Ann Coulter's Fallacies

For this week's essay, let's look at the latest column by Ann Coulter. It's penned in her usual sweet, elegiac style and she titles it, poetically, "Alito ... Boo!" Certainly, if I cannot find a fallacy or a hundred in a column by the woman who recently called for rat poison in John Paul Stevens's cereal, I cannot find fallacies anywhere.

In her op-ed piece, Coulter's point seems to be that Democrats are wimps--or something. One is never quite sure of Coulter's point, because she strings so much invective together that there's hardly a simple, declarative sentence in any of her essays. Not one to beat around the bush (or the Bush), Coulter starts right off comparing the Democrats in Congress to "Saddam Hussein's vaunted 'Elite Republican Guard'-- the ones who ran like scared schoolgirls...." Further on, she talks about "NARAL ladies running around Capitol Hill with machetes."  And she makes sure to mention Joe Biden's "hair plugs."

Her whole essay is one shoddy, yet juicy morsel--fear and loathing served on a platter of blood and iron (in the Bismarckian sense). There are so many straw men, arguments from outrage and ad hominem accusations in Coulter's essay that it seems she really isn't trying to convince her audience of anything. Hers is a pseudo-essay, no more interested in truth value than were the speeches of Joseph Goebbels in the Reichstag. These scurrilous attacks purvey a pulsing, pounding, prurient form of rhetoric. It's so egregious that I have coined a new name for it: the Ann Coulter Fallac-io.

Works Cited
Coulter, Ann. "Alito ... Boo!" Ann Coulter.com. 2005. <http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/welcome.cgi>.