Ballad of A Thin Mantis

Well, you walk into the room

Like a camel and then you frown

You put your eyes in your pocket

And your nose on the ground

There ought to be a law

Against you comin' around

You should be made To wear earphones.

~~~

Bob Dylan

The hate speech industry is at an all time boom. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone who is also swinging a dead cat. In order to get noticed in that vast sea of belligerent shrieking, you have to keep upping the ante. All the big players have their shtick. Rush wheezes bombastic pronouncements that nobody ever seems to call him on. The only job in the world less demanding than being Limbaugh's fact-checker would be fire-watcher in the Petrified Forest.

Then there's Glenn Beck, the current leading light of paranoid dementia, who relies heavily on visual aids. He employs puppets, Nazi symbology, rehearsed crying jags, and a blackboard to create a sort of Sesame Street on PCP. (Sponsored by the letters 'Au', the symbol for gold, which you should start hoarding in anticipation of the Apocalypse)A hyperbolic hellscape that makes Dante look like Kenneth the NBC Page.

So one might be inclined to feel sorry for Ann Coulter. That is one might, if she were not such a cynical, black-hearted, corruption. Ichor-hearted, slavering, and malignant on a cellular level. She used to be right up there, at the top of the heap, a best selling 'author' a darling of media circus side-shows, hissing and blowing out wads of poison like a puff adder. She was the angular, rail-thin (she's so bony you'd think that good intentions and facts were nutrients) darling of 80's frat-boys everywhere.

But lately she has fallen through the cracks (yeah, I went there) of fame's fickle stage. Book sales are down. Way down. As recently as 2008, she was getting 24,000$ for 40 minutes of sneering nationalistic race-baiting and Republican ass-kissing. (She once famously stated that Republicans are better lovers than Democrats, which I took to mean it's easier to find a drunken conservative in an airport hotel bar. If he can convince the Viagra to make the swim through his Chivas Regal thinned bloodstream long enough for him to bump his receding hairline against her Adam's apple for two minutes, all the better) In 2010, she's touring Canada, a country she's gleefully maligned in the past, for a comparatively paltry 10k Cdn.

How the righty has fallen.

But God bless the American Entrepreneurial Spirit, which states among other things, if anyone gives you a helping hand, screw them for all they're worth. And God bless Canada, likable, easy-going Canada, whose conservatives are mostly agreeable types imbued with the true spirit of the idea of conservatism. You know, just the sort of people American conservatives love to use up, and spit out.

So one might be inclined to feel sorry for Canada, again reduced to a stereotype, and used by a shrill, desperate has-been. That is one might, if they didn't know better. I do. Canada is a GREAT place to live, it's currently living up to an American Dream, that has long been co-opted by parasites like Coulter.

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Tomorrow: 'The Anatomy of a P.R. Back-Stabbing', or 'The Skank-Shanking'