Old musings of Ann Coulter

I stumbled upon these old Ann Coulter articles earlier while "blog-surfing".
1. (from 2000) Oil good; democrats bad
2. (from 2001) This Is War

In the first, she says:

"Fuel is the metric of prosperity, and conservationism is an acknowledgement that we are in decline of prosperity -- that this is the beginning of the long bleak twilight of civilization. If you posit that we have fixed energy sources and we have to ration them, then we are dying as a species.

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet -- it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that's the Biblical view.

Producing oil isn't so bad for the environment anyway. During World War II, our boats were going at breakneck speed to get oil to England (what with the war and all). There were oil spills everywhere. Half the beaches in the United States were slathered in oil. Six weeks later all the birds were back.

You couldn't get rid of the environment if you tried. Alaska is immense, caribou love the Alaskan pipeline, they've grouped there, frolicking and leaping over the pipeline ... but I'm lost in an irrelevancy. The point is: We need oil for our CAT scan machines, airplanes, computers and refrigerators."

And in the second:

We don't need long investigations of the forensic evidence to determine with scientific accuracy the person or persons who ordered this specific attack. We don't need an "international coalition." We don't need a study on "terrorism." We certainly didn't need a congressional resolution condemning the attack this week.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Hmm...

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use.
I really dislike the worldview. Inarguably, being human ourselves we will place the greatest emphasis on human interests and civilization in general, but in no way are we independent from regional and global ecology. A fantastic read on this subject is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. In it, specifically concerning this issue, he offers an anthropological interpretation of Genesis that is fairly interesting. There's a decent summary of this on Wikipedia, although it's not as succinct as in the text.

Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that's the Biblical view.
I'm sure that's what Jesus would advocate...

Producing oil isn't so bad for the environment anyway.
I thought for a little while about this, and I'm almost certain it's sarcasm. Oil spills and burning fossil fuels are not bad for the environment? Then what, if anything is? She's making a sweeping conjecture without evidence or common sense.

You couldn't get rid of the environment if you tried.
The fact that the world is still in one piece and there are surviving species (notably us) that remain on it doesn't mean that our actions don't drastically affect it. I'll admit that it the earth is somewhat resilient if that's the point being made, but that doesn't justify needless pollution and species extinction.
1. Extinction Rate Across The Globe Reaches Historical Proportions
2. Deep-water fish 'are facing extinction'

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
So.. oil consumption is justified because it is in line with Christianity, but we should invade, kill, and convert our enemies? Perhaps go on a Crusade? This doesn't make sense, it's not radically conservative it's an absolute contradiction.

I truly can not understand how serious conservatives can actually look at Ann Coulter in a positive and credible light. I've long thought that this is just an act--that this is just how she makes money. No rational person could really be that fanatical and separationalist. Even if that were the case, she needs to stop. Her books and articles aren't achieving anything. She does nothing to help people reconsider their political ideologies, she makes people with existing "conservative" political standings less reasonable and more arrogant in their opinions.