Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Jesse wants to know why, O why, is Ann Coulter taken seriously at all. I wish I knew -- I've long thought that she was the right's version of Michael Moore, so much so that if the two of them ever came into physical contact with one another, both would annihilate each other with a sufficient release of energy to power the warp drive of a Federation starship. I pretty much completely ignore both of them.

I haven't read any of Coulter's books (I have read one of Moore's, and thought I wanted to like it, I didn't). I used to read her monthly columns in George, back when I had a subscription, and I pretty much blew her off as another weirdo trying to ride on Rush Limbaugh's coat-tails, which is apparently the correct response. I mean, she's thin, rich and blond -- what the hell does she have to be so angry about? At least Michael Moore is overweight and male.

I completely stopped paying any attention to Coulter at all when she appeared on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher one night during the whole 2000 election fiasco, while the recounting was going on. She made such an ass of herself on that show that I then never watched another episode of PI on which she appeared. At one point she literally tossed her head, folded her arms and threw herself back in her chair, just like a small child who's just been informed that she can't go to the park today because it's raining, and said, "This is all Al Gore's fault!" And I'm thinking, "Hmmm, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States thinks there's a good chance that he might be the actual winner of Florida's electoral votes and is therefore fighting for recounts. Inconceivable!" Then, a few minutes later, someone brings up all the votes for Buchanan in that heavily-Jewish county, where the infamous butterfly ballot was used, and Maher pointed out that even Buchanan himself had publically stated that all those votes were unlikely to be his, from the standpoint of voter intent. Coulter's response? "Pat Buchanan is just being modest."

Ummmm....OK. Well, I decided then and there that any person whose opinion on the 2000 Election required ascribing the personal quality of modesty to Pat Buchanan, a guy who has generally shown only slightly less modesty than Bill Clinton over the years, is not a person likely to contribute much to the onward march of human knowledge.