It was Mean Ladies Sunday in the New York Times, as Metro and Styles each gave splashy, above-the-fold section-front coverage to a middle-aged, female right-wing publicity chaser.
Metro went with lots of screencaps of
, who
habitually refers to herself as a “racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot” — all one word in her pronunciation — which hints at her sense of humor and her evident frustration at her public persona.
The humorous part is that Geller is in fact an anti-Muslim bigot, but that in her public persona—in which she rallies people in the name of anti-Muslim bigotry—she tries to seem brash and joyous, while actually being a sad and damaged person. Oh, maybe that wasn’t the humorous part?
Well, Pamela Geller is famous. But what about
? Sunday Styles had a giant black-and-white picture and the latest word:
Now that members of the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder, Ms. Coulter is taking some surprising new positions.
Such as? She opposes the way the current president, from the party she professionally opposes, is using military force in Afghanistan. She does not insist that the president is a foreign-born Muslim sleeper agent. And she is saying nice things to gay people. Such as this:
“Marriage is not a civil right.”
And:
“[T]his is a point about society. People love gays, they don’t want gay marriage.”
Hey, where Coulter’s coming from, those are relatively nice things. Here, for comparison, is
, major-party candidate for the governorship of New York:
“I didn’t march in the gay parade this year — the gay pride parade this year. My opponent did, and that’s not the example we should be showing our children.”
But does Coulter’s new semi-open-mindedness matter? Or is this the desperate minor re-branding of a
?
As of lunchtime Monday, on the Times’
, the Geller profile was at No. 16. The profile of Coulter was nowhere in the top 25.
Up at No. 4 was a
story from inside Sunday Styles
:
Mean-girl behavior, typically referred to by professionals as relational or social aggression and by terrified parents as bullying, has existed for as long as there have been ponytails to pull and notes to pass (today’s insults are texted instead). But while the calculated round of cliquishness and exclusion used to set in over fifth-grade sleepover parties, warfare increasingly permeates the early elementary school years.
[…]
Eileen O’Connor, a lawyer and mother of five girls in the Georgetown section of Washington, has also witnessed trickle-down meanness in her daughters’ classrooms. “To be honest with you, the parents not only enabled it, they engaged in it,” she said. “The parents of mean girls often think, Great, our daughter is so popular!”
