The emerging conventional wisdom about the 2008 presidential election is that Iraq will be a dominant and perhaps decisive issue and, in part as a result of that assumption, the Democratic nominee -- whoever that may be -- will have a significant advantage over his or her Republican counterpart.

The Coulter-Matthews-Dowd continuum

The emerging conventional wisdom about the 2008 presidential election is that Iraq will be a dominant and perhaps decisive issue and, in part as a result of that assumption, the Democratic nominee -- whoever that may be -- will have a significant advantage over his or her Republican counterpart.

A historically strong Democratic primary field, coupled with a truly bizarre Republican field -- the top three contenders are all likely to alienate large portions of the conservative base and of moderate and independent voters -- justifiably contributes to the perception that Democrats have an edge. (Writing for The American Prospect, Matthew Yglesias has provided what may be the definitive big-picture explanation of the flaws of the leading Republican candidates.) Not to mention the fact that each week seems to bring further evidence that John Kerry's famous description of the GOP as “the most crooked, you know, lying group of people I've ever seen” was, if anything, too kind.

We'd like to believe that the candidates' actual positions on Iraq -- along with their health care plans and economic agendas -- will be among the keys to the 2008 election; that they will be judged on their qualifications and competence.

Unfortunately, we know that the next presidential election is as likely to be decided by the same kind of breathtaking inanity that has determined the outcome of so many recent political struggles as it is to turn on policy positions and professional qualifications.

For example, the constant drone of derisive but substance-free chatter about the candidates that the media too often mistake for “analysis” or “wit.”

In the wake of the latest example of Ann Coulter's mindless bigotry, some have suggested that it's best to ignore Coulter. Time.com Washington editor Ana Marie Cox, for example, wrote this week:

I really only have one thought about her: That we should not think about her. [...] [S]he, like any bully, will go away if you ignore her.

[...]

I really believe we should ignore her. “We” meaning, I guess, the MSM [mainstream media]. Sure, she'll continue to get top billing at CPAC, but beyond the tinfoil hat brigade, her influence is limited. And if we studiously avert our eyes from her ghoulish visage -- bonus! -- she'll have to get more and more outrageous in order to get our attention, which will marginalize her further. I mean, look at the wingnuts who denounced her recently.

It seems obvious that the “wingnuts who denounced her recently” did so precisely because the “MSM” did not ignore her.

After all, at last year's CPAC, Coulter referred to Muslims as “ragheads,” the MSM ignored her -- and the wingnuts didn't denounce her. And when Coulter called Al Gore a "total fag" on MSNBC in 2006, the MSM ignored her (except for Chris Matthews, on whose show Coulter made her comments. Matthews finished the interview by announcing that "[w]e'd love to have her back.") Needless to say, the wingnuts didn't denounce Coulter then, either. Nor did the wingnuts denounce her any of the various times she has suggested violence against Democrats, liberals, or journalists.

The MSM's failure to properly convey the extent of Ann Coulter's bigotry, nastiness, and irresponsibility hasn't resulted in her being “marginalized” -- it has helped her become an icon of the right without any accountability for the conservative movement that embraces her. Coulter's column, receptacle of much of her hate speech, appears in numerous newspapers across the country. Media Matters, outraged emailers -- 834 by one editor's count -- and others have begun to put a real dent in her reach. Yesterday, we posted a list of papers running her column, as well as their email addresses, and the parade of op-ed pages announcing that they are dropping her is growing almost by the hour.

All of which brings us to the first of two reasons why it is actually important that we don't ignore Ann Coulter.

If Coulter's seething hatred was hers alone, she might best be ignored. But that ugly and unthinking hatred isn't unique to Coulter.

Instead, Coulter's anger and venom are illustrative of the modern conservative movement. Her vitriol is embraced and rewarded by right-wing audiences far and wide. Her intellectual and rhetorical peers -- Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck, among others -- are, like Coulter, anything but “marginalized.” They unleash vicious tirades against gays, women, minorities, and liberals -- and are paid handsomely for it. And they are paid not only in cash, but in respect: Vice President Dick Cheney, for example, sometimes seems to be auditioning to be Limbaugh's co-host, while President Bush opens the Oval Office to the likes of Neal Boortz and Sean Hannity.

Ann Coulter's bigotry and hostility, her public fantasies about violence against Democrats, progressives, and journalists -- and those of countless others like her -- demand more attention, not less. They illustrate the irrational anger that has long driven and sustained the conservative movement. (Those who insist on believing, against all available evidence, that the left is driven more by anger than the right would do well to remember that, during the 2000 Florida recount fiasco, it was the Republicans who rioted, not the Democrats.) But those who applaud Coulter can't win or hold power on their own -- there just aren't enough angry, hate-filled voters in the country. They need the support of more rational and reasonable people, many of whom would be appalled -- and no longer supportive -- if the media showed them the true nature of the extremists they support.

But the most interesting -- and important -- thing about Coulter's hate speech isn't that it is representative the of attitudes of her ideological fellow travelers.

It is the similarity between what Ann Coulter was trying to do by calling John Edwards a “faggot” and what countless “respectable” members of the “MSM” do every day.

Coulter's comments, of course, weren't about convincing people that John Edwards is gay. They were about trying to strip him of his masculinity, to feminize him -- and in doing so take advantage of the cultural stereotypes that equate strength with men and weakness with women to portray Edwards as “wussy” (her word).

The use of epithets like “faggot” to feminize and weaken seems largely self-evident, but for those who desire or require further discussion of this topic, bloggers such as Digby, Bob Somerby, and Andrew Sullivan have all made excellent points this week; excerpts of their work appear below. Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, explained a corollary principle: “As critical as it is to them to feminize Democratic and liberal males (and to masculinize the women), even more important is to create false images of masculine power and strength around their authority figures.”

Again: this is nothing new for Coulter. She has long made efforts to feminize those with whom she disagrees a cornerstone of her overheated rhetoric:

• On Al Gore: "seemed kind of gay."
• On Al Gore: "total fag."
• On Bill Clinton: "latent homosexual."
• On John Kerry: “Kerry claims he will stand up to powerful interests, but he can't even stand up to his wife. ... Kerry clearly has no experience dealing with problems of typical Americans since he is a cad and a gigolo living in the lap of other men's money. ... This low-born poseur with his threadbare pseudo-Brahmin family bought a political career with one rich woman's money, dumped her, and made off with another heiress to enable him to run for president. If Democrats want to talk about middle-class tax cuts, couldn't they nominate someone who hasn't been a poodle to rich women for the past 33 years?” [1/30/04]
• On John Edwards: “True, Edwards made more money than his father did. I assume strippers make more money than their alcoholic fathers who abandoned them did, too. ... Kerry picks a pretty-boy milquetoast as his running mate, narrowly edging out a puppy for the spot.” [7/11/04]
• On John Edwards: “After Dick Cheney had beaten Edwards about the head for a while during the debate, Edwards waved his girlish hands and said: 'There are 60 countries who have members of al-Qaida in them. How many of those countries are we going to invade?'”
• “Fortunately for me, liberals not only argue like liberals, they also throw like girls. Liberals enjoy claiming they are intellectuals, thrilled to engage in a battle of wits.” [4/17/05]
• On The New York Times: "Revenge of the queers."

But, as usual, Coulter's outbursts are most interesting for what they demonstrate about others. And Coulter's attempts to feminize progressives may be more vulgar than most, but that only makes them more obvious, not more harmful. Instead, it is likely that the frequent but (slightly) more subtle feminization of progressives by “mainstream” journalists has far greater impact than Coulter's uncontrolled braying.

Take, for example, the steady stream of journalist/pundit comments seizing on specious claims about Al Gore turning to a woman for instruction on how to be an “Alpha Male.”

Or the full-court press by Fox News to convince the world that John Kerry -- unlike “most men” -- enjoys an occasional manicure.

Or the description of John Edwards as the “Breck Girl” -- a sneering, feminizing insult that first appeared attributed to an anonymous “Bush associate” in a 2003 New York Times article, but was quickly embraced by journalists and pundits who adopted it as their own.

In March 2004, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd highlighted the “Breck Girl” label as an example of the “nasty Republican habit of portraying opponents as less than fully masculine.” Still, it's a habit she can't kick: She has used the phrase “Breck Girl” four times in three columns since then -- not to mention countless other occasions when she has compared Barack Obama to Scarlett O'Hara or called him “Obambi” or otherwise indulged her own “nasty habit.”

Not that Dowd is alone. On election night in 2004, MSNBC viewers were treated to this exchange about Edwards between Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough:

SCARBOROUGH: But he don't play in West Virginia, though.

MATTHEWS: Pardon me?

SCARBOROUGH: I said, but he don't play in West Virginia.

MATTHEWS: Why not?

SCARBOROUGH: Look at him. He just doesn't play in West Virginia,

MATTHEWS: He is not rough-looking enough?

SCARBOROUGH: He's not -- you know what? They'd rather hang out with W. shooting guns.

[crosstalk]

MATTHEWS: He's got the Breck Girl problem, right?

[crosstalk]

SCARBOROUGH: It's the Breck Girl problem.

(One wonders what the Manly Men who inhabit Matthews' psyche, sneering at Breck Girls, must think of a television host prone to making Breakfast at Tiffany's references. But we digress ...)

Earlier in the campaign, Matthews had referred to the vice presidential debate as “Shrek versus Breck.” In previewing that debate, Matthews, NBC's Andrea Mitchell, and Newsweek's Jon Meacham -- who had earlier described Edwards as “very well coifed” -- agreed that Cheney would make the Breck Girl's prettiness an issue during the debate:

MATTHEWS: He'll call him cute. He'll say I don't have the hair.

MEACHAM: There'll be a hair joke.

MATTHEWS: Will he do that?

MEACHAM: There will definitely be a hair moment.

MATTHEWS: A hair moment.

MITCHELL: And pretty.

MATTHEWS: And pretty. The Breck Girls. Breck vs. [unintelligible].

During the 2004 Democratic National Convention, after playing a clip of Edwards declaring that a Kerry-Edwards administration would “destroy” Al Qaeda, Mitchell told viewers: “He's too pretty to say that.”

No, really. She did. And right on cue, as if to make Pavlov proud, Joe Scarborough chimed in with a Breck Girl reference, while Chris Matthews compared Edwards to Pee Wee Herman.

They do it ever so slightly less offensively than Ann Coulter does, but Matthews and Dowd and Mitchell and countless others have been calling John Edwards a girl for years.

On Thursday, The New York Sun chimed in with a headline: "Could Edwards Become First Woman President?"

Rush Limbaugh immediately used the headline on his radio show. In case anyone doubts the connection between the Dowd/Matthews/Mitchell Axis of Inanity's constant invocation of the “Breck Girl” sobriquet, The New York Sun's “first woman president” headline, and Ann Coulter's use of the word “faggot,” Limbaugh made it clear:

LIMBAUGH: Try this headline. Ann Coulter, if you're out there listening, listen to this heading from The New York Sun today, “Could John Edwards become the first woman president?” It's by Josh Gerstien in The New York Sun: “Toni Morrison famously dubbed Bill Clinton 'America's First black President.' With that barrier broken” -- Obama, you hear that? The first black president barrier has been broken -- “With that barrier broken, the comments of a prominent feminist are provoking debate about who may lay a similar claim to the title of America's first woman president. The candidate being touted as a torchbearer for women is not” Mrs. Bill Clinton, but one of her former colleagues, John Edwards the Breck Girl.

At a rally near the University of California-Berkeley campus this week, a veteran of the abortion-rights movement, Kate Michelman, asked and answered the question she gets most frequently about her decision to back the Breck girl. Why John Edwards, given the historic nature of our extraordinary campaign for the presidency this year with Mrs. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and all the others? “Well, I've gotten to know a lot of political leaders over the years, I've been an advocate for women's rights, and I know the difference between those who advocate as a political position and those who understand the reality of women's lives.” Compared to Mrs. Bill Clinton, the Breck girl is short an X chromosome -- is this not absurd? - “but listening to Ms. Michelman, that's easy to forget. As a lawyer, as a senator, as a husband, as a father of two daughters, he understands the reality of women's lives. He understands the centrality of women's lives and experience in the health and well-being of society as a whole. He understands that on an extremely personal level. ... She did acknowledge recently to an online magazine Salon.com that touting the Breck Girl did necessarily mean criticzing his opponents. Pressed for how the Breck Girl could have a feel for women's problems” -- this is too ripe. I'm practicing restrain like you can't believe here. “Pressed for how the Breck Girl could have a feel for women's problems that is even comparable to someone like Mrs. Bill Clinton, Ms. Michelman said her concerns go beyond identifying the issues.

[...]

LIMBAUGH: Now Ms. Michelman's decision after a career in the women's movement” -- which by the way as I say, I love the women's movement, don't get confused here I love the women's movement, especially walking behind it.

[...]

LIMBAUGH: So John Edwards, on tap now, according to one of the nation's largest abortion-rights supporters, to become the first woman president in the United States, and of course the barriers down, the first black president Bill Clinton, that barrier's broken [laughs]. Sometimes all you can do is laugh at these people.

Why pay attention to Ann Coulter? Because she and Limbaugh and their ilk speak for the conservative movement. And because Maureen Dowd and Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell speak in much the same way -- except that nobody denounces them, and they do more damage. And that, as much as Iraq or health care or the economy, is likely to define the 2008 presidential campaign.

Why pay attention to Ann Coulter? Because her description of John Edwards as a “faggot” may finally be what it takes for people to get mad about Dowd using more polite words to call a long line of Democrats the same thing.

***

Digby explains:

A lot of the shrieking aversion to the dirty hippie came from all that “feminine” hair on men's heads and “masculine” hair on women's bodies, if you'll recall. My brother was constantly harrassed about “looking like a girl” in 1966 Mississippi for having hair below his collar. In those days, hair was a political statement and even though forty years have passed and most of those people can only dream about all that hair they no longer have, the right successfully parlayed that gender role anxiety into a political narrative that continues to powerfully effect politics today.

Coulter is somewhat desperate so she's articulating this stuff in a crude and obvious fashion in order to keep her stale schtick going. But this concept is so ingrained in the political culture by now that the only thing that really stands out about it is the fact that she used an obvious epithet that is out of public fashion, even at a rightwing event. Suppose she had used the silly word “girlyman”? Nobody would be calling for the smelling salts. In fact, I would imagine the press corps would have told us all to “get over it.”

Bob Somerby:

But then, why should pundits criticize Coulter when she describes Dem males as big “f*ggots?” It's very similar to the gender-based “analysis” their dauphine, the Comptesse Maureen Dowd, has long offered. In Dowd's work, John Edwards is routinely “the Breck Girl”(five times so far -- and counting), and Gore is “so feminized that he's practically lactating.” Indeed, two days before we voted in November 2000, Dowd devoted her entire column, for the sixth time, to an imaginary conversation between Gore and his bald spot. “I feel pretty,” her headline said (pretending to quote Gore's inner thoughts).That was the image this idiot wanted you carrying off to the voting booth with you! Such is the state of Maureen Dowd's broken soul. And such is the state of her cohort.

And now, in the spirit of fair play and brotherhood, she is extending this type of “analysis” to Barack Obama. In the past few weeks, she has described Obama as “legally blonde” (in her headline); as “Scarlett O'Hara” (in her next column); as a “Dreamboy,” as “Obambi,” and now, in her latest absurd piece, as a “schoolboy” (text below). Do you get the feeling that Dowd may have a few race-and-gender issues floating around in her inane, tortured mind? But this sort of thing is nothing new for the comptesse. Indeed, such imagery almost defines the work of this loathsome, inane Antoinette.

Coulter has been visibly disturbed ever since hitting cable in the mid-90s. But Dowd is a borderline nutcase too -- a slightly cleaned up version of Coulter. (Ah, we Irish! Yes, each had an Irish Catholic dad.) Coulter comes right out and calls Dem men “f*ggots” -- but Maureen Dowd has always come close. Just as Chris Matthews is a slightly cleaned-up [Catholic League president] William Donohue, Dowd is a more presentable Coulter. For mainstream voters, Maureen is easier to take. For that reason, she has done us more harm.

Coulter teaches contempt for gays, and tries to extend that contempt to Dem pols. But that's what Dowd has done all these years! And we liberals and Dems have been too weak to understand and address the problem.

Andrew Sullivan:

Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it's worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn't homophobic. It was, in her words, a “school-yard taunt,” directed at a straight man, meaning a “wuss” and a “sissy”. Why would gays care? She is “pro-gay,” after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into “reparative therapy” to “cure” them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.

[...]

Coulter's defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. But it isn't. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word “faggot” is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. She knew why Edwards qualified. He's pretty, he has flowing locks, he's young-looking. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a “faggot” by his straight peers. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. And that's what she was doing: trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. It happens every day. It's how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.

And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men - and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. We have as much and maybe more courage than many -- because we have had to acquire it to survive. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight -- the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.

Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a Marine come out to tell their stories. I'd like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American serviceman to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss? What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men “boys”? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that's what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said -- and conservatives applauded -- that I and so many others are not men. We are men, Ann.

Washington Post editorial page still can't handle the truth of CIA leak investigation

Last week, we touted the groundbreaking work the weblog Firedoglake.com has done covering the Libby case. Next week, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert will examine some coverage of the trial we could have done without: that of the Washington Post editorial pages.

The newspaper that once called for a special counsel to investigate the Clintons even while acknowledging that “there has been no credible charge in this case that either the president or Mrs. Clinton did anything wrong” -- and that treated Clinton probes that ended without criminal charges as evidence of their guilt -- reacted to this week's conviction of Scooter Libby by ... declaring his innocence.

Boehlert will have all the gory details on Tuesday.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.