I read with interest this week that Ann Coulter, a commentator not known at all for hyperbole, had set the internet aflame with her latest insult of “idiot” libertarian voters.
“If you are considering voting for the Libertarian candidate in any Senate election, please send me your name and address so I can track you down and drown you,” Coulter cracked in her latest column, a “to do list to save America.”
Ha! That hell-raiser. You see, Coulter doesn’t want right-of-center or otherwise non-Democratic voters to cast a ballot for a Libertarian candidate, because that would siphon votes from the Republican and … never mind. Clearly, the point is that she’ll throw you overboard the seafaring vessel G.O.P. Majority if you don’t acquiesce. Enjoy the hypoxia or the sharks, whichever comes first.
Quite the number of small-L libertarian websites took offense to Coulter’s remark. A sampling of headlines: “Ann Coulter Promises to Track Down and DROWN Libertarians,” “Ann Coulter Wants to ‘Drown’ Libertarians: Come Try to Drown Me—Address Provided” (which is quite good), “Somebody Should Drown Ann Coulter” (unusually hawkish).
Somebody really should cast aside any umbrage taken in response to Coulter. The anti-libertarian shtick has been for hers for years — the multitude of descriptors she has uttered or written about libertarians now has a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day quality about it in its redundancy.
“This is why people think libertarians are p*ssies,” she said on one occasion.
“Most libertarians are cowards, too afraid of liberals to take a stand on the most important issues of our time,” she wrote on another.
“It’s not even liberals I hate so much. I hate groupthink. And the libertarians have it every bit as much as the college liberals I speak to,” she’s said, adding that if she ever reached such a point of intellectual stasis, it’d be “gun-to-the-mouth time.”
Cowards or pansies who are especially insufferable in college: that’s Ann Coulter’s composite libertarian, many snarks in the making. That they’re now cowardly idiots who deserve to drown doesn’t imply they’ve gone through much of a makeover in her mind.