Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Ann Coulter, 43 or 45, Conservative Commentator, Dies

Well, not really. My assignment for an unnamed humor magazine whose future theme issue was death was to write an obituary in the deadpan style of the New York Times, who despite failings in other areas produces the best death notices in the American media, for the right-wing poster babe. They killed the piece, but that's what the Internet is for--to show off stuff that might never have seen the light of day. So, enjoy!

In anticipation of the obvious question, all of the Coulter quotes are genuine. All else is satire.


Ann Coulter, 43 or 45, Conservative Commentator, Dies

Ann Coulter, the outspoken conservative columnist and the author of bestselling polemical tracts, died on Thursday at an apartment leased to Sean Hannity on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The cause was internal bleeding in her lower aorta, said Hannity, a long-time friend.
She claimed to have been 43 and listed a 1963 birthdate on her District of Columbia driver's license, but she was 45 according to her Connecticut and Florida voter registrations, as well as a duplicate driver's license she obtained from the State of Connecticut. Because her age and gender must be determined in order to comply with new counterterrorism regulations governing the identities of deceased citizens, a skin sample will be subjected to a DNA test.
Ann Hart Coulter was probably born on December 8, 1961 in New York City, to her father John Vincent Coulter, a "union buster" lawyer (her words), and Nell Husbands Martin Coulter. Her grandfather Hunter Hart Martin was née Hunter Hart Wiessinger, but presumably changed his name for reasons of self-hatred). Raised in New Canaan, Connecticut, Coulter attended Cornell University, where she co-founded the conservative Cornell Review and graduated cum laude in 1984. She received her law degree from the University of Michigan and eventually became a litigator for the anti-government Center for Individual Rights.
Coulter died from injuries sustained on September 11, 2006, when the historic replica of a dirigible in which she was riding exploded over the Hudson River near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, killing 11 people, six of them illegal immigrants from Honduras, on a garbage barge passing below. The German ambassador to the United Nations had invited her aboard Germany's new LZ 131 Graf Zeppelin III's maiden voyage as his guest of honor; they were watching the ceremonies commemorating the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks when the blast occurred. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board believe that Coulter initiated the accident when she fired a pistol as she stormed the airship's flight deck in the mistaken belief that its bearded pilot was an Islamic hijacker.
President Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, for her "valorous Valkyrie-like vigilance."
Coulter, who simultaneously resided in Washington, New York, Connecticut and Florida, was an outspoken firebrand who defended traditional American values against what she saw as the depredations of militant secularist liberals determined to subvert them. Although privately shy, she struggled against the demons of introversion in thousands of television and lectures before packed, rapt audiences of admirers. "I'm dreadfully afraid of the limelight," she once confessed during an interview with Larry King, "but if not me, who? I have a duty."
She was best known as the author of five epic treatises in a variety of disciplines, all of which appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list. Her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (Regnery, 1998) became an immediate literary sensation. "Coulter's outrage at interoffice miscegenation between a sitting president and a kneeling intern serves as a convenient vehicle which she exploits in order to introduce a new voice in American letters," wrote a reviewer for The New Yorker. "Her supple manipulation of the soft curves of the Romantic aspects of English language literature, coupled with sly hip-hop-infused feints at the postmodern didacticism presided over by the cult of dead irony and Amy Tan," said The New York Review of Books, "has shattered the status quo. She doesn't merely write in English. She is English."
Coulter's second work, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown Forum, 2002), took a less lyrical tone, perhaps the result of her reliance on a 1970s-era Dictaphone to transcribe it after repeated evenings spent experimenting with acid reflux. "Liberals hate America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9/11," Coulter wrote in a passage frequently cited as the epitome of the can-do spirit of patriotism. "The good part of being a Democrat is that you can commit crimes, sell out your base, bomb foreigners, and rape women, and the Democratic faithful will still think you're the greatest."
Although Slander was as not well received by critics as High Crimes, her philosophy, since dubbed Americism, is now widely taught and accepted as inarguable by academia, the media and ordinary people in the United States and overseas. "It's obviously true," said Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) upon being informed of her death, "that I hate America, flag-wavers, and abortion opponents. And also all religions except Islam. Post 9/11. Raping women—I'm into that too. Dammit! There's just no way to turn a phrase the way Annie did."
Coulter rebounded with Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (Crown Forum, 2003), this time forcing a radical rethinking of 20th century history by rehabilitating McCarthyism and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, as well as supply-side economics. ("It did too work," she scoffed at economists.) Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado history professor who once called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," said Treason had forced him and other left-of-center theorists to rethink their views. "The Treason shockwave continues to rumble across historians' chat groups," he said. "Its full effect may ultimately be unknowable, but I and others of my ilk have pretty much stopped reading anything else."
A collection of columns that appeared in several pairs of newspapers, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) soon appeared, followed by Godless: The Church of Liberalism, a book whose brilliant, irrefutable 69-word proof of Intelligent Design earned her a posthumous Nobel Prize for editorial biology.
Here it is:
"Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record—and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God."
Godless also unveiled Coulter's Grand Corollary of Procyonid Gaseous Emanation: "Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don't accept the giant raccoon flatulence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat."
"Can't argue with that," remarked Professor Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge.
At the time of the zeppelin incident Coulter had been working on a new collection of essays that "would have changed everything we know about music, cooking and anthropology," said her companion Hannity. The uncompleted manuscript will be released next year under the title Tuneless: How Democrat Communist Hacks Corrupted Anglo-Saxon Culture.
Despite seemingly universal acclaim—Coulter was feted by personalities as diverse as the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Pat Robertson—Coulter suffered criticism for her views. At a January 26, 2006 speech to the influential student body at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Coulter called for "somebody to put rat poison in Justice [John Paul] Stevens' crème brulée."
"Killing a Supreme Court justice is one thing," scolded the New York Law Review, "but it is irresponsible to promote slow-acting poison over more humane, constitutionally approved methods such as lethal injection."
Shortly before her accident at the 9/11 "Five More Years" bash, Coulter came under fire when it came to light that her most recent promotional photo had been digitally airbrushed to make her look significantly heavier. The touched-up photo seemed to add 20 pounds to her trademark skeletal frame, angering activists in the anorexia-acceptance movement. "At 87 pounds Ann is a beautiful woman, an inspiration to college girls and genocide survivors the world over," said Rosie O'Donnell, who slashed two-thirds of her body weight in tribute to Coulter. "If anything, they should have Photoshopped her vertically to make her look even skinnier."
In accordance with her wishes, Coulter's ashes will be scattered across the grave of Buchenwald overseer Ilse Koch at Aichach women's prison in Bavaria. She is survived by ex-boyfriends Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative author, television talk show host Bill Maher and Spin magazine founder Bob Guccione, Jr.

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