I never thought she was that attractive and her voice is at times horrid. I don't loath her but equally don't she is at great as a lot of people think she is. I am betting that the fact that she has gone so far so fast does have something to do with the fact she is a blond (relatively) attractive woman.

Whenever I think of Coulter, the phrase "James Carville in a dress and blonde wig, only right wing and not as pretty" comes to mind. Yes, she has her share of sexist critics, the ones who call her "C*ntler," but for the most part she's just a mean and nasty person who shouldn't be writing for any serious conservative publications, and that criticism transcends her genitalia.

What's *really* interesting about Coulter is that I know many fiscal conservatives / social liberals who absolutely adore her. They see her as a lightning rod for the fringe left -- someone they can attack for saying outrageous things, thus betraying their utter lack of humor and myopic worldview. They find her attractive, witty, and intelligent. They don't think she really means what she's saying and feel that they "get the joke". I suppose that to a certain extent she's effective, if good and reasonable people can honestly find her likeable. What I feel when I watch her talk is the same thing I feel when I watch Michael Moore talk: Schadenfreude without the Freude.

I find myself laughing when she talks. I also laugh at Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, and Michael Moore.

Sometimes they all have something of merit to say. For me though, they are all full of so much shit it's too much trouble to decipher it all.

Mostly, I find her an embarassment to her party. Just like the rest of the ones I have named and a host of others.

OhmyGod, Dean's caving in to the lefties!!

Heh.

Interesting comment, John. We must know different conservatives--I don't know any who like her (though I understand there must be a lot out there), and I can't stand her myself. Not because she makes my side look bad (which she does), but because she slanders/libels the loyal opposition (among whom I count friends and family) by denying there is one.

I don't like Coulter's style, but I find it infinitely amusing watching lefties foam at the mouth decrying their own tactics.

Yeah I've heard some people say they like her because they find her funny and think half of what she says is a joke. I thought the same, the first couple of times I read one of her columns, or saw her talk on TV.

Then again, I've known people who take every single word she says very seriously and as gospel truth.

If she endorses President Bush, does that mean President Bush must repudiate her or suffer the wrath of all right-thinking people?

Just asking.

I'm inclined to agree with MJ here. However, it's still a tactless and gross way to deal with the issue. I went ahead and read the whole article by Ann Coulter to get full context. If not for the downright rudeness, its not a bad article nor an unfounded point.

Also Im a bit ashamed that people would stoop to harping on her looks, really who gives a shit? She's reasonably attractive, if rather skinny for my tase, but really, why comment? It just lower you moral center of gravity after all.

*shrug*

Ara:

She is in not the equivalent of Rall. The Dean people are **bragging** about Rall's endorsement.

I'll make you a deal. If Arafat endorses Bush and the Bush campaign brags about it. We will call them out on it.

Fair enough.

I find the moral equivalence drawn between Rall, the cartoonist, and Coulter, who is a cartoon, to be amusing.

Yes, if the Bush campaign were to brag about getting Coulter's endorsement, that would be disturbing, and I'd call 'em out for associating with such a cheap shot artist.

But Rall regularly compares America to Nazi Germany, says he wants more of our soldiers to die, and says there's something wrong with supporting our troops and that we shouldn't support them. He literally wants us to lose.

Last I heard, the Dean campaign has not repudiated those views. They say they want us to win, but they brag about the endorsement of a man who wants us to lose and thinks 9/11 was our fault.

If I were still a loyal Democrat, I'd be angry with the Dean campaign and demanding that they apologize for embarassing my party. Instead, you shift the focus and draw a moral equivalency argument?

You should be outraged, Mr. "I've supported this war from the beginning."

I'm not a big fan of Coulter. She makes valid points at times, just like any other entertainer. It boils down to just that, though. She's an entertainer.

I like Coulter, she's amusing, and while some of her attacks are a bit broad brush, there is usually truth in it.

Like, not all Democrats are treasonous, but yes there are a decent(or is that indecent) number of them.

And she defends McCarthy? Well so did William F. Buckley the founder of National Review. He claimed that McCarthy's enemies were worse than McC (not exactly a ringing endorsement, true, but the notion that we had Soviet infiltrators influencing our gov't is accepted by me.)

And as to being sexy, well you have to understand the world she is in. She's the prettiest person at the Ugly People's Ball.

The latest article was partisan. But also about par for the course for the hardline Democratic pundits. I doubt she's the Right's Moore; I think the Right gets rid of its nuts like that (if only because the media would crucify us if we did not).

The latest article argued that there was something unseemly about trotting out your dead relatives to make a political point. And she charged that this attempted to cover a lack of substance.

Point two is correct.

Point one is sorta correct. It can be unseemly, but then politics often is a rough game with crude tactics. I think she is attacking something that if a Republican did she would have no problem with.

That's fine for her to do this. If the Dem candidates can be crude, then so can she.

Maybe the Dem candidates are being honest with their feelings, and not just using them to make a political point, but color me skeptical. If a relative died of, oh, lung cancer, and then you made a plank of your platform to raise the fines on convenience stores selling cigarettes to minors, I'd go along with that as reasonable.

But if you claim that death motivated you to increase teh fines on speeding, well then I'd be a bit more skeptical.

“So do shallow, vicious harpies like Maureen Dowd and Molly Ivins.”

But Dean, Molly’s a nice, full-figured gal. Besides, in both shallowness and viciousness Ann Coulter makes Molly Ivins look like Mother Teresa.

Molly is a nice, full-figured girl. As for her demeanor, she is the very picture of the passive-aggressive southern woman who eviscerates with left-handed compliments, muttered asides, and vile insults masked by disclaimers like "bless his little heart."

I'll grant that she doesn't call her dissenters traitors though. ;-)

By the way, there are a whole lot of women in politics and punditry who I think are a lot better looking than Coulter. I am astounded by how often people feel compelled to say how pretty she supposedly is.

Dean, you can call Coulter ugly all day long, but you have been Cast Out of the liberal tent; they won't take you back, bro. :)

Welcome to the Pale... Heh.

Just went to see what Michele had to say.

Ok. If what Ms. Coulter said had been in a movie like Hot Shots (or some other tasteless spoof), most of us might have gotten a chuckle out of it, in the same way that Hogan's Hero's could mine humor in a concentration camp.

But... Cracking funny about someone's dead brother just ain't right.

I'm not in anybody's club, and not interested in being in one. ;-)

Dean,

But it was the Democrats bringing out the corpses of their family and trying to wring a bit of political advantage out of them....that is whats disgusting, not Coulter ridiculing them for doing it.

Personally, I think she's amazingly intelligent and very attractive. Merciless to the left, but they've earned nothing but utter contempt.

Dean,

But if you join my club, you'll get all the second-hand smoke you need.....

I like Ann Couter simply because I think she is very funny and occasionally makes some decent points. I think so often goes too far, but I also think that many things she says "tongue in cheek" people take seriously.

I think that the problem is that people tend to take her as a serious political pundit or something along those lines. I suppose I have always seen her more in the category that I see Dennis Miller. An intellignet and funny person who is trying to entertain while talking sometimes about serious issues, but often blowing things out of porportion and taking the cheap shots to get a laugh.

I guess there's not much to choose bewtween the "deniable" pit bulls of the Left and the Right.

But she's certainly ahead in the anorexia derby.

But Rall regularly compares America to Nazi Germany, says he wants more of our soldiers to die, and says there's something wrong with supporting our troops and that we shouldn't support them. He literally wants us to lose.

Last I heard, the Dean campaign has not repudiated those views.

Oh my, Dean. See here's the thing: Ted Rall doesn't actually, you know, like, work for Howard Dean.

Besides, Anne Coulter said she's sorry that Tim McVeigh didn't make the New York Times his target. Has President Bush repudiated that statement? Of course not, nor should he have to.

Rosemary:

The Dean people are **bragging** about Rall's endorsement.

Bragging? About being endorsed by a fifth-rate political cartoonist?

Yeah, like $25 million in the bank and #1 status in the race isn't enough.

Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?

I can see Howard Dean now, on the phone, pounding his desk, veins bulging on his brick-neck: "Get me The Cartoonist!" Right.

I already read the web page. The breathless excitement you describe is strangely lacking there.

Please send me the link to their press release.

Totally frivolous post here:

You know, between those that criticize Jennifer Lopez for "draggin' a little wagon" and those that criticize Coulter for being too skinny, you'd think that men were a bit difficult to please. ;-)

For the record, I think Ann could use about twenty pounds. She can have ten of mine.

Casey:

Just for some perspective, *I* am also not welcome under the liberal tent, much less the conservative one. However, to me that is a reason for optimism.

It sounded like a fairly genteel rant compared to the stuff I read on various left and right wing blogs, and occasionally in the comments here. It's not easy to discourse rationally.

Yours,
Wince

Who is Ann Coulter?

So bashing fat people because of there appearance is a hideous, terrible crime, but it is ok to make fun of skinny people for theirs?

Thanks for the double standard! From now on, I get to bash all fat people based on their appearance only, not their opinions

JE

Aahh, leave her alone. She's not a nut like Rall. She just needs a dog and a sandwich.

Well for the post op Transexual that she is she does not look that bad besides the really big adam's apple.

JE:

So bashing fat people because of there appearance is a hideous, terrible crime, but it is ok to make fun of skinny people for theirs?

First, I don't think that Dean gives a shit about fat bashing. That was me. I find it rude to bash people by their appearance. Must be because I'm a sensitive woman. I prefer bashing people based on their sheer stupidity. I find that fun and since they are stupid they don't know that I have insulted them: Double bonus!

Anyway, he had a long screed on why she's a harpie but all you got was that he doesn't like her because she's skinny? Why would he? He's got a hot wife with major T & A.

From now on, I get to bash all fat people based on their appearance only, not their opinions

Wow, you mean you didn't already? You were asking for permission to be a rude asshole? Go ahead.

Let's all be nasty assholes because the hidden hypocrisy of this thread gave us permission.

I'll start. Since I can't see you and I don't enjoy insulting people based on their appearance..... what can I insult then?

Maybe that your comment was the stupidest fucking thing I've read all week, and I've read some doozies. After your shift ends at Wal-Mart, you should go hoot and holler obscenities at fat chicks. That way you have something fun to think about while jerking off.

You picked the absolutely worst picture that was available of Ann Coulter for your post. I've seen her a couple of times on some talk shows and she looked way better on television. Personally, I think she's a moron, but I wouldn't mind it if she posed in Playboy.

I've read her books... don't see much TV and I don't think I've ever heard her voice. She occupies an evolutionary niche, an important one, I think. Her job is to me amazingly simple. All she has to do is take the rhetoric one finds among the Democrat base, invert the pronouns, replace fictions with easily obtained facts and blab away. A cruel sport but vastly entertaining! On the aesthetics... not my sort. Redheads Rule!

Mrs. Esmay,

JE misrepresented Dean's main point, which was his dislike for Coulter's callous attitude and harsh rhetoric. But, Dean did tack on two paragraphs at the end that made fun of her appearance.

Now, perhaps JE is a rude asshole who deserved the smack you gave him, but you must admit that it is rude to make fun of people based on their appearance, regardless of what it is like.

Frankly, I don't find it very funny when it is done to fat people, skinny people, or people who are simply unattractive. This is not to say that I have not laughed, at times, when jokes are made in this way, but I do generally feel bad about it afterwards.

To summarize, I could have seen myself making a similar point, with qualifications as above, about Dean's post. I would not have appreciated you swearing at me, and claiming that I masturbate while thinking of yelling at fat people.

P.S. I also, generally, like Ann Coulter.

Nathan

Now, perhaps JE is a rude asshole who deserved the smack you gave him, but you must admit that it is rude to make fun of people based on their appearance, regardless of what it is like.

I have admitted that it's wrong to attack people based on appearance. Twice during the bitch slapping and many times in the past.

To summarize, I could have seen myself making a similar point, with qualifications as above, about Dean's post. I would not have appreciated you swearing at me, and claiming that I masturbate while thinking of yelling at fat people.

I wouldn't have dreamed doing so unless you made your point by suggesting that you were going to start attacking fat people simply because Dean bashed Coulter for being thin. Like JE did.

That is why I gave him a smack. Re-read him again.

I find the moral equivalence drawn between Rall, the cartoonist, and Coulter, who is a cartoon, to be amusing.

What I find amusing is that you recognize that Coulter is a cartoon and yet you treat her as if she were some sort of serious figure.

Ann Coulter is the Don Rickles of commentary, or perhaps for you younger readers, "Ann Coulter The Insult Comic Pundit".

I think she's funny. Sometimes I laugh with her, sometimes I laugh at her. I admire the character she has created, but if you haven't figured out that it IS a character as deliberately created, and as deliberatly awful as "The Diceman" or "Pee Wee Herman", you just haven't been paying attention.

By the way, what I find funniest of all is the people who take her seriously, no matter what side they are on.

I'm astonished at how many here have been reduced to dissing Miss Annie's looks, for God's sake. I thought that was what Dems do -- make ad hominem attacks because they can't or won't argue on substance. I've read virtually no substance here.

My hubby loves Miss Annie and has read all 3 of her books. As a former lifelong Lefty, I am shocked at how right on I think she is. We both think she is hilarious and brilliant; looks are meaningless. She definitely can outwit anyone on the left and almost all on the right.

I suspect like Rush, she relishes being a conservative whipping post. We love 'em both.

"Ann Coulter is the Don Rickles of commentary"

More like the Pee-Wee Herman.

Peg C.,

You sound like the sad tragic result of American de-education. It happened to my mother. She used to be a fairly intelligent and compassionate democrat until Clinton took office. After that, she tuned into Rush, read Ann, and no longer has a grasp on reality. Too bad she's hooked up to an evil death machine (the eib network) and Florida won't let me pull the plug. Luckily, most of the republican liberals I've known display intelligence, reason, and genuine compassion for society. The "yapping grapes" (right-wing wacko talk show hosts) offer nothing but anger, disinformation, and are as much to blame for fanning the flames of class warfare as idiots like Moorer and Maxine Waters.

Crass, Blunt, Boorish, maybe.

But she's the perfect opposition to the normal liberal banter.

I find that I'm glad she's around.

What pills are these people who think Coulter's looks can be left out of a discussion of her prominence popping? Does anyone honestly think that if her intellect and personality were dropped into Barbara Mikulski's body, she'd be such a hot commodity?

Yeah, I was wondering why you said you can't criticize her 'just because she's cute'?

Who said she's cute?

And here I thought I was the only conservative who despised her. Good for you.

I'm a looksist -- proudly. In other words, I have eyes with which to discern beauty from ugliness and also from other beauty, just as my ears discern music from noise and also from other music. The contemplation of beauty is the highest good, an end in itself.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (which makes it _more_ spiritual, not less). Some are drawn more to the ectomorphic (thin), others more to the endomorphic (fat), just as some are drawn more to blondes, others to brunettes, etc.. About fat and thin, here's a joke I like:

G. K. Chesterton once said to George Bernard Shaw: "Looking at you, people would think there was a famine in England."
And Shaw replied: "And looking at you, they'd think you were the cause of it."

About Ann Coulter: I initially saw her as somewhat more attractive to my eyes than I do now, judging from her picture in the Jewish World Review, which I liked. I saw more of her and liked her somewhat less, visually. Ideologically, while she is at times dead-on about the contradictions of the "Left", more generally I have concluded that she is a thin female Rush Limbaugh, a dittohead, in other words, as conformist as those she derides. She's no Camille Paglia or Ayn Rand, I'm afraid.

*shrug* I may be in a minority here, but I'm not horribly outraged by Coulter taking cheap shots at politicians making political hay out of dead relatives. Cheap shots for cheap tactics.

Sure... she's mean, snarky, and has a razor edged sense of humour: that's not a crime for a columnist or a pundit. She's also pretty funny on occassion, and often perceptive. And sometime sher humour falls flat.
Ditto for Ivins, although Ivins was a lot funnier back in '84 writing for the [Now defunct] Times Herald. Ivins jumped the shark during Anne Richard's govenorship.

Give Coulter 20 years, and she'll be as lame and flat as Ivins or Rall. It's the nature of humorists. Look at Eddie Murphy. ;]

Tim the Soldier brings up a good point. I've been getting a bit conservative over the past few years, but I've never really listened to Rush. For a while, I read a bunch of books from folks on the right ... one thing I noticed is that many of the popularizers of right-wing thought used the same anecdotes, the same quotes and such. And some of it I found pretty odious.

Coulter doesn't bother me as much as she does others. I don't know why. Some people just don't rub others the wrong way. Now, you want to read a right-wing demagogue, read Michael Savage ...

Tim the Soldier brings up a good point.

Actually, he doesn't. He spews his bigoted opinion with as little basis in reality as he accuses others of. He sounds just like Bill Clinton talking about "hate speech".

Rush often has interesting things to say. He's a bit behind the power curve these days because he clearly doesn't follow, or even understand, the political blogs. He seems to get a lot of his news from "big media", which puts him a day or two behind.

I'm not a big fan, but I usually listen to him for a half an hour every weekday while I drive to work. If you give him a try, bear in mind that, like Coulter, his on air persona is a creation, not reality.

Coulter's appeal is that she lets the left have it with their own style of rhetoric. How delightful their huffing and puffing. Her shtick may wear thin after a while, but I'm not tired of it yet.

Last week US Attorney-General John Ashcroft insisted the US had respected its own laws in deporting Syrian-Canadian Maher Arar to be tortured in Syria. Does that mean that Canada can now deport any US citizen who is suspect to Syria for torture?

A thought just occurred to me. Why don't the Democrats run a billy-goat as their next candidate for president in the next US general election? After all the Republicans ran a jackass for president in the 2000 election did they not?

The remarks about Ann Coulter were out of place, and based on her politics. A lady is not pretty or ugly because of her political viewpoint, but because of her looks. I may never agree with someone, but that in no way or form changes how that person looks. Having said that, there is no question that Ann Coulter is very pretty, whether you like it or not. Off an on over the years I have watched Ann Coulter on TV programmes, and I do agree with her point of view, but that does not make me think she is ugly or thin. Sure beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and thats not going to change either. I have always had an independent viewpoint and thats not going to change for someone else's.