Leave it to Ann Coulter to try and spoil the fun ahead of Thursday’s pivotal USA-Germany World Cup soccer match.
After cautioning that she’d held off from writing about the beautiful game so as “not to offend anyone,” the conservative pundit dedicated her syndicated column to a rambling, point-by-point explanation of how “any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.”
Coulter cited some predictable criticisms, arguing that “individual achievement” is barely a factor in the sport and that “it’s foreign.”
But she also laid out a few wackier gripes. Coulter took issue with the fact that a soccer player can’t use his or her hands in play, then made a bizarre comparison between the sport and the metric system that invoked the French Revolution and the guillotine. Basically, she argued that liberals’ adoration for soccer and the metric system runs deep because they’re both “European.”
Not one to leave any box unticked, Coulter even touched on immigration in the column’s kicker:
If more “Americans” are watching soccer today, it’s only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.
It’s worth noting that aside from the Olympics, the World Cup is really the only occasion when an American audience gets a chance to cheer on a national — rather than a regional — sports team. But apparently that doesn’t jibe with Coulter’s vision of patriotism.
TPM illustration by Christopher O’Driscoll. Image via AP.
