Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Paxman, Paxmaned?
Jeremy Paxman, famous for his contemptuous one line put downs, meets his match with a fearsome advocate for the US right Anne Coulter. Someone should have warned him, surely?
Update: It’s official: Paxman was indeed beaten!
Mick Fealty @ 07:38 AM
Proves the point that any point of view taken to the extreme becomes lunacy, but boy does it sell books.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:04 AMYeah, but she is a pretty cool customer too. I disagree with her on a lot of things, I guess (being a liberal and all that), but I admire her ability to stand her ground.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:07 AMThere’s a message in there too about reading what’s been written and attacking it in its own terms. I thought her remarks on Darwinism were interesting and could have been followed up. But it didn’t fit Paxo’s script.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:08 AM“Meets his match”???
Come on Mick - this looked to me like an encounter between a deranged adolescent siuationist and a calm, bemused and properly condescending elder. Coulter lost this one hands down.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:19 AMBemused,
Coulter lost this one hands down.
You think so? On what points did she lose? I didn’t see him getting even the tip of his lance through her slimy reptilian scales*
[* That’s a St George and the dragon analogy, not a smutty one!]
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:24 AMIs there a transcript of it? Open plan offices don’t lend themselves to audio files…
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:25 AMI remember watching this and it was great TV and she gave as good as she got. But it is frightening to think there are so many highly intelligent people who are so absolutist.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:35 AMthat young lady shows promise, but she’d need to spend a few weeks here to see how bad soft headed liberalism really gets. I hope she keeps improving
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:37 AMShe sure has a best-selling formula. Take someone who is very bright, very self-confident, extremely telegenic, calm, well-spoken and ever-so-reasonable and allow them to espouse the most simplistic of popular misguided prejudice and you have created a sure-fire winner. Any criticism of her from the liberals is doomed to failure (except before an already liberal audience) as her audience already despises liberalism and holds all that flows from rational enlightenment thinking in utter contempt. Her secret is to allow her audience not to feel stupid for holding their beliefs before what they see as snotty superior liberal commentators who look down on them. And boy, does it ever work!
She’s an A-student with all the B’s : Beauty; brains; balls and absolute (if feigned) bloody belief to boot.
No previous US right wing demonologist that I can think of -Joe McCarthy; George Wallace; Jerry Falwell ever before managed to also become a subject for erotic fantasy in the minds of their left-wing detractors.
Let’s face it fellow lefties she’s our very own Tokyo Rose - we hate what she’s saying but - oh, boy!
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 08:46 AMPaxman allowed her to make herself look ridiculous. She came across as eyebrow-raisingly undergraduate. I agree with Bemused. None of her answers were remotely satisfactory.
The “I’m just critiquing Darwinism” stuff was code for “I realise all the other so-called alternative theories are so diaphanously thin or comically absurd that I can’t plausibly advance them, so I’ll take the easy stance of criticising a theory on the grounds that it does not provide a full “my-first-picture-book” explanation to an infinitely complex series of questions”.
And “it’s the most popular book in the States” hardly represents a reasoned defence of her peurile, intellectually vacuous book.
Liberals MUST read the book though. It (like all her other books) is poorly written, pompous and vindictive, but it gives an insight into how hate makes all arguments possible, and why the right is so angry.
Paxman’s lost it a little though. Why didn0t he ask if she would be comfortable with Muslim prayer in American schools? Also, it’s disappointingly, though typical of the English establishment, that Paxman still can’t forgive Gerry Adams for the various schoolboy spankings Gerry’s given him over the last few years. Paxman and his ilk will never change their spots. Terrible having these smart-mouthed paddies running around. Can you imagine him describing Nelson Mandela as a terrorist?
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:02 AMThe American division of right and left, reactionary and liberal, does not really apply in the same way elsewhere.
Darwin was no liberal. He felt that his ‘survival of the fittest’ principles could and should be applied to society in general, so that the economically strongest could crush the weak.
Nietzsche and Hitler regarded themselves as his followers.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:13 AMPaddyReilly
... and your point is?
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:29 AMmeet his match, nah i dont think so, takes a george galloway to rumble humble paxman,......yer woman is an american version of paisley,full of hot air and bluster with a copious amount of brown lips
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:29 AMPaxman let her off the hook, probably because he tried to cover too many subjects in a short interview.
He should have nailed her to propose alternative approaches to teaching Darwinism in schools.
Her comment that a restaurant critic doesn’t have to open a restaurant to be a critic was well rehearsed but flawed. A restaurant critic has to eat and thus must have some restaurants they recommend. Thus it’s fine to criticise Darwinism but lets have your recommendation.Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:36 AMPaddy Reilly,
You left Marx off the list of Darwin’s admirers. He wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin on the basis that he had discovered the laws of society as Darwin had discovered those in nature, but was refused permission.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:38 AMPaxman fairly meandered over this one. There was no actual debate on any of her points, and of course anyone would give the same answer to “do you really believe what you’ve written?”. Darwin’s theory on the morphological differences of species gave rise to neo-Darwinism, which is essentially a revised theory based on the evidence of modern genetics. So, while it may be accurate to say Darwin was wrong, it’s also glib and blinkered. Few 19th century theories survive unpunctured today.
Vitriol sells.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 09:54 AMRory: You made hte best point so far. The others forget Paxman s a second rater too. Go listen to right wing talk radio or Fox. Hicksville Central laps up this drivel.
I saw her onece being interviewed about foreign aid. When it was mentioned Norway gives much higher % than the USA. her quip was they were all Quislings during the war.
Coulter IS the level of debate in the USA and Paxman etc don’t cut it on US debating rules. Green Apples and orange Orangies old chap.Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 10:18 AMDoes this not tell you a great deal about the USA of today and the UK of tomorrow. I have no doubt somewhere in the UK a similar bimbo is being rehearsed to be let loose on our TV screens via Richard and Julie.
Even a few years ago someone such as her who spouts provable nonsense would not have been given house room within the US/UK mainstream media. What is up with the US white middle classes, [i use the term as it should be used, not to describe working class people with jobs] they support and applaud such people not because they truly believe all they say, but because they reinforce their wretched prejudices and give them an acceptable face.
Most of this woman’s groupies, for that is what they are, went through higher education, university so they know most of what she spouts is nonsense. Yet as they see religion as a bastion against a wicked world, they are prepared to enrich her and sit at her feet, it really is impossible not to have contempt for these born again types.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 10:21 AMandy town rebel
She made Paisley look like someone from Alliance! Not the same ballpark, not even the same sport.
This amount of invective can only be for one reason - to sell books. If the fundamentalist neo-con christian right in the USA lap this up and buy her books, that’s fine: that’s the audience she’s playing to. Most of America laughs and shakes it’s head like the rest of us. You have to say though, her marketing must be top notch, she made it on to the BBC after all.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 10:54 AMUpdate: It’s official: Paxman was indeed beaten!
Really?
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 11:10 AMRory “ Take someone who is very bright, very self-confident, extremely telegenic, calm, well-spoken and ever-so-reasonable and allow them to espouse the most simplistic of popular misguided prejudice and you have created a sure-fire winner.”
Straight out of SF’s Mary-Lou McDonald’s book then.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 11:16 AMKeith M,
Don’t be petty. The same formula has worked for Blair, Cameron, and many others. Even the DUP are trying to follow the same route. They already have the ”most simplistic of popular misguided prejudice”, now they’re trying to mould the heir(s)-apparent into ”very bright, very self-confident, extremely telegenic, calm, well-spoken and ever-so-reasonable” presenters of that message.
I think you’re just annoyed that Sinn Féin got there first.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 11:27 AMA studio interview would perhaps have been more ‘entertaining’; it would have eliminated the time delay. Bring it on!!
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 11:31 AM“Rant” the word used by liberals when their pet beliefs are challenged and found wanting. In the Guardian today a perfectly reasonable article by Janet Daley exposing the complete inability of the liberal British establishment to grasp the magnificently simple concept behind successful policing in New York (ie nick the criminals) was also labelled a “rant”.
I particularly loved the way Paxo exposed his own biases; “I simply don’t understand the premises of this book...” No Jezza old son you wouldn’t, because in the uber-liberal world view of Islington, the Guardian and the BBC which you inhabit when an intelligent person challenges the very basis on which your world is founded you are as lost as jungle dwellers when told the earth is not flat but is in fact round and revolves around the sun.
Because they have never actually encountered these concepts they react in terms of bewildered anger, hence the abuse that is hurled at Coulter for stating inconvenient facts. Hence the invective of the posters above who choose not to rebut Coulter’s arguments but instead to rely on ad hominem attacks on her, “bimbo”, “wretched”, “groupies”, “hot air and bluster”, “pompous and vindictive”, “a deranged adolescent” but actual refutations of her arguments? Nary a one.
C’mon guys I could easily challenge the clowns on the Left; Galloway, Michael Moore, Chomsky in exactly the same way (in fact by calling them clowns I suppose I just did) but you’d come straight back here and demand I put up proper rebuttals of their arguments.
As a matter of fact the “Jersey Girls”, a self selecting group of 9/11 widows willingly engaged in partisan politics and attacked Bush and supported the Democrats. Coulter is perfectly justified in then pointing out that by doing so they had joined the political fray and were therefore fair game, I point with which I happen to agree.
In Coulter’s book “Treason”, Coulter systematically points how many people on the Left in America were traitors, she quotes chapter and verse, she names the names, she tells you the occasions and the dates, for that instead of being hailed as an investigative historian she gets called names.
In “Treason”, Coulter produces a devastating demolition of the Liberal mythology surrounding Joe McCarthy, she conclusively proves that far from some poor wee liberals being hounded by big bad Uncle Sam, McCarthy and the HUAC (two seperate things by the way) in fact there was a huge infiltration of the US government, military and society by Soviet spies and she exposes these inconvenient facts. I was truly gobsmacked when I read the book as I had been brought up on the Liberal lies about evil Joe McCarthy and to discover the truth written in such snappy and witty prose was a mind blowing breath of fresh air.
I think Mickhall you say it best when you say that a few years ago Coulter would not have been given house room in the media, of course provable nonsense by liberals and leftists was and still is doled out in a numblingly continuous stream in the mainstrean media today. That is precisely what is behind the huge upsurge in the “alternative” media, people have become so heartily sick of the non-stop agenda driven, Liberal idiocy in the BBC, Guardian, Irish Times, RTE, Channel 4, Hollywood, and so much else of the dinosaur media that they have turned to the blogs, the cable news and talk radio to find that their viewpoint is not somehow taboo and that they weren’t insane for all the years they listened in frustration to the Liberal dronefest that is the mainstream media and which makes Pravda appear amateurish.
Well guess what mickhall, we’ve found our voices now, that is why Coulter is number one in the booksales in the US, I agree that this phenomena will cross the Atlantic and it couldn’t come a moment too soon and when it does you better be ready to defend your postions because simple personal attacks and abuse hurled at the messenger won’t be enough I’m afraid.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 11:37 AMMick Hall is as full of cliches as this babe is. The untainted working class, university education etc. Like it or lump it but a lot of folk believe all this shit Coulter emits; that’s a fact Jack. And, outside of NJ. NY, Ca and a few other spots, the USA is GOP Red, not Dem blue.
I rememeber reading Ernie O’Malley’s Singing Flame and On Another Man’s Wound. And when the war was over and dear old Ireland unfree what did the losing “working class” Republicans do? Why, they went back to their university courses and middle class jobs.Kevin Barry, the famous UCD medical student and rugby player, would have taken the same road. Working class, my arse.
Posted by on Jun 27, 2006 @ 12:00 PM
