Right Wing: "Threats 'R' Ideas"

Recently on Bill O'Reilly's hateathon, Ann Coulter said that liberal have ideas that are so intellectual that they "just can't fit on a bumpersticker." Further, she claimed that all liberals can't formulate counterarguments to conservative "ideas," all they can do "is throw food." Here's the quote:

If you go speak at a college campus, I promise you, if you don't have a security detail, they will physically attack you, because they are the party of ideas, and they're so intellectual their ideas just can't fit on a bumper sticker. You know, everything else they're always saying about themselves. But when it actually comes time to formulate a counterargument, all they can do is throw food.

Coulter was referring to an incident at the University of Arizona in October 2004 where two men threw a pie at her and missed. The pie throwing incident was an inexcusable breach of civility, but it can hardly be said to constitute a fair and balanced characterization of liberal counterarguments to Ann Coulter's "ideas" or the ideas of the right-wing reactionaries whom she defends so splenetically.

Here's one counterargument, short enough to fit on a bumpersticker, that to my knowledge that neither Ms. Coulter nor her masters and minions have ever addressed: THREATS ARE NOT IDEAS.

Further, threats which pose as ideas, are not ideas, they are threats in disguise. When George "Divine Right" Bush justifies spying on Americans because it would have saved and will save American lives, not only is he lying, he is also invoking a threat of death while at the same time pointing toward those who would stop him from rewriting the Constitution as those who are responsible and will be responsible for American deaths: terrorists, and by extension, their liberal dupes.

One of the favorite strategies of the right is to project onto liberals their own hate-mongering tactics. For instance, Coulter in her statement above suggests that it is Liberals who are unwilling to engage in the free exchange of ideas, who would instead simply throw food.

Ms. Coulter, to my knowledge, has never advanced any ideas. She has worked energetically to attack any person or group who might attempt to suggest that real political debate is something other than the constant reiteration of the cynical collection of focus-group-tested wedge issues so beloved of the right: Guns, God, and Gays. And the corollary to the God "issue": God = Free Market.

And, of course, she has made threats against her political enemies, most recently, and interestingly, a food-related threat against Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. She suggested that someone should put rat poison on his creme brulee. After making this threat she explained: "That's just a joke, for you in the media."

I'm not sure how this can be seen as a joke. At best it's a jokey threat, but in the same way that threats are not ideas, suggesting that one's political enemies should be poisoned simply can't be accepted as a joke.

If such a suggestion can actually be claimed and taken as a joke, then the political sphere has become so toxic, so coarsened by the hate- and war-mongering of the right-wing, then this "joke" must be taken as a sign that reasonable people must work even harder to resurrect and renovate the shattered public forum of decent democratic debate in this once great country of ours.