Ann Coulter, the legendary troll of the right, sat across from Sean Hannity to discuss the piece recently penned by Monica Lewinsky for Vanity Fair. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember Lewinsky was the young White House intern who, between 1995 and 1997, was engaged in an affair with President Bill Clinton that eventually led to Clinton’s impeachment and the Lewinsky Scandal.
Since this is Ann Coulter, any expectations you have regarding basic human decency can be left at the door.
Hannity started the segment on a surprisingly merciful note, saying that he wishes people would just leave Lewinsky alone, highlighting the parts of Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair essay that point out she was suicidal. Coulter, meanwhile, was… well, she was Ann Coulter.
I think the only hope for her . . . she’s gotta become a Christian, because she is just going to end up in worse and worse despair, and more meaninglessness to her life. She went through a very tough time, but I would add to that, having said that, first of all, she shows, and this is part of the reason, she shows just an utter lack of personal responsibility, something I write about in my book, Godless, that Theodore Dalrymple [Andrew Daniels], who interviewed a lot of criminals, described.
It’s interesting, because here’s what Lewinsky had to say in her piece, according to CNN:
“At the time — at least from my point of view — it was an authentic connection, with emotional intimacy, frequent visits, plans made, phone calls and gifts exchanged,” she writes. “In my early 20s, I was too young to understand the real life consequences.”
Looking back, Lewinsky muses on how difficult it was for her to move on. “Unlike the other parties involved, I was so young that I had no established identity to which I could return.”
“If you haven’t figured out how you are, it’s hard not to accept the horrible image of you created by others,” she observes. “I remained ‘stuck’ for far too many years.”Coulter continued, disagreeing with Lewinsky on her claim that it was consensual, because if there’s anything all of us know Republicans understand, it’s consent:
Just one more thing, that I want to disagree with her on. The article was this big coming out; it was consensual, that she was in love with the big — that isn’t the point. We know she was doggedly pursuing him, but to say this wasn’t a power imbalance — this is like women who say a woman can do anything a man can do — really, can you be quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks? It was a power imbalance, he was an adult, she was not, he was the president.
Sean jumped in to correct: “She was in her twenties for crying out loud!”
Twenty-four, to be precise. If you listen to Coulter carefully, Coulter is trying to have it both ways: painting Lewinsky like she’s old enough to understand what she did and own up to it, but young enough to not give consent to the affair (thereby implying that she wouldn’t understand the full scope of it).They went on to list a long number of women who were allegedly abused by Clinton; Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and others, leading Hannity to say, “Because the war on women, the Republicans are guilty, war on women, wait a minute. They started a war against women to a degree that we have not seen before.”
This lead Coulter to say, “Right, right. They’re against rape unless it’s committed by a Clinton or a Kennedy.”
Actually, the opposite is true: Republicans are pro-rape, unless it was committed by a Clinton or a Kennedy. How else are we supposed to take Todd Akin’s remarks regarding “legitimate rape?” It seems like every time a Republican opens their mouth regarding rape, or domestic abuse, they shove their foot in it, and then there’s the anti-abortion, anti-birth control, and Coulter herself is on record discussing the impact of taking away women’s rights to vote. The last thing they need to be doing is talking about a “war on women.”
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