulb, Coulter decidedly opens her mouth when the cameras are rolling. For Hilton, doing coke, getting DUI’s, and having blowjobs night-vision video taped is the standard; for Coulter, it is insulting the widows of 9/11, referring to Muslims as rag-heads, and most recently, calling John Edwards a ‘faggot’.

The problem with the situation wasn’t Ann Coulter necessarily, but the amount of response to her absurdity. After years of hearing a neighbor’s nocturnal dog, the media and blogospheres reaction was as if being unexpectedly stirred from slumber by the barks and yelps of the canine. Much like a poorly trained dog or poorly raised child, the satisfaction of Coulter and Hilton grows as the uproar continues. They suffer from the same disease of needing to satiate their egos with the media attention they believe is deserved. In this addiction, they do not care who they hurt, what they say, or what they have to do, the end prize is the pursuit and capture of attention, no matter how negative or repugnant.

The lesson was learned apparently, later rather than sooner, by the Associated Press. Reported by CNN, the AP decidedly ‘blacked out’ Paris Hilton from media reports for a week and promptly was arrested for driving under the influence the following week:

So you may have heard: Paris Hilton was ticketed the other day for driving with a suspended license. Not huge news, even by celebrity-gossip standards. Here at The Associated Press, we put out an initial item of some 300 words. But it actually meant more to us than that. It meant the end of our experimental blackout on news about Paris Hilton.

It was only meant to be a weeklong ban — not the boldest of journalistic initiatives, and one, we realized, that might seem hypocritical once it ended. And it wasn’t based on a view of what the public should be focusing on — the war in Iraq, for example, or the upcoming election of the next leader of the free world, as opposed to the doings of a partygoing celebrity heiress/reality TV star most famous for a grainy sex video.

No, editors just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t cover this media phenomenon, this creature of the Internet gossip age, for a full week. After that, we’d take it day by day. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice? And would that tell us something interesting?

It turned out that people noticed plenty — but not in the way that might have been expected. None of the thousands of media outlets that depend on AP called in asking for a Paris Hilton story. No one felt a newsworthy event had been ignored.

The media, after years of getting humans like Paris Hilton wrong, finally got it right. But it turned around in less than a month and got Ann Coulter wrong. The reaction to Ann Coulter’s ‘faggot’ episode was flawed not in the direction — almost everyone, left and right, denounced her words — but that the reaction was disparate, coming from all directions, and constantly replayed. Rather than having isolated Coulter, the story found itself on the headlines of CNN and FoxNews website, on Bill O’Reilly’s ‘The Factor’, on MSNBC, and any blog with a political bent. Essentially, Coulter was put on a pedestal — isolated but admired with attention that she did not deserve, aptly labeled by Slate as the press’ Ann Coulter problem.

In the end, there is but one lesson to learn: don’t feed the ego, especially of individuals who don’t deserve it. It’s the only way Ann Coulter and Paris Hilton will go away.

Boston, Raped By The Moon People.

Apparently the Moon people decided to invade us (I TOLD you a preemptive strike against the Moon was necessary). Everyone is either too busy planning war against Iran or snorting coke.

At least these guys are smart enough to be assholes back during the whole proceedings. So some fat Boston cops couldn’t tell the difference between a FUCKING CARTOON CHARACTER and a BOMB, that doesn’t mean the marketers should have to pay for others stupidity. Check out the press conference of Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky, the braintrust behind the Moonnite light bright:

I feel like my hair is pretty perfect but altogether I want to redirect this to the haircuts of the ’70s,” Berdovsky said, ignoring reporters’ shouts.

“I really like the one where the hair curls around to the back,” Stevens replied.

“Oh yeah, that one’s so hot,” Berdovsky then responded.

Frustrated reporters, trying to get the pair to respond to serious questions about the incident that at one point involved the participation of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, finally tossed a question that gave one of them cause to reflect.

When asked whether they were afraid their hair might be cut if they are sent to prison, Berdovsky stopped his rant and answered, “Whatever happens I feel that my hair is safe at the moment.”

While Boston officials were livid, fans of the show mocked authorities for what they called an overreaction.

About a dozen fans gathered outside Charlestown District Court on Thursday morning with signs saying “1-31-07 Never Forget” and “Free Peter.”

Pollution like him swirls around in the gutters of every democracy

Ever wonder why debate about the Middle East is stifled to the dichotomy of either being pro-Israel or pro-Terrorist, and why America was the only country in the world to support Israel while it bombed civilians and infrastructure in Lebanon when it should have just targeted Hezbollah? Come and read about world renowned piece of shit Abe Foxman, President of the Anti-Defamation League.

“Anyone who criticizes Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle Eastern policy … stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite.” That would be where Abe Foxman comes in.”

Indeed, he does. Foxman branded Tony Judt a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite. Judt, if you are interested, is a well-known historian who teaches at NYU and frequent contributer to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. (my favorite article of his is entitled ‘The country that wouldn’t grow up‘, a writing on the 58th anniversary of the creation of Israel). But the most interesting fact about Judt, and Foxmans comments? Judt is Jewish and lost several members of his family to the Holocaust.

Not only does he live in his own state of delusion, but creates an atmosphere that reinforces it — a world full of anti-Semites, waiting eagerly for the chance to execute another Holocaust that can only be stopped by imagining the world as such:

All that, so far as Foxman is concerned, is a pleasing delusion, like the soigné Berlin of 1925. In his most recent book — “Never Again?” — he makes the stupefyingly counterintuitive claim that high rates of Jewish assimilation are a reaction to discriminatory treatment, rather than a proof of the opposite. “One out of three people in these United States believes that the Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S.,” he growled. “That’s a classic anti-Semitic canard.” And yet a Pew Global Attitudes Poll in 2004 found that anti-Semitism had declined in much of the West and was lowest in the United States. A Pew poll last year found American support for Israel as strong now as at any time in the last 13 years.

The damaging element is not Foxman himself, but that he is listened to, his falsities come presented as facts, and his defamation of character and of culture are marketed as the opposite: ‘anti-Defamation’. ‘Experience — primal experience — has taught him that the truth does not win on its own merits; the market for falsehood is just too powerful’.

Touching Kids on the Government’s Time

You can get away with a lot of things in government. You can come to work late. You could just not go to work at all. You could spend your hours and hours of paid time slowly translating your boring, everyday life onto a BLOG.

But the one thing you cannot get away with is being a pedophile. In the least, an elected official pedophile (I’m pretty sure the FBI, DOD, etc. have an affirmative action policy for a minimum amount of pedophilic hires). Or, in the world of our Lords and Gods the Republicans, being a homosexual (since everyone that loves children also loves being a homosexual).

Of course, none of this wouldn’t be aided by arm chair quarterbacking of the world’s greatest, and most renowned, perverts:

That being said, Foley is pretty fucking legit. I’ve been around cybersex since almost the beginning – 1996 – and this guy certainly knows what he’s doing. The main thing that impressed me most was the control of the conversation. The whole time we know that Foley is in control, but he manipulates the teen in such a way that he feels comfortable, even offering up information without being asked. The biggest difficulty one faces when trying to get a stranger to have an orgasm over a computer is that reluctance, that shyness. But because Foley was so impressive, there doesn’t seem to be any reluctance on the part of the teen. While I’m not in the “if” business, it seems to me that if the teen’s mom had not intervened, there would have been so mutual masturbation session within the next ten minutes.

Loose Post-9/11 Lips

Once again, a government employee forgot his lines while trying to cover his bosses mistakes. What kind of sycophant can you be if you can’t even say ‘blown up by terrorists’? Clearly, Mr. Rumsfeld needs to be demoted to the State Department.