If you like Coulter even a little, you'll LOATHE her after reading this

[BurtWorm]

Today's Daily Howler is one of Bob Somerby's masterpieces of decontruction. Very few have the patience or iron stomach required to do what Somerby does, which he calls, going deep into the weeds, In particular, he tears apart this paragraph and its attendant footnotes to shine light on Coulter's patholoigical drive to slander and lie:

COULTER (Slander; page 12): After Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion contrary to the clearly expressed position of the New York Times editorial page, the Times responded with an editorial on Thomas titled “The Youngest, Cruelest Justice.” That was actually the headline on a lead editorial in the Newspaper of Record. Thomas is not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy. He is called “a colored lawn jockey for conservative white interests,” “race traitor,” “black snake,” “chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom,” <39> “house Negro” and “handkerchief head,” “Benedict Arnold” <40> and “Judas Iscariot.” <41>



http://www.dailyhowler.com /


Good grief! Let’s state the obvious. This passage seems to say that the New York Times wrote an editorial about Thomas, in which Thomas “was not engaged on the substance of his judicial philosophy” but was instead called a string of vile names. Unfortunately, none of this is true. And yes, observers noticed some of the problems here—Charles Taylor in Salon, for example:

TAYLOR (6/27/02): The passage is conveniently phrased to make it look as if the quotes, as well as the headline, appear in the Times editorial. They don't (notes in the back of the book identify the sources as former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elder's interview in Playboy, and Joseph Lowery at a meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference quoted in the New Yorker). Coulter sets up the passage to give the impression that the Times called Thomas a "lawn jockey" and a "house Negro" and hopes that we won't notice that she's fudged it.

For the record, the estimable Taylor was much too kind when he said that Coulter had “fudged it.” In fact, the Times editorial included none of the terms that Coulter put inside those quotes; Coulter had simply invented a nasty claim, then sold it for 26 bucks to the rubes. Hopefully, Salon’s readers were repulsed by what Taylor revealed—by the nasty, inexcusable way Coulter put these words in the mouth of the Times, where they didn’t belong. But uh-oh! Sadly but understandably, even Taylor was taken in by the depth of Coulter’s pathology. In fact, Coulter’s faking went well beyond her bogus claims about the Times; the footnotes to which Taylor referred were thoroughly bogus too! No, those nasty phrases didn’t come from Joycelyn Elders’ Playboy interview. They came from a totally different source—an unexciting source which Coulter cut-and-pasted (i.e.: plagiarized), then failed to ID in her footnotes....