Hooray for Ann Coulter

I dig Ann Coulter.

There. I said it.

Respectable conservatives are supposed to shun her, because she “goes too far.” She says incendiary things that are supposedly an embarrassment to all good-hearted people. Liar Al Franken says she’s a lying liar. Hillary Clinton has called her heartless, and Elizabeth Edwards, if she were just a touch more violent, would probably have a contract out on her today.

I still dig her.

There’s no question that she’s far more provocative than almost all of her fellow conservative pundits. She’s certainly unafraid of what people might say about her, and she’s not interested in holding back out of respect for the rules of decorum. Unlike so many of her tepid allies, she’s willing to be loathed in the interest of winning her arguments. Consequently, she actually succeeds in advancing the conservative agenda – at the expense of her own personal reputation.

Case in point: when her book Godless was released, everyone zeroed in on her comments about the Jersey Girls, four 9/11 widows who have used their newfound prominence to campaign for John Kerry and excoriate the Bush administration. The sentence that brought the most criticism was her statement that “I've never seen people enjoy their husbands' deaths so much.”

Outrage! Shock! What an awful, awful thing to say! Republicans and Democrats alike fell all over themselves to condemn this mean, mean lady and her flying monkeys. In the meantime, more than a few people took a look at why she would write such a thing, and they discovered that she had a pretty good point, which is that Democrats rely on victims to present arguments in order to inoculate themselves from criticism.

So anyone who calls Cindy Sheehan a lunatic – which she is – runs the risk of looking like a bully, because she lost her son in Iraq. Similarly, Senator Max Cleland lost three limbs in Vietnam, so who are you to say that he’s not supportive enough of anti-terrorism measures? Democrats counter arguments with biographies, and the opposition is cowed into silence.

Except for Ann Coulter, who blasts through with a comment so incendiary that it’s impossible to ignore.

As a result of this, Ann Coulter came off looking like a shrew, and many people willfully misinterpreted her comments to insinuate that she was deriding all 9/11 widows, which was clearly not the case. But she made her point. And now it’s much harder for Democrats to get away with this kind of nonsense. Just last week, the Democrats used an uninsured 12-year-old child to respond to the President’s weekly radio address and complain about the decision to veto the SCHIP program. Talk show host Glenn Beck mocked the Dems mercilessly for this, and nobody called for hanging him up by his thumbs. I’m not sure if that would have been true had Ann Coulter not paved the way for him with her over-the-top rhetoric.

This is not to say that all conservative firebrands are created equal. I can’t listen to talk show host Michael Savage for more than ten seconds. He’s just belligerent – he has none of Ann Coulter’s prickly intelligence or wit. His idea of reasoned discourse is to tell gay people to get AIDS and die. He’s utterly humorless, whereas Ann Coulter makes me laugh out loud on almost every page. And she always has a point to back up her insults.

I bring all this up because yesterday a local talk show host was up in arms over a statement in her new book where she says that it might be a good thing for women to lose the right to vote, because it would mean no Democrat would ever be elected.

That was the first I’d heard of her new book, so I rushed out and got my own copy of If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans. (I got a really dirty look from the Borders clerk who rang me up. That was kind of fun.)

I was disappointed to discover that the book is the literary equivalent of a TV clip show – a collection of quotes from her previous books and columns with very little new material. I also found the quote that had the local host’s panties in a twist and discovered it was a statement she’d made over four years ago. It’s also based on a factually true premise – if women hadn’t been able to vote, every Republican in the last 50 years would have won – even Bob Dole! To be “offended” by something like this is pretty stupid.

Have I ever been personally offended by anything Ann Coulter has written? Almost. In the new book, she cracks that Mitt Romney is a member of a “quasi-Christian church, the Masons.” That bugged me for about three seconds. Then I realized that most evangelicals wouldn’t even be willing to call Mormons “quasi-Christian,” and that calling Mormons “Masons” perfectly illustrates the confusion that the average voter has about my faith. So, in other words, Ann’s insult aimed at me actually has a point to it, too. (Taking offense is a colossal waste of time and energy, anyway.)

Flipping through the book, I stumbled on several quotes that might qualify as “beyond the pale,” but they made me laugh. So I share just a few of them with you.

The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media will only refer to partial birth abortion as “what its opponents refer to as partial birth abortion.” What do its supporters call it? Casual Fridays? Bean-with-bacon potato chip dip? Uh… Steve?
_________

Italian Interviewer: Is it possible to export democracy?
Ann Coulter: Yes. Ever heard of “Italy”?
_________

If John Kerry had a dollar for every time he bragged about serving in Vietnam – Oh wait, he does.
_________

Perhaps the Democrats could find an orphaned child whose parents were brutally hacksawed to death to put forward their tax plan.
_________

We must attack France. What are they going to do? Fight us?
_________

Interviewer: How would your career be different if you looked like Molly Ivins?
Ann Coulter: I’d be a lot uglier.

Don’t tell me you didn’t laugh at that last one.