More like Sinking To Their Level.
I am sorry, folks. I agree with Coulter's substance 85% of the time, but I can't agree that there is a net gain in the way she deliberately taunts to draw leftist fire to demonstrate how easy it is to make them violate their own principles.
Take her Jersey Girls statement in the book. I was in a bookstore yesterday and read it in context, and Matt Lauer did a serviceable job blowing it out of proportion. Coulter's remark about the JG's 'enjoying' their husbands deaths was part of a much larger point. She spent several pages discussing the kid glove treatment of the likes of 9/11 widow Kristin Breitweiser -- who blamed Bush Administration figures for the deaths of that day repeatedly to the exclusion of the terrorists -- as opposed to Debra Burlingame, who also organized surviving family members for media fights, but was marginalized and insulted by the New York Times editorial page when she fiercely fought against the placing of a pan-cultural Blame America First museum on the Ground Zero grave of her husband.
There is no doubt that Coulter has a valid point: There is a liberal tendency to send authentically tragic but self-serving, intellectually dishonest spokespersons like Breitweiser, Cindy Sheehan and Michael Berg out before cameras and microphones, hoping they will inspire in fence-sitting observers their same distrust of everyone and everything right of center. But Dorothy Rabinowitz, an excellent Wall Street Journal writer who years previously broke the major print media embargo on Juanita Broaddrick's allegation of rape against Bill Clinton, wrote a lengthy treatise on the Jersey Girls that made the same point, but didn't come close to suggesting that they were somehow delighted they had traded their spouses for celebrity.
Rabinowitz, however, wasn't invited on Today or put on the cover of Time. Why not? IMHO, because the left-leaners who run those outlets didn't see any benefit in promoting someone whose opposing view did nothing but make sense. No, they needed someone who would be seen not as a counterbalance, but as an wild-eyed, scattershot display of the reasons why nobody but they in the MSM should be taken seriously. Enter Ann.
Haven't some of you Coulter Cheerleaders wondered why she gets more ink and face time than conservative females like Mona Charen, a pre-Reagan revolution columnist whose book Useful Idiots was everything Treason should have been, or Laura Ingraham, a former CBS News reporter and nationally syndicated talk show host? I believe it is because Coulter can be counted on to deliver a foot in the mouth spew that makes the less attentive say, "If you have to be that cruel/silly/tactless to be a conservative, I don't want to be one."
I speak from experience regarding that idea. Before the age of Rush, the only guys I read, heard or saw representing conservatism on a regular basis were the caustic columnist Jeffrey White, John Lofton, and Wally George/Morton Downey Jr. (same act, different coasts). Eventually, the more I learned, the more rightward I drifted -- no thanks to those guys.
I imagine there were a lot of military people during WWII who said many of the same types of things you are when the idea of the now infamous Dirty Dozen came up.
Fortunately, the Dirty Dozen did their thing in spite of the detractors. We were lucky to have them and have much to thank them for.
In much the same way Coulter has taken on a job that many have attempted, though few have made much progress.
She's out there in the muck, where the others were afraid to go. With great gusto she's taking bullets and it looks like shes getting the job done.
Like the Dirty Dozen, we're lucky to have her and have much to thank her for.