Briefly Breaking My Coulter Ban

About a year ago, after several years of getting in a tizzy every week over Ann Coulter's columns (and occasional books, TV appearances, etc.), I took an online oath: I promised that I would do my best to no longer read her increasingly unreadable, transparently calculated, quip-heavy hate screeds. That way, I can help cut back on her only form of power (attention, duh). I can't even remember at which site I took this pledge, nor could I find it with a quick Google search. Regardless, I mean business, and my sanity has been happily preserved.

But every now and then I break it. I couldn't resist thumbing through her "takedown" of evo-devo in Godless (effectively dismantled here), and I couldn't resist seeing how she would respond to someone (i.e., Elizabeth Edwards) who called her on her shit on-air, the cameraman very tellingly holding on her face. (Nice sabotage, dude.)

Surely, I don't need to post the incident on this page (you can see it here, as well as, oh, everywhere else). I have a (possibly rhetorical) question, though. Edwards asks her to stop making personal attacks (on her husband, and in general). Coulter immediately interprets/spins that as meaning she should stop writing altogether. Does that mean she's acknowledging that she has nothing to write about except personal attacks? That if she stopped "making fun" of grieving parents, widows, et al., there'd be a blank page? A brutally honest admission, if you ask me.

(By the way, how awesome is Chris Matthew's exasperated sigh when, having asked her a pretty direct question about why she mocks, say, Monica Lewinsky's fat legs, she ducks it by demanding he superfluously cite the entire sentence? Awesome enough that I almost like the guy.)

And with that, my Coulter ban resumes.